Stand-Up Comedy 101 by Joanne Kam
Saw an open mic night before and thought “I could do better than that”?
Want to try stand up comedy but don’t know how or where to begin?
Join us on Saturday, Oct 5 at Monk’s Brew Club for a fun and interactive workshop with Malaysia’s Queen of Comedy Joanne Kam!
Laugh, learn and write as Joanne shares her tips and experience while providing the necessary guidance you need to begin your stand-up comedy journey. You will learn the art of joke writing and more in less than four hours, with a break provided in between.
Whether you’re a complete beginner or a comic who’s done a few open mics before, this workshop would be perfect for anyone looking to hone their comedic skills or simply try something new. Don’t miss out on this super unique opportunity to learn from one of the best in the business!
Each participant is also entitled to one regular coffee/tea, AND a salad/chicken slider/kaathi roll from the venue.
About Joanne Kam
A comedic force to be reckoned with, the reigning monarch of laughter in Malaysia needs no introduction. With her razor-sharp wit, infectious energy, and uproarious stage presence, she has earned the title of Malaysia’s Queen of Comedy.
As a trailblazer in the Malaysian comedy scene, Joanne has broken barriers and shattered glass ceilings. She has performed in numerous sold-out shows and comedy festivals, both locally and internationally, earning accolades and rave reviews along the way. Her charisma and stage presence have made her a sought-after performer, and she continues to inspire a new generation of comedians with her unparalleled talent.
The Care, Legal, and Financial Impacts of Mental Incapacity for LGBTQ+
🌟 Join us for a 2-day event and gain insights on how to protect your financial, legal, and personal well-being in case of mental incapacity 🌟
📅 Day 1: Seminar with our speakers
🗓 Date: August 31st, 2024
⏰ Time: 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM
🎉 Highlights:
– The basics of setting up a Lasting Power of Attorney (LPA)
– Considerations to arranging the preferred care for yourself in the future
– Learn about choices available for individuals who are estranged from their family
– Ways to financially provide for your needs in mental incapacity
– Gain peace of mind by booking a slot for the following week to certify your LPA
Speakers:
– Low Seow Ling (Managing Director, Emre Legal LLC)
– Wong Jie Bin (Estate & Succession Practitioner, and Financial Services Consultant)
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📅 Day 2: Lasting Power of Attorney Certification
🗓 Date: September 7, 2024
⏰ Time: Book a slot between 2PM and 5PM
🎉 Highlights:
– Protect your rights to choose the care you want
– Certify your Lasting Power of Attorney with one of Singapore’s Top 10 frequented lawyers
– Join our Day 1 seminar to have more information on the certification
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We look forward to seeing you there!
No Readgrets Book Club Discussion on 14 Sep 2024: Geng Rebut Cabinet (GRC)
Our next book club event of the year explores the Malay identity and racial relations in this third volume of the Collected Plays series by Alfian Sa’at.
Book Summary:
Alfian Sa’at explores the Malay identity and racial relations in this third volume of the Collected Plays series. This volume collects plays written and staged in Malay, and translated to English for the very first time.
In Nadirah, a young woman is shocked to find out her mother wants to marry a non-Muslim. In Parah, a group of students can no longer ignore the stereotypes and prejudices that divide the races, and the strain it puts on their friendship. In Geng Rebut Cabinet (GRC), we’re transported to an alternate reality where the Chinese are the minority in Singapore. And in Your Sister’s Husband, five sisters try their hardest to reckon with their superstitious, old-fashioned eldest to farcical ends, raising questions about black sheep, outcasts and sociopaths.
No Readgrets discussions are safe spaces to nurture conversations and connections over inspiring books and explorations beyond their pages.
This time, we will be discussing these plays from Collected Plays Three:
- Nadirah
- Parah
- Geng Rebut Cabinet (GRC)
- Your Sister’s Husband
Event Flow:
- 1100-1230: Book discussion
- 1230-1300: Stay around to chat if you’d like to!
This is a ticketed event – please feel free to grab a beverage and some bites to support our amazing venue partner Crane. Slots are limited so sign up soon!
The book for discussion, Collected Plays Three is available at NLB libraries and major bookstores.
PSST! Upon purchasing a seat to our book club session, you’ll receive a special 10% discount code to attend the staging of Geng Rebut Cabinet (GRC)by Teater Ekamatra that’s happening from 5 to 15 September! Get your tickets here, and enter the discount code upon checkout!
