Friday, August 29, 2025
9:00 AM |
The Winning Darkness
It is not really a rare case when judges for a literary contest gather together to deliberate on the winners—and find out, to their delighted astonishment, that they practically share the same titles in their shortlists, give or take one or three. It is not a rarity, but it is always a welcome happenstance—because it makes the deliberation easier to accomplish, with no one fighting for stray entries that are nowhere to be found on each other’s lists, making the decision sometimes difficult. This was what happened when the judges for the 2025 Nick Joaquin Literary Awards—poet Marra PL Lanot, fictionist Susan S. Lara, and I—met online over Zoom last August 23. It took less than an hour to agree on the winning titles—covering stories and poems that appeared on Graphic Reader from February 2024 to January 2025—and we spent most of the time just doing chika. We were unanimous in our choices, and by the time this article would see print, these winners would have already been announced last August 28 in a ceremony held at Luxent Hotel in Quezon City.
The NJLA is the annual derby sponsored by Philippines Graphic Magazine, which seeks to award the best short stories and poems published in its monthly literary supplement, Graphic Reader. It is named after the great writer and National Artist for Literature who served as literary editor of the magazine for many years until his death in 2004. [As an aside, I am always happy to note that Nick Joaquin chose one of my stories for publication in the Graphic before he died—a particularly rambunctious piece about a hustler who gets flummoxed when he is “rented out” by a high schooler.] I’ve been shortlisted for the award a few times over the years, but only won the grand prize in 2023, for my story “Ceferina in Apartment 2B.” This year, I stepped in as judge, taking over the spot vacated by one of my writing idols, Butch Dalisay.
It was not an easy task reading and assessing 47 short stories of varying quality, as well as 50+ poems. I had about a month to read through the pile—which was a challenge, because I have somewhat become a “slower” reader recent years, perhaps owing to my ADHD. That meant though that I had to muster all my concentration for each story, and when a fantastic one came my way, my pleasure in the reading was double. There were stories about mysterious goings-on in the Cordilleras that verge on the supernatural; about the historical Enrique in the company of Magellan sailing towards fate in 1521; about serial murderers and serial daters; about good people trapped in the Battle of Manila in 1945; about trans children choosing names;, about ambitious boxers whose dreams get thwarted by the punishing realities of the sport; about commencement speakers embarking on nostalgia trips; about hapless people in love affairs; about storytellers contemplating the doomed love stories they’re penning.
In the end, from our combined shortlists of stories, we fell in love with “All Fall Down” by Menchu Aquino Sarmiento, a comedic comeuppance of the upwardly mobile in society; “Ashfall” by E. V. Rieza, which turns from funny ruminations of a local journalist covering a volcanic eruption to a serious consideration of the tragedy that lies in the end; “Palaspas” by Cesar Miguel Escaño, which is about a boating competition in Dumaguete, and deftly explores the vagaries of revenge, class disparities, and the flimsiness of luck; “Holiday Pay” by Rick Patriarca, which, in two segments, delves into the psyche of an ordinary, down-on-his luck office worker, who finds out that he has been bamboozled by a street vendor—and then shows up a year later with a strange idea for revenge; and finally, “Homecoming” by Joshua Berida—a story that feels epic in its examination of a man who runs away from what is expected of him back home in the Philippines, and tries to find himself in the snowy landscape of Siberia. That story’s minute description of rural life in the wilds of Russia is so maximalist in its breadth, but somehow manages to concentrate all of that into a lean story of loneliness and defiance. I was in awe reading this story. [Note: I have omitted titles that did not land on all our lists.]
These beautiful stories—surprise, surprise—were just our collective runners-up. Eventually, we chose three titles as our winners for the short story: “Dial D for Desire” by George Deoso, bagging first prize; “Angel of Light” by Menchu Aquino Sarmiento, second prize; and “The X-Ray Tech’s Love Story” by Paulino Lim Jr., third prize. These were the stories that haunted me for days on end, after reading them.
Lim’s story glimmers with the deceptive simplicity of two Filipino expats talking, but beneath the ordinary rhythms of conversation is a reservoir of memory, regret, and the weight of lives lived elsewhere. What begins as a casual exchange in a California hospital—two countrymen discovering kinship in shared language—gradually unfurls into a meditation on exile, lost loves, and deferred dreams.
What I love most is the story’s restraint. There is no melodrama here, no need for heightened conflict; instead, Lim allows nuance to do the heavy lifting. Each detail reverberates: the mention of a first love rejected at a rich family’s doorstep, the broken hearts left behind in the Philippines, the delicate balancing act of faith, marriage, and temptation in a new country. The betrayal of infidelity. These are the textures of diaspora, rendered with precision but also with deep compassion. The story ultimately lingers because it understands how loss accumulates quietly in the lives of migrants. The characters talk about jobs, about choir performances, about family routines, but in the spaces between their words, you hear the ache of what might have been. Andy’s roses, dumped into a trash can in youth and sent again decades later, become the story’s quiet emblem: a love story both aborted and rekindled, hopeful and tainted, impossible and unforgettable. And the language—clean, supple, unforced—carries all this with grace. Lim’s prose resists ornament, but each sentence hums with resonance, like a hymn sung under one’s breath. By the end, we realize this is not just Andy’s love story, but also the narrator’s, and perhaps our own: the universal story of what we leave behind, and how memory, in its stubborn persistence, never quite lets us go.
Sarmiento’s story, on the other hand, is truly diabolical—Susan Lara calls it “Jane Austen with an evil twist”—but above all, it is a marvel of character work, an unflinching portrait of privilege gone rancid, of beauty weaponized into cruelty. At its center is Eden Reyes Blanco, doctora, socialite, political wife, and eldest sister who treats her younger siblings as burdens rather than kin. From the first page, Sarmiento renders Eden with such precision—her vanity, her entitlement, her breathtaking lack of empathy—that the reader is both enthralled and appalled.
