I’ve now been home for a week. I think I’m pretty well over my jet lag and so I thought it would be a good time to look back on this year’s trip to SE Asia and see how I’m feeling about it all. I wrote a blog the day before I left outlining all I had hoped to accomplish. This is what I said I hoped to do:
* meet writers in Malaysia, especially Sharon Bakar and Shivani Siguranathan
* work with the amazing kids at Anjali House. 
* see what it feels like to “live” in Cambodia for an extended time
* see whether I continue to feel as if Siem Reap could be a home away from home
* do revisions on Novel 3 
* find a Cambodian poet to collaborate with 
* get connected to the growing arts scene in Cambodia
* travel to at least one part of the country I haven’t been to before
* spend time with old friends and make new ones
* give one or two readings/book signings, especially in Kuala Lumpur



So let’s see. I did
* meet with Malaysian writers, and spend lots of good time with Sharon and Shivani
*work a lot with the kids at Anjali House. This time I was there much longer, got to know more of the kids and worked with lots of different age groups and language abilities. You can get a copy of our latest Writers Workshop magazine here.
*get a sense of what it feels like to live in Siem Reap, and I do love it. I’m still waking up each morning and thinking I’m there. I have friends there. I’m comfortable. I know where to buy groceries and do my laundry. And most importantly, I have important work that I love there, and constant inspiration.
* spend time with old friends and make lots of new ones
* give two book readings in KL, plus did  a long interview on BFM radio. You can listen to it here.


But  I didn’t
* travel around Cambodia. One month just wasn’t long enough, believe it or not. I stayed around Siem Reap the entire time. 
* get any more connected to the arts scene. Again, a month isn’t long enough. I think to really become a part of the arts scene, I need more time and I need to go back to Phnom Penh


And I both did and didn’t
* find a Khmer poet to work with. I struggled to find anyone in Cambodia who was seriously writing poetry, and I began to understand why. Literacy was all but destroyed by Pol Pot, and although it is starting to come back, it takes a while for a culture to develop the time or ability to read or write for pleasure. The government is also cracking down on free speech and some people hesitate to publicise their work. But just as I was about to leave, my husband was reading The Boston Globe, looking for the Red Sox score, and found an article about a Cambodian poet, Tararith Kho, who is now working at Harvard under their “Writers at Risk” program. I did contact him. I actually did also meet with him during my whirlwind weekend in Boston immediately after the Cambodian trip. And we are discussing now how we can work together. I have high hopes for this. I’ll keep you posted.
* do revisions on Novel 3. While I was away, I received my editor’s comments and suggestions. My initial impulse was to start rewriting immediately, but then I decided to wait. Sometimes, it’s better to let things percolate for a while before you tackle them, especially when a sense of place is so important to the work. I decided that, while I was there in Cambodia, I should give myself the time and mental/emotional space just to be there, without giving in to the impulse to turn reality into fiction, to translate the music of Khmer into its English corollary.


Now I’m home and I can set out the work to be done between now and my next trip back to this place which has really become my second (or is it third?) home:
* to slowly work my way through my manuscript and write the next draft of Novel 3
* to persevere with the work of translating some modern Khmer poetry into English 
* to further work on my talk connecting my writing life with my social activism life
* to finally, yes, learn to speak (and maybe even read) Khmer! I found a teacher…..

So, I guess, that completes this year’s trip, the planning, the doing, the reflecting. I have learned important lessons, too, about who I am as a writer, what my goals and ambitions really are for my work, and in some ways, who I’m not. “Who I’m not”…that’s something I’ll need to think and talk about some more later. This post is already getting too long.