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About No Readgrets Book Club:
No Readgrets discussions are safe spaces to nurture conversations and connections over inspiring books and explorations beyond their pages.
About Crane:
CRANE is an open minded, collaborative, socially conscious community – free from prejudice – and built upon a foundation of idea-sharing and learning from one another. At the core, Crane is a global ecosystem with various dimensions spanning from community building to retail and hospitality. Crane redefines the concept of sociality by providing spaces and tools to encourage the sharing of skills and passions between people of all cultures and ages.
About Teater Ekamatra:
Teater Ekamatra is an established and exciting Singaporean arts company that spotlights artists of diverse ethnicities. We are living out our vision of being at the heart of theatre, by staging daring works that address socio-political issues.
Teater Ekamatra has been commissioned by notable international arts festivals and has also won numerous accolades, especially at Singapore’s highest platform for excellence in theatre, the Straits Times Life! Theatre Awards, where our trophies have included Best Director, Best Actor, Best Costume and Best Original Script several times.


Queer & Here
This event is free of charge but registration is required due to the limited seating capacity.
Learn more about some of our readers below!
Choo Yi Feng (he/him) is an intertidal explorer, climate activist, ecologist and fiction writer. The Waiting Room is his debut short story collection. Elsewhere, his short stories have previously been published in Foglifter Journal, Anathema: Spec from the Margins, Queer Southeast Asia and Alluvium, the journal of Literary Shanghai. He was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2022.
Clement Yue is a Singaporean essayist exploring queerness, religion and family. His work has been featured in The Slow Press, the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and won the Columbia Journal Online Nonfiction Contest in 2024. He is currently working on a full-length memoir and is completing his MFA in Creative Nonfiction at New York University.
Conan Tan (he/they) is living out his brat summer reading depressing queer literature. Their poems have been published in Rattle, Alien, West Trade Review, Lumiere Review, QLRS, and elsewhere. He is an undergraduate at the University of Oxford. Say hi to them @tmyconan on Instagram and Twitter.
Jack Xi (they/he) is a queer wheelchair user and member of the writing collective /Stop@BadEndRhymes (stylised /s@ber). They’ve appeared in several poetry journals and anthologies. Find out more at “jackxisg.wordpress.com”.
Max Pasakorn (he/she/they) is the author of creative nonfiction chapbook A Study in Our Selves (Neon Hemlock Press, 2023). Max’s writing has won the 2024 swamp pink prize in Nonfiction and the Chestnut Review Stubborn Writers’ Contest in Poetry. Their works are in Split Lip Magazine, SUSPECT Journal, Foglifter Journal, Eunoia Review and others. Read more at maxpasakorn.works or follow Max on Instagram at @maxpsk_writes.
Noonherd is a brown writer based in Singapore. She is a third-year student at the National University of Singapore, studying at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Her works have been published in online magazines such as Sploosh, Pareidolia Literary, and Antifragile Zine.
Si-Min Chong is a writer and translator from Singapore. She makes work about vessels: women, trees, and snakes. Based in Singapore and O’ahu, Hawai’i, she holds an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University.
Zeha (b. 2000) is a multi-disciplinary artist. They are interested in dissecting memories to reimagine the past and the humans of the now. They enjoy how malleable language is and loves to construct and deconstruct mainly the malay and english language to conjure microscopic imageries and paint soundscapes. Their performances centre around the relationships between family, queerness, ethnicity, familiarity and reconcilation. They have been a part of Pooja Nansi’s 2020 Biennale commision activation, ‘Coping Mechanism’ and has also read at the 2022 Singapore Writers’ Festival’s closing event, ‘…Only to Arrive at the Same Place Together’.
Held at Proud Spaces, a safe and welcoming space for the LGBTQ+ community & its allies in Singapore, we request that all readers will adhere by their Code of Conduct
The Other Book Club Book Discussion Session: Jul 2024
We’re pleased to announce that our 6th book club session will be held on Thursday 25th July 2024 at 7:30pm!
The book for this session is “Gaze Back” by Marylyn Tan.
The Other Book Club is a LGBTQ-run book club that hopes to create a safe haven for all to gather and discuss freely without qualms.
Please note that there is a small fee of S$5 (excluding EventBrite admin charges) for this session. This fee goes toward venue cost and light refreshment.
We will contact you separately where this will be held once you’ve signed up via EventBrite.
You can borrow this book from the National Library (NLB) or purchase a copy from Ethos Books, Epigram Bookshop, Book Bar or Kinokuniya.