This is, at heart, a character study of corruption not in the sense of crime or scandal, but in the corrosion of spirit that entitlement produces. Eden is brilliant, accomplished, glamorous. But she is also monstrous: she cannot help but see her sisters not as family but as genetic embarrassments, obstacles to her polished narrative. The brilliance of the story is that it refuses to soften her, and refuses catharsis. There is no redemption arc here, only the relentless unfolding of a woman who has made herself untouchable, even in the face of her sisters’ suffering.
It is, admittedly, a very evil portrait, but therein lies its power. In Eden we see the distillation of a class and a culture that valorizes success while erasing compassion. The Fairview house becomes the story’s cruel pivot: a symbol of inheritance, obligation, and betrayal. Every exchange with her sisters drips with condescension, her veneer of charity little more than transactional cruelty. This is all rendered perfectly in Sarmiento’s cool, exact, surgical prose. There are no easy emotional payoffs, no melodrama, only the chilling recognition that some lives are hollowed out not by tragedy, but by triumph itself. “Angel of Light” dares to give us a protagonist too evil to be forgivable, and in doing so, exposes the banality of privilege at its most corrosive.
Then there is George Deoso’s story. A story I was so envious over, I wanted to be the one to have written it. Alas, George has—and as a former mentor of his at the Silliman University National Writers Workshop, I am so proud at how far he has come with his fiction.
“Dial D for Desire” is a story that thrums with urgency. From its very first scene, we are made to feel the tautness of a world where intimacy is rehearsed, packaged, and sold by the minute, where the borders between work and desire, performance and truth, blur into something at once exhilarating and devastating. At the center is Ruben Rivera, a towering presence who enters the training room at this BPO with the swagger of someone who knows how to command attention. He is brash, magnetic, and impossibly alive. But the story is told through the gaze of a weary male trainer, someone jaded by years of corporate scripts, who finds himself increasingly drawn to Ruben in ways he cannot entirely admit. This tension—erotic, unspoken, dangerous—gives the story its pulse.
It is that erotic charge I responded to the most. It is a story, after all, that is steeped in longing—and longing and heartbreak together has been my own fiction’s province for some time now. Every page in Deoso’s story feels haunted by the ache of unsaid things, by the quiet devastations of queer desire under fluorescent light. The narrator finds himself tethered to Ruben in all his posturing, menace, and tenderness. The story reads like a confession written against the grain of routine. Calls, scripts, metrics … they all dissolve whenever Ruben enters the frame. What remains is the impossible tension of attraction denied its expression, of intimacy glimpsed but never held. Deoso captures that precarious state with a voice both restrained and trembling, the way grief disguises itself in professionalism until it bursts through.
But it is also more than a queer story; it is a searing document of BPO life in the Philippines, where labor and intimacy are commodified in equal measure. The story places us in the world of Phone Love, an outsourcing account that feels very much like a phone-sex enterprise, where agents are required to sell not just time but fantasy, where one’s voice becomes a product line, and where bodies become extensions of the corporate machine. Ruben is presented as a call center veteran whose skill at “selling himself” is both survival strategy and trap. We witness how in him charisma is easily turned into capital, and even how queerness is both marketable and punishable. The brilliance of Deoso’s narrative lies in its ability to show the dissonance between corporate celebration—Ruben as “top performer”—and the lived precarity of workers whose safety, dignity, and very lives remain expendable. But the story refuses to flatten BPO life into neon glamour or economic miracle. Instead, it exposes the psychic violence beneath the headset: the exhaustion of repetition, the erosion of boundaries, the exploitation hidden beneath statistics. When Ruben becomes the target of a violent client’s whims, the company’s response is chilling in its apathy. Profit outweighs protection; labor is nothing more than replaceable flesh. Of course, it ends in tragedy.
Infidelity. A woman’s monstrous lack of empathy. BPO life in a murderous grind. I’m glad that we chose these stories, even if they invite an examination into the darkness of the Filipino soul, our soul. I call these tandem our “winning darkness.” Sometimes, the dark stories are the narratives that best provide the mirror of who we are as a society. They resonated so fiercely, and they stayed with me, mostly because of the painful truths they tried distilling in their dramas.
From these dark tales, we jump to the poetry—and the common titles in our shortlists all vied, with equal vigor, to be the one poem, or suite of poems, that would land its author the distinction of being Poet of the Year. “Bound by the Same Umbilical Cord” by Jim Pascual Agustin. “Four Poems for 2024” by F. Jordan Carnice, who has won the Poet of the Year prize two years in a row. “Parallel Poems, Like Parallel Lines, Don’t Meet” by Cesar Ruiz Aquino. “Consequences, 3 Poems” by Karina Africa Bolasco. “Indignation as Elegy” by Ralph Semino Galán. “A Prayer for Leni Robredo” by Simeon Dumdum Jr. And finally, “Arranging Furniture at Midnight” by Totel V. de Jesus—which we loved partly because it has cats in it. [Susan and I are cat lovers.]
We eventually chose Joel Toledo as Poet of the Year, with his poem, “Saint-Paul de Mausole Sonnet.” It is a brief but incandescent act of ekphrasis, a poem that remakes Van Gogh’s The Starry Night in language that is at once tender and restless. Beginning with “one crude sketch,” Toledo traces the painter’s fevered transformation of smudge into cosmos, of turbulence into brilliance. What emerges is not a fixed tribute but a moving meditation on the impossibility of stillness—skies become oceans, spires levitate, galaxies sear into being. Addressing the poem itself as “dear sonnet,” Toledo reminds us that art is both sanctuary and struggle, a fragile “nightlight forever” wrested from suffering. It is a plea against silence, a recognition of the unquiet labor that turns pain into radiance. With precision and lyric restraint, Toledo captures Van Gogh’s urgency: nowhere are the hands not moving, and nowhere is the world more alive than in their untethered strokes.
