SINGAPORE – She has bother holding a pen, however that has not stopped Stephanie Esther Fam, 36, from writing a guide.
Shades, her first poetry assortment, took her 18 years to finish – a literal labour of affection for Fam, whose cerebral palsy impacts her motion and steadiness.
It has 51 poems, lots of them introspective musings drawing on nature, love and life.
“After I began, I needed to seize freedom,” says Fam, who sorts on a smartphone utilizing predictive textual content expertise.
“After I hit my 20s, it was even more durable to simply accept this physique. As I wrote, I started to like myself extra and realise that is the physique I have to work with.”
Shades, which is printed with the assistance of social enterprise Collective Views, was launched on Jan 29 at Gateway Theatre.
Fam says: “I would like this guide to be a supply of consolation for somebody who perhaps goes by way of a troublesome time.”
The poem Silent Shadow, written in her mid-20s, “speaks of loving somebody, not having the ability to have that individual, but accepting the truth that it is okay – you’ll be able to nonetheless love that individual from afar”.
With Your Loss of life, one other poem, is devoted to the previous Linkin Park vocalist Chester Bennington, who dedicated suicide in 2017.
“After I learnt of his demise, it hit me arduous,” Fam says. “Such an excellent artiste was gone, and he would by no means know the way a lot his writing model has influenced me. He was in a position to articulate his darkness, however sadly he took his personal life.”
Apart from writing poetry, Fam is a contract public speaker and theatre practitioner.
She obtained her first performing function in 2018, in Kaite O’Reilly’s And All of the sudden I Disappear: The Singapore ‘d’ Monologues, a disability-led theatre challenge created between Britain and Singapore.
She additionally wrote and carried out a piece in What If, a web-based manufacturing on the M1 Peer Pleasure Youth Theatre Pageant in 2020, in addition to A Chair Is Nonetheless A Chair, which appeared within the disability-led quick movie Views final yr.
Her ardour for writing, nevertheless, started a lot earlier, when she began studying romance novels by Judith McNaught and Johanna Lindsey.