Barefoot Poetry at a Balinese Monastery ~ Dipika Mukherjee
By the time I reached Bali on October 22nd, I was mentally and physically drained. I had been travelling and been out of my home in Chicago for over two months, and although I was to deliver a keynote at the Asia Pacific Writers and Translators Annual Conference in two days, I hadn’t written anything at all in months. My keynote, titled Contests and Prizes: The Advantage of the (Global) Asian Writer , was becoming impossible to write. I felt the imposter syndrome growing toxic in my brain. Despite being surrounded by the beauty of Bali, I was unable to relax. There were a Ganesha at every turn – the APWT conference was hosted by the Ganesha University of Education and there was a beautiful Ganesha right outside my hotel door – but it seemed clear that the God of Scribes and Beginnings was concerned with weightier matters than my silly writerly angst. The Asia Pacific Writers and Translators community has been in existence for 10 years now, and this was ...