Encountering all these worlds and words in poetry and prose was such a heady experience for me as judge. I love that the NJLA opened my eyes to the kinds of poetry and fiction, at least in English, that is being produced and published these days. I love that in the final conclusion, Philippine literature feels very much alive—and the best of them are still being adequately rewarded, especially in a time when literary creativity is being challenged everywhere.
The judges deliberating over Zoom with Graphic editor Psyche Mendoza as host
Labels: awards, fiction, life, philippine literature, philippines graphic, poetry, writers, writing
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Thursday, August 28, 2025
I remember the last time I directed the Outstanding Sillimanian Awards. It was 2010. I was bound for the U.S. for a writing fellowship on the day of the ceremony itself. So for more than two months, I meticulously prepared everything, from scripting to blocking to music to videos to slides, and then I gave my assistant director just one simple instruction: “Just press this button sa laptop, and the show will start.” I was giving minor last minute instructions over the phone even as I was walking towards my flight at NAIA 1. Then the plane taxied, and I was off, and that was that. I heard it was the best OSA I’ve ever done in the ten years I was directing it. Then I decided to exit on that high, and I’ve never directed another OSA ever again.
Labels: silliman
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
4:06 PM |
Mike de Leon, 1947-2025
He was my favorite Filipino film director, rightfully seen as our country's Stanley Kubrick for the way he tackled all kinds of genres and made them bear his mark. Kisapmata. Itim. Kakabakaba Ka Ba? Kung Mangarap Ka’t Magising. Batch '81. Nahahati ang Langit. Bilanggo sa Dilim. Aliwan Paradise. Sister Stella L. Bayaning Third World. Citizen Jake. All masterpieces, especially the first one. I know he had a reputation for being difficult and ornery, but I wish those things can be transcended and he be given a distinction truly and rightfully his: a National Artist for Cinema. Labels: directors, film, obituary, philippine cinema
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, August 27, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 254.
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Tuesday, August 26, 2025
11:00 PM |
I Will Never Have a Meaningful Talk With You Again
I have cut off “conversational privileges” from people. Two, in particular.
The first was curious: I didn’t know why I always felt deflated after talking to this person. Then I told myself, “Observe closely.” That’s when I noticed that while she would talk to me in a motherly way, the core of her message was apparently always, “You’re not good enough,” or “You’re wrong”—but coated with sweet words and even sweeter tones.
The second one was much the same. I would tell her of things that happened to me, often things that hurt me, and her responses were always to take the position of Devil’s advocate, making me doubt my own story. “Are you sure?” she would always say, always. Like, YEAH, I’m sure.
I value friends who tell me the truth, who call my bullshit, but when the negativity borders on the toxic and the pathological and the unempathetic, I need to draw the line. Both of these people are still friends of mine, but I try not to have deep conversations with them anymore.
I think of it as an editing of my own life, this pruning of conversation. It’s not about canceling people, or slamming the door on friendship; it’s more like quietly deciding which room in my house they’re allowed in, and for how long. Some people, I’ve realized, belong only in the living room, where the polite small talk resides, the weather and the traffic and the latest gossip about who married whom. Others, the rarer ones, are granted entry into the kitchen, where the smells of food and the intimacy of hunger live. The fewest are ushered into the bedroom, where the soul is naked and the conversation unfurls like secrets spoken in whispers.
It takes me a long time to make these categorizations because I am a sentimental fool. I want to believe that everyone means well, and I cling to the idea that if I give them enough chances, they will eventually rise to the occasion of kindness. But life keeps teaching me otherwise. There are people who will always lace their words with hidden barbs, and there are those who wear skepticism like a second skin, unable to resist the itch of doubt. And when you’ve been gutted enough times, you learn to protect the soft parts of yourself.
I suppose this is part of growing older, too. The curation of one’s inner circle. When I was younger, I wanted everyone to like me, and I mistook criticism for care. I told myself, “At least they’re paying attention.” But I now know that attention is not always love, and words that dress themselves as concern can sometimes be the most insidious form of harm. It’s like poison in small doses: you don’t notice it at first, until your body learns the pattern of sickness that follows every encounter.
Cutting off conversational privileges is my antidote. It is my way of saying: I deserve peace. My spirit is not an endless sponge for other people’s projections of inadequacy. My story is not a courtroom where I must defend my pain with receipts and affidavits. I have the right to speak and be believed. And if someone I call a friend cannot give me that, then friendship with them must be relegated to the shallow end of the pool, where the water never reaches the heart.
And so I keep my circle, smaller and smaller. But in its shrinking comes clarity. There are friends who tell me the truth in ways that do not wound unnecessarily. There are friends who, when I falter, say, “I see you, I hear you, I believe you,” before they ever say, “But have you considered this other perspective?” That’s how empathy works: not the bulldozing of another’s story with counterarguments, but the holding of that story with tenderness until it can be examined together.
I do not think I am alone in this curation. I know people who have done the same thing, often in silence, because how do you tell a friend, “I can’t talk deeply with you anymore because your words hurt me”? Sometimes it’s easier to just redirect conversations to neutral territories, to laugh over shared memories, to text emojis instead of paragraphs. The friendship continues, but with boundaries. Boundaries, after all, are not walls; they are fences with gates, and you decide when to open them.
The older I get, the more I believe that conversation is sacred. It is, in a way, the very architecture of friendship. We build each other in the words we exchange: the affirmations, the confidences, the jokes that stitch days together. To guard this architecture is not selfishness, but self-preservation. Because if you keep letting termites chew at the beams, one day the house of your spirit will collapse.
So yes, I have cut off conversational privileges. And yes, it sometimes feels cruel, even cowardly. But it is also necessary. I have learned to honor the weight of my own spirit. I have learned to be a careful steward of my own voice. And in this stewardship comes an unexpected gift: the conversations that remain, the ones I still have with the chosen few, are richer, deeper, filled with laughter that heals instead of barbs that wound.