Limited slots available. Sign up now to avoid disappointment!
NOTE ON VENUE:
1. Venue will be revealed to attendees closer to the date of the session.
National Day Conversations with No Readgrets Book Club on 03 Aug 2024
We Are Not The Enemy: The Practice of Advocacy in Singapore
Advocates and activists in Singapore contribute to policy discussions and positive change through a combination of deft manoeuvres and patient politics. Yet civil society is often unacknowledged, their skill and labour instead frequently misunderstood, even earning them the label of “troublemakers” or “enemies of the state.”
This collection of essays and interviews is a candid reflection on the intentions, beliefs and strategies behind the practice of advocacy across a spectrum of causes. The contributors come from varying backgrounds and include academics, artists, lawyers, journalists, non-profit and advocacy organisations, student and community organisers. They share practical insights into their aims and community-building work, and the tactics they employ to overcome obstacles, shedding light on how to navigate a city-state with shifting socio-political fault lines and out-of-bound markers.
With an introduction, “It is Time to Trim the Banyan Tree”, by Constance Singam, and a conclusion, “Their Struggle is Ours to Continue”, by Suraendher Kumarr.
N o Readgrets discussions are safe spaces to nurture conversations and connections over inspiring books and explorations beyond their pages.
This time, we are discussing the book We Are Not The Enemy: The Practice of Advocacy in Singapore. We’re thrilled to have several contributors join us at the session!
Join our next discussion as we delve into the essays 🗯️
Here’s the plan:
Venue: Monk’s Brew Club, 57 East Coast Road, Singapore, Singapore 428773
Time: 1100-1330
Book discussion of We Are Not The Enemy
Please note that this session is ticketed! Slots are limited so sign up soon! 🙂
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And learn more about our amazing partners:
Monk’s Brew Club is a modern coffee house and social club designed to bring people together over speciality brews, hearty food and ideas.
Ethos Books is a local independent publisher of literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry based in Singapore. Giving voice to emerging and exciting writers from diverse backgrounds, we help foster an environment in which literature and the arts not only survive, but thrive. In short, we nurture the growing literary community in Singapore and throughout the region. That’s why our authors and their ideas come first. By taking a collaborative approach to publishing, we bring each author‘s voice and vision to fruition. We are always open to new ideas: different ways of working and fresh ways of delivering the unparalleled satisfaction only a good book can bring. Established in Singapore in 1997, Ethos Books, an imprint of Pagesetters Services Pte Ltd, aims to create books that capture the spirit of a people and reflect the ethos of our changing times.


The Other Book Club Book Discussion Session: May 2024
We’re pleased to announce that our 5th book club session will be held on Thursday 23rd May 2024 at 7:30pm!
The book for this session is “A Certain Exposure” by Jolene Tan.
The Other Book Club is a LGBTQ-run book club that hopes to create a safe haven for all to gather and discuss freely without qualms.
Please note that there is a small fee of S$5 (excluding EventBrite admin charges) for this session. This fee goes toward venue cost and light refreshment.
We will contact you separately where this will be held once you’ve signed up via EventBrite.
You can borrow this book from the National Library (NLB) or purchase a copy from Book Bar, Epigram Bookshop or Kinokuniya.
Limited slots available. Sign up now to avoid disappointment!
NOTE ON VENUE:
1. Venue will be revealed to attendees closer to the date of the session.
AMA I’m a conversion therapy survivor
Ask Me Anything as a conversion therapy survivor in Singapore. I hope to be able to equip folks to help their queer Christian friends.
I’m hosting an AMA as a conversion therapy survivor in Singapore to allow people to ask what they’ve never had a chance to do before. (Feel free to key in your questions into this Google Form if you’d like me to prioritise your question during the session.)
As someone who’s been in an evangelical megachurch, then a smaller Presbyterian one, and now finally finding my chosen family at the country’s only queer-affirming church (Free Community Church), I will also provide some useful tips and practical suggestions on how to support your queer Christian friends so that they don’t make the same mistake I did.
Finally, I will be sharing a bit about my Indiegogo crowdfunding book project: “Fearfully & Wonderfully Made: Letters from Conversion Therapy Survivors in Singapore” in the last 5 minutes of this workshop.
Please note that there is a small fee of S$7.20 (excluding Eventbrite admin charges) for this session. This fee goes toward workshop materials.
If you have financial difficulties but are keen to attend, please contact us and we can work something out.
Entrance to the event by ticket only, all gatecrashers will be turned away.