YANGON, Myanmar (AP) -- Poet Saw Wai parked himself on the lawn, unfurled a map of Myanmar with a blob of blood-red paint dripping down from a spot up north and invited people to make poetry with him.

"He's calling for more trouble," said a passerby.

What the message lacked in subtlety it made up for in brazenness. Government forces have been pounding ethnic rebels in Myanmar's northern Kachin state, displacing tens of thousands and testing the country's fast-growing friendship with the West. It's the sort of thing you couldn't really talk about here for 50 years.

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EDITOR'S NOTE This story is the first installment in "Portraits of Change," a yearlong series by The Associated Press examining how the opening of Myanmar after decades of military rule is and is not changing life in the long-isolated Southeast Asian country.

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Nearly two years into reformist President Thein Sein's term, the rush of hope and idealism that greeted many new freedoms most strikingly freedom of speech is turning into a measured assessment of the nation's progress. Long accustomed to writing around censorship, Myanmar's writers are relearning the habits of free thought and testing the boundaries of speech. But change has also brought questions about how licensing requirements and market capitalism will shape public debate and how speech should be regulated in a multiethnic and multireligious nation of Buddhists, Muslims and Christians.

Saw Wai, who served 28 months as a political prisoner, grinned as he handed out photocopies of his latest poems.

"I'm not afraid," he said. "I'm just a guinea pig, testing freedom of expression on behalf of the people."

Myanmar's censorship board, which shut in August, was officially rebranded the Copyrights and Registration Division at the end of January, just in time for Yangon's first international literary festival, where Saw Wai staged his poetry performance. The festival, which ended Sunday, brought together around 80 Myanmar authors including exiles and former political prisoners like opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and international writers, like Jung Chang, whose best-selling "Wild Swans" recently became available in Burmese, though it is still banned in China. Myanmar is also known as Burma.

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Freedom brings new challenges for Myanmar writers