Labels: enemies, friends, life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, August 24, 2025
9:00 AM |
A Small Garden Party
There are days that unfurl so perfectly that you can only count them among the blessings that make life bearable, even luminous. They arrive like small benedictions, reminding you that there is still some sweetness in being alive, that there is still a feast to be had even in the shadows.
For me, that day arrived on the 17th of August this year, a surprisingly bright Sunday in the middle of a month known for its turbulent weather. But thank God for that sunny, breezy day, because I finally fulfilled a wish I had carried since I was a high schooler watching too many European films. Those films—you know the ones, where the camera lingers on a long table laden with fantastic dishes, under a tree, filled with people laughing or breaking bread, as if an eternity is contained in an afternoon—imprinted on me a vision of how a meal among friends can be a communion, a reminder that the good life is not about grand gestures, but about company, food, and the presence of trees. For decades, it was only that, a cinematic fantasy. At my age, alas I still do not have the sprawling villa, nor the terraced gardens with ancient stone, nor the long rustic table that had seen the weight of generations. I only had the wish and the fantasy.
But turning fifty has a way of rearranging your sense of what is possible. There is no more time for the “someday.” If not now, then when? If not in this life, then never. And so, with my significant other, Renz, I said: Why not now? And why not here, in the Maghanoy compound in Taclobo, that patch of memory and inheritance first secured by Renz’s grandfather in 1989?
A garden is still a garden, and a long table for a meal is only a matter of assembling chairs and flat surfaces and linen. And besides, isn’t that the point of dreams—that they don’t require perfection, only the courage to enact them in the form that life allows?
And so, we did it.
We borrowed the tables and the chairs and the linen from a good friend, Marikit Armogenia, who gave us not just furniture but a sense of welcome, a gesture of generosity that made the whole endeavor feel more grounded in community. We adorned them with the blossoms that have always meant happiness to me—the radiant yellow of the chrysanthemum. The bundles of flowers—a gift of my Manila-based friend Ted Regencia—sat in vases like bursts of small suns, uncomplicated but enough to light the air with cheer.
We laid out food that felt like home: escabeche from Lab-as, with its balance of tang and sweetness—facilitated by Tita Macrina Fuentes and my high school classmate Sande; smoky and tender lechon manok and liempo from Golden Roy’s—facilitated by my old high school teacher, Ma’am Cassion; and from Renz’s magic hands, chicken curry fragrant with spices, the [slightly] bitter honesty of ampalaya salad, and the earthy freshness of pako salad, a taste that spoke of mountains and streams—and the way my mother exactly prepared them for me when I was growing.
This spread of my favorite food [and flowers] made less for spectacle and more for satisfaction, the kind of presentation that doesn’t need to be fussed over because it already lives in the bloodstream of our memories.
And then my people arrived—a carefully selected list of 15, agonizingly pared down from higher numbers I could not accommodate for logistics reasons. Ernest and Gayle Acar. Karl and Gail Villarmea. Hersley and Toulla Casero. Mohammed Malik and Finola Uy. Lyde Gerard Villanueva. Justine Megan Yu. Tara De Leon. Kaycee Melon. Warlito Caturay Jr. Alana Narciso. Khail Campos Santia. And Tita Melisa Maghanoy, Renz’s mom. People who represented aspects of me, barring those who could not come for some reason or other. Each one was a reminder that a life is not measured in what you’ve hoarded but in who has chosen to sit at your table. These fifteen guests filled the garden with laughter, with stories, with the heat of shared presence. A beautiful crowd for a beautiful day.
I called it a “literary lunch.” Because books and words have always been the meat of my life, and because it felt right to give the occasion a shape beyond food and fellowship. So I asked everyone to speak of gratitude—but with a rule: no mentioning of husbands or children, since they were already a given. Gratitude must be about the self, the singular joys, the quiet triumphs, the overlooked grace notes that make up one’s song. It was astonishing to hear the answers, little confessions of bliss that reminded me how textured life can be, how rich we all are if only we bothered to take inventory of our small joys.
Then I read to them “The 50 Gratitudes,” the essay I had written for and of myself for this occasion, a litany of thanks for the years and the loves and the accidents that have brought me here. I bundled it with two other pieces I had written for my birthday month [“The Confessions of Secondhand Rose” and “My Mother, The Muse”] and made a zine, my little giveaway for the day, because what is a birthday if not also a chance to give back the words that have sustained me? To see my friends leaf through those stapled pages, to hold in their hands my attempt at summing up half a century—it was my way of saying, “Here, take a piece of me with you, because you are already part of my story.”
Fifty as an age can a frightening number. You wake up to it and realize you have been on earth for half a century, that you are no longer the “young one” in the room, that your body creaks with the accumulation of time.
But I think fifty is also a tender number. It carries not just the weight of age, but the buoyancy of having survived, of having made it this far despite everything. It whispers: look around, you are still here. And what better way to mark it than to sit under the trees, at a long table, in the company of those who matter, and to say: thank you, thank you, thank you.
Because a good day is never just a day. It is a culmination of every choice, every act of courage, every hand extended to you in love. A good day is the flowering of roots you sometimes forget you planted. And a good life, if we are lucky, is only a constellation of such days, strung together until they shine enough to light the rest of the journey.
That August 17 Sunday was one such day. I think of it now with the certainty that whatever lies ahead, I have already known joy.
Labels: birthday, friends, life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, August 20, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 253.
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, August 17, 2025
9:00 AM |
The 50 Gratitudes*
* Which feels like a portmanteau of “gratitude” and “beatitudes”—i.e., thankfulness for supreme blessedness. Today, I turn 50. I think it’s important to celebrate it with fifty things I am grateful for:
1. That I’m alive at 50. Everybody wise tells you it’s a privilege to get older. Not many people are given this gift. This is especially true for me because I never thought I’d reach this age, to be frank about it. The thought of dying has been a constant shadow entire life. When I turned 33, the so-called “Christ Year,” I remember crying almost every day—even when I was riding a pedicab—because I really felt deep in my bones that death was knocking on my door from all manners of demise, either by affliction or accident. It was a difficult mindset to shake off. But I think what I was scared about was the idea that I had not reached my full potential yet, and had not made my mark on the world, no matter how small. This scared me and not “death” itself. That dance with mortality somehow ultimately faded when I entered my 40s, but what a grim dance that had been—a tango of cartwheeling emotions all wrapped in the name of personal legacy.
2. My resolute stubbornness to do my own thing—sometimes to my own “detriment” [but not really]—is something I am actually grateful about. [Sometimes I call this “instinct.”] For example, I was enrolled in first grade at North City Elementary School in Piapi, and my homeroom teacher was a wonderful woman named Mrs. Limpiado. Within weeks of the schoolyear just beginning, she had to leave for somewhere [I think the U.S. for a much-needed reunion with family], and she was soon replaced by another teacher, who was probably not bad—but I did not stand for that replacement. At seven years old, I absolutely refused to continue going to school, unless Mrs. Limpiado came back. One time, I even peed on the classroom floor just because. My mother was flustered at my uncanny stubbornness. “You will have to repeat Grade 1 next year if you don’t go back to school!” she implored. But … I … did … not … care. So I stopped school that year—and by the next year, we had moved to another house in another barangay, and my mother enrolled me at nearby West City Elementary School. Guess who was the new principal at my new school: Mrs. Limpiado.
Note 1: This stubbornness would have other versions in the coming years. I can endure whatever hell that comes my way when my mind is made up about something.
Note 2: This is why I am older than my classmates in grade school and high school. I never minded the teasing I got for it. In my mind, being adamant with my refusal at 7 was correct.
3. My adult ADHD diagnosis in 2022—which made me learn to forgive myself, and made me make sense of things in my life I never understood before.
4. Friends who understand why I am what I am. [See #2.]
5. Also former friends who don’t. It’s … fine. I’ve long ago accepted that I can’t expect everyone to like me. I don’t like everyone either.
6. Second chances. And third chances. Even fourth.
7. To live in Dumaguete. To be here, and to call it home, is such a blessing. The fact that this city thrives on culture and the arts, and is so near both sea and mountains, is something most of us living here take for granted. Not me. I love that I can be at the foothills of Valencia town in the morning [perhaps also at the Sunday tabo at the población, when I can wake up for it], then proceed to Dauin for some beach fun in the afternoon, and then attend a piano concert at the Luce in the evening. This is the magic of being in Dumaguete.
8. Henny Penny, that mighty red chicken in our grade school textbooks, who taught me to read.
9. My grade school teacher Ma’am Bennie Vic V. Concepcion, who first recognized that I could write—even though I had no idea.
10. High school classmates, who become forever friends.
11. Kokak and Tedo from college days.
12. Friends—Krevo, Hendri, Razcel, Willy, etc.—who take me to strange and beautiful places that I would never venture into on my own. White rabbits all of them, and I am their Alice.
13. My writing mentor, Timothy Montes, who made me join the Silliman National Writers Workshop in 2000—although I didn’t know anything about it. [He also made me join The Weekly Sillimanian.] Teachers who push you should always be celebrated.
14. The fact that I’ve traveled the world extensively, for free. And usually because of my writing.
15. Japan, which bled me of my homesickness.
16. New York in the autumn.
17. Sagada in 2008.
18. Meals that make you adequately full and happy. And chicken curry, fern salad, fried bangus, and escabeche—the food my mother used to cook to make me happy.
19. That rare really good cup of coffee that lifts you from the doldrums.
20. “Film school” courtesy of Goodluck Store near the tianggue.
21. Reading really good books, and being in a daze after finishing them, and being so envious of the writing. Call Me By Your Name, Giovanni’s Room, The Pillars of the Earth, Interpreter of Maladies…
22. Dean Francis Alfar telling me I could do speculative fiction.
23. The films and books of Nora Ephron. When she died in 2012, I had no idea I would be so heartbroken. Her life is the one I want to emulate the most, to be honest, including her writing mantra: “Everything is copy.” [Two essays that she wrote—”What I Won’t Miss” and “What I Will Miss”—are the inspiration for this very essay you are now reading.]
24. The Hive who made me feel welcome when I badly needed friends after a breakup.
25. The sight of Renz coming towards me.
26. The sound of Renz laughing over some movie or television show. Usually RuPaul’s Drag Race.
27. Under the Tuscan Sun, especially the movie.
28. Avatar: The Last Airbender, the original animated series, which Renz made me watch, and which honestly is one of the best written television shows in history.
29. Clair de Lune by Debussy. Especially when I hear it out of the blue in the early morning.
30. Being able to watch Lady Gaga live in concert. [Because I was not able to catch Madonna when she toured Asia.]
31. All the boys that broke my heart. [Read my collection, Don’t Tell Anyone.]
32. People who don’t mind that I can’t remember names, even though I do remember my experiences with them.
33. The days when you can roll in bed all morning, with no meetings to anticipate, and with absolutely nothing to do. [It’s also nicer when there’s soft rain outside.]
34. My collaborations with Hersley-Ven Casero, which have been very productive.
35. Newly-dagit friends in Dumaguete who inspire me, and make me experience my city in a new way again. Like having literary lunches!
36. Dear friends who once told me, “Let’s help you make your dream come true,” and then they did Dumaguete LitFest with me! You should always cherish friends who tell you they want to help you make your dreams come true. That’s very rare.
37. Dessa, Lana, and Karl, who asked me to come back to teaching—even though I didn’t want to.
38. Tita Melisa who gave me a home and a bubble, especially during the pandemic.
39. The pandemic, which—although horrific in places—also taught me I could live very simply, and still be satisfied. It taught me not to strive for positions, or for property. All these things don’t really matter.
40. Dad jokes, and laughter that splits your sides.
41. The fact that I still believe in God, despite Christians.
42. My father.
43. My sisters-in-law and my nieces and nephews.
44. My brother Rocky.
45. My brother Alvin.
46. My brother Edwin.
47. My brother Dennis.
48. My brother Rey.
49. My mother.
50. The fact that—see #1—I have finally absolved myself with all needs of “legacy.” It’s an impossible ask, and one that is totally beyond my control. But I love that I have done my best to pursue the very specific things I love, and I am grateful that some of these have touched the lives of people.
* * *
But legacy is something I cannot help but grapple with, especially now. Truth to tell, I have been the recipient of three recognitions that promise me there is some personal legacy at play. Years ago, I was Hamiling Bayawanon. In 2021, I was given the KSSLAP Award by the Cultural Center of the Philippines in recognition of my writing life and my cultural work, and I’m included in the literature volume of the newest edition of the CCP Encyclopedia of Philippine Art. This year, I am recipient of the Outstanding Dumagueteño Awards, also for the same recognition. When I received the notice regarding that last one, I remember posting on Facebook: “I think I’m still too young for this.” But a friend later told me that age has no bearing on these things, that they are recognitions for our contributions to the community—and that they should be received with gratefulness and humility. And I finally agreed.
I’m glad that I’m still relatively young and able bodied while I’m getting these awards and opportunities. I do not want to be too old and too physically infirm when accepting these accolades, as I see it sometimes happen. And also because—and this is my bombshell if you’ve read this far—I really have no idea how much time I have left.
Call this as shades of #1, but truth to tell, I am aware that my body might soon betray me.
I mentioned my brothers and my mother last in this litany of gratitude, not just because they’re family, but also because there is a physical ailment that we share that we have only discovered in the past decade. My mother hails from Bayawan, but her ancestors—like many in that southern Negrense city—are from Panay. There is a rare type of genetic movement disorder that comes from Panay called Lubag Syndrome, an X-linked dystonia-parkinsonism that primarily affects men, particularly those from this island, which they inherit from their mother. The condition is characterized by a combination of dystonia—which is involuntary muscle contractions causing twisting and repetitive movements—and parkinsonism, which can induce tremors, rigidity, and slow movements.
Four of my brothers have it now in varying degrees, and I have a fifty percent chance of also getting it. I will not deny I am a bit afraid of this possibility—but at the same time, I do not want to worry about things that may be beyond my control.
What I have now is just my present, and how I will live it. I want to travel. I want to finish my books. I want to use what time might remain of my able body to finish the work I have set out to do. Part of this project is also letting go of things that does not matter at all in my life, like toxic people, and surround myself with people I love and respect. Another part of this project is expressing my gratitude, hence this birthday list. How many years do I have left? Five? Ten? I have no idea. But I am grateful that I have so far lived a relatively good and simple life, filled with many goodhearted people—and at 50, I feel a fierce urge to really live.
Labels: birthday, family, life, love
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, August 13, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 252.
Labels: birthday, poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Tuesday, August 12, 2025
10:08 PM |
Strings at Ritual
You could say it was a Dumaguete kind of evening. Very D.I.Y. Very chill. So cultural. Inside Ritual—the zero-waste grocery store at the Arts and Design Collective Dumaguete along E.J. Blanco Drive, which now apparently moonlights as a performance space—monobloc chairs were being unstacked and arranged not by some invisible stage crew, but by the musicians about to do mini-concert. There was something disarming about seeing Reginald Bernaldez and Gonzalo Misa setting down chairs like they’re also in charge of the barangay fiesta seating plan. It was like catching superheroes folding laundry before saving the day.
The intimacy was immediate, the space itself smelling faintly of laurel, cinnamon, lye, baking soda, and laundry soap. This wasn’t a concert hall; it was a living room with a conscience, and last August 9, it belongs to five of Dumaguete’s best musicians.
The night began with François Champion’s “Gavotte” and Joseph Kuffner’s “Andantino,” a duet between Venus Seno-Bernaldez on the flute and Reggie Bernaldez on the guitar. The pairing was like wind over water: the flute’s clear silver thread sailing over the calm ripples of the guitar—which Reggie later acknowledged: “The flute really overpowers the guitar. Which is why I am in tandem with my wife, Venus,” he joked to the appreciative crowd. I really don’t know much about classical guitar beyond the occasional recitals I attend, but I can tell when musicians are listening to each other to create a good duet. In “Andantino,” Venus leaned ever so slightly toward Reggie in the softer passages, and his playing seemed to rise under hers. I know these two from my college days, and it was fantastic to see them play together again.
Then Reggie himself took to the stage alone for Francisco Tárrega’s “Capricho Árabe”—a piece whose title promised Moorish longing and delivered exactly that. The opening was a delicate question, like a traveler at the edge of a strange city; halfway through, the melody blossoms into something almost defiant. By the time Reggie closed with Miguel Llobet’s “Cançó del Lladre,” I was convinced the titular thief was also a romantic one, stealing my heart in that small room at Ritual.
Rav Rocamora soon stepped in next with Ariel Ramírez’s “Balada Para Martín Fierro.” Kuya Rav has always struck me as a gentle presence—maybe from those childhood days I’ve known of him as a fellow churchmate and elder at Calvary Chapel—but his guitar here was a storyteller’s grit. The piece unspooled like an epic poem, tender in one phrase and stormy in the next. With Dilermando Reis’ “Eterna Saudade,” he offered a quieter ache, a saudade so precise it felt like the memory of a special late afternoon.
Arnold Franke followed with Abel Carlevaro’s “Preludios Americanos,” and here the music felt almost painterly—expressionistic and experimental. There was something in Arnold’s posture—shoulders relaxed, gaze steady—that made the complexity of his playing look deceptively easy. I would later learn he studied music in Tilburg, Netherlands, but in that moment of his playing, he was the embodiment of the naturalness of his sound.
And then there was Gonzalo Misa, who stormed in with Nikita Koshkin’s “Usher Waltz,” a piece as dramatic as its literary inspiration—Edgar Alan Poe’s iconic story. It was gothic and playful, moody and whimsical, and Gonzalo leaned into every shift in tempo like an actor changing masks mid-scene. Watching his fingers was dizzying; they darted, paused, and darted again like they were in on some private world.
For the finale, Gonzalo and Arnold paired up for Christian Gottlieb Scheidler’s “Sonata in D Major.” They wielded two antique guitars, and with these had a conversation that was sometimes harmonious, sometimes argumentative, and always fascinating. The first movement felt like two old friends recalling an adventure; the second was like those same friends, years later, laughing at how serious they used to be.
When the last chord faded, there was roaring applause from the small audience who gathered at Ritual—a warm, sustained clapping, the kind that said: “We know you. We see you. Thank you for making this city more beautiful tonight.”
Outside Ritual that Saturday night, the air was cool. I think of how, in this small city by the sea, music doesn’t always need a proscenium or velvet seats for magic to happen. Sometimes it only needs five friends, a grocery that believes in zero waste, and a few rented monobloc chairs back. And for all my confessed ignorance about classical guitar technique, I left certain of one thing: when Dumaguete’s finest play, the music is never just notes. It is the whole city, plucked and strummed into being.
Labels: art and culture, dumaguete, music
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, August 10, 2025
9:00 AM |
My Mother, The Muse
My mother Fennie—Ceferina in her old birth certificate—has been a lot of things in the nonagenarian counting of the years she has lived her life: an orphaned girl raised by grandparents, a dreamer who wanted to be a nurse, a very accomplished hairdresser, an unlucky sugar planter, a party-loving socialite in a small town, an impoverished peanut butter maker and vendor, a fervent born again Christian, and an inspiration.
She will turn 94 on August 17, which is also my birthday, and here I am writing about her as my muse. All artists invariably have muses. Sometimes they are friends or family, often they are lovers, occasionally they are strangers glimpsed just once on the street or in a café but makes such indelible impression on the art maker that they soon possess the imagination, enough to engender creation.
Sometimes they can even just be the mere idea of someone, or an ache in the shape of a person long gone. But a muse, if one thinks deeply about it, is not merely a subject. They are a mirror that shows the artist a self they cannot see alone, a catalyst that makes their work urgent. Art-making is, at its heart, a conversation between the maker and the made-for, which is sometimes tender and sometimes savage. A muse sharpens the stakes for the artist: the painting must be worthy, the novel must reach the fever pitch of confession, the dance must breathe like a lover’s sigh. The art they cause to being are really love letters to these people, to moments with them, to lives perhaps already slipping beyond the reach of the artist. Inspiration, one can say, is always a kind of pursuit of these fleeting things.
For the painter Frida Kahlo, the muse was her husband, the artist Diego Rivera, equal parts tempest and harbor, the storm that broke her and the light that also made her paint again. For the musician Leonard Cohen, it was Marianne Ihlen, the woman in the Grecian dress who became “So Long, Marianne” and all the other songs he wrote to chase her ghost. For the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, it was his wife Zelda, who was a dazzling and self-destructive Southern belle whose brilliance and fragility flickered in every line of The Great Gatsby. Theatre director Peter Brook found his muse in Natasha Parry, his actress-wife, who for decades animated his vision of theater as a sacred and living exchange. The choreographer George Balanchine had a litany of muses such as Maria Tallchief and Suzanne Farrell, who were not just ballerinas but virtual architects of the very movements he conjured, their bodies the ink in which his choreography was written.
For me, my heartbreak stories have been occasioned by the results of erstwhile lovers, but my true muse—the person who inspired me to write the steadiest of my fiction—will always be my mother.
One of my earliest stories, “Old Movies,” which won me my first-ever Palanca in 2002, is my wildest incarnation of her: the character of Charo is my imagination of my mother as a fragile Tennessee Williams character, given to drama and Scotch. I wrote of her this way in that short story: “On bad days when she is not Ava Gardner, or Kim Novak, or Lolita Rodriguez, Mother is a weeping shadow, her room locked and curtained off—her darkness as dramatic as the lull before an evening’s last full show.” Totally the opposite that my mother has been in my life—and yet I am perfectly aware that when I was writing this character all those years ago, the face she bodied was my mother’s face.
In “The Hero of the Snore Tango,” the story that won me my second Palanca in 2003, I made an attempt to write a story about my father. Invariably, that character has a wife, and she is my mother as I knew her in the early 1980s—an embattled woman who used to have big dreams, but was now reduced [not a good word] to peddling homemade peanut butter, which she would deliver house to house to rich people who used to be her close friends.
In “Things You Don’t Know,” which in 2007 won me the very first of my first prizes for the short story in the Palanca, there is the character of the grandmother who willfully ignores the secret travails of her daughter and her jobless son-in-law, and who spends her days in her bedroom watching The 700 Club on television. That detail is taken after how my brothers and I convinced my mother to consent to us finally getting a television set in the late 1990s. “If we have TV, you could watch The 700 Club all you want!” we told her, targeting her religious streak. In real life, she did say yes—but she never really got to watch the shows she wanted: we, her boys, were all over controlling the watching of shows in the days when cable TV was quite new to Dumaguete.
These three stories are collected in my first collection, Beautiful Accidents, published by the University of the Philippines in 2012. I brought out another book that year, this time a collection of my speculative fiction, Heartbreak and Magic, published by Anvil Publishing. Not a lot about my mother in that collection of my fantasy, science fiction, and horror stories—but “The Sugilanon of Epefania’s Hearbreak” is a fantastical reworking of a story she once told me about her older sister Fannie, otherwise known as Epefania, from their childhood in Bayawan. In a way, although it is about my aunt, this story was still inspired by my mother. That story, which also brings to life their mother Bebang and their grandmother Intan, has since been adapted into a Virgin Labfest play, written by May Cardoso. When it was staged at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 2017, it gave me goosebumps to see my grandmother and my great grandmother—both of whom I’ve never met—somehow resurrected.
There is none of my mother at all in my third collection, Don’t Tell Anyone, since it is a collection of my erotica—a book peopled by my minor muses consisting of past loves and past hurts. But my fourth collection, Bamboo Girls, published by Ateneo de Naga University Press in 2018, is truly inspired by her. She is in fact the “bamboo girl” in that collection’s first story and title, based on her recollection of her grandmother once telling her that she had no mother and that was born from the cracks of a bamboo, in the thicket behind their old house in Bayawan—a story she believed in very thoroughly. The book ends with “Mother’s High Heels,” which is of course about her, and her high heels, and her resolute faith in her Protestant God.
The collection I am working on now, Where You Are is Not Here, contains one story that really excavates my mother’s life very thoroughly. It is titled “Ceferina in Apartment 2C,” and if one notices, I did not shy away at all from using her actual name. In that piece, I regurgitated her experience of her brief immigration to Los Angeles, where she lived briefly with my brother Rey in 2010. That story won me my second first prize in the Palanca, in 2022. If you have noticed, every time I write about my mother, I win a literary prize. If that is not the definition of a muse, I don’t know what is.
Why do I write about my mother? I truly consider her life dramatic. I have elaborated as much on her childhood in Bayawan, the loss of her mother and the disappearance of her father, and then later on, especially in “Ceferina in Apartment 2C,” her wish to escape her hometown by selling tira-tira, which funded her passage to Cebu City in the 1950s, where she was promised by a distant relative a chance to study nursing. That never happened. That promise broken, she found a job as a hairdresser in a beauty parlor along Jakosalem, eventually finding that she was quite good at that vocation, which she took to for the rest of her life.
I have already written, in a Martial Law essay I wrote that became viral when it was published by Rappler in 2022, about her life as a sugar haciendera back in her hometown in the 1960s and early 1970s, and then how she lost everything in the late 1970s, and how she dealt with the poverty that engulfed her and six boys in the 1980s and 1990s.
Someday I will write more fully about the part of her life between being a penniless hairdresser in Cebu in the early 1950s and back home in Bayawan as a sugar planter in the late 1960s.
Someday I will write about how a studio photograph of her which captured her in a very beautiful, pang-artista pose, made many Cebu men beeline to ask her out.
Someday I will write about her falling in love with the handsome scion of a rich Cebu family, and how she became pregnant … and how she was rebuffed by the boy’s mother who thought her totally beneath her social class.
Someday I will write about how she fled that drama by exiling herself to what she thought was a far off place—a little town called Nasipit in Agusan del Norte, where she opened her own beauty shop in a house owned by someone who would turn out to be my father and her future husband.
Someday I will write about how he pursued her, how she pushed back but then also fell in love. [He was suave, and had his ways with women.] I have actually already written something about their rocky marriage in an unpublished story, which I fictionalized by setting it in Bukidnon—but the bare details of that plot, including my father’s disappearance and his involvement in a cult and his eventual reappearance in our lives, is taken from their somewhat tumultuous life together, which climaxed with my father’s passing in 1997.
Someday I will write about how she is now in her golden years—and how, a few years ago, she got reunited with that old boyfriend from Cebu, to which she has, alas, said “no” to the possibilities of a romantic reunion. “Tigulang na ko,” is what she tells me. [Truthfully I don’t mind: the guy in his prime was very handsome, and I do not wonder at all why my mother fell in love with him all those years ago and bore him a son, my eldest brother.]
Some would say I am revealing too much of family secrets in my “fiction.” Truth to tell, my mother doesn’t mind. [The rest of my family as well.] She is a diva that way, enamored by the fact that she has somehow been transformed into literature. Who doesn’t want to be memorialized that way? Especially when it is accomplished via the lens of somebody who loves them.
I think this will always be my “forever gift” to my mother—returning to the intricacies and dramas of her life and using them over and over again as fodder for my fiction.
Someday I will turn my mother into a novel.
Labels: birthday, dumaguete, family, fiction, life, mother, philippine literature
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Friday, August 08, 2025
9:52 PM |
The Pianist as Pinoy
There is a word in music that feels like an apt description for the way pianist Horacio Nuguid plays: “cantabile”—which means the smooth quality of making the instrument sing. This was the thought that stayed with me through Sound Scapes, his piano recital of rare and resplendent works from the Filipino classical repertoire, which unfolded simply and beautifully on the Claire Isabel McGill Luce Auditorium stage last 6 August 2025—a respite we didn’t think we needed in the middle of the week. In an age where music-making often feels like a gladiatorial sport—faster, louder, more technically dazzling—Nuguid sat before the instrument with the calm assurance of someone who had nothing to prove. And in that unhurried humility, there was magic.
Nuguid is no stranger to the world’s stages. Trained at the University of Santo Tomas, he would later take his craft to the University of Northern Iowa and to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His career has taken him from solo recitals to orchestral collaborations in the Philippines, Mexico, and the United States, and into close musical partnerships with distinguished singers and instrumentalists.
As artistic director of the Rochester Chamber Music Society, he has carved out a space for music-making that is both intimate and expansive. Honors have followed—among them the Ardee Award for outstanding artist in Rochester—and so has a commitment to teaching: master classes across continents, decades of shaping young pianists at the Young Artist World Piano Festival in Minnesota, and mentorship at the Philippine High School for the Arts. Recently, he has taken on the role of co-artistic director at the Bethel University Summer Piano Academy, continuing the work of nurturing the next generation, even as he brings the voices of our past composers back into the light.
It is with that pedigree that Nuguid makes his debut in Dumaguete, on the Luce stage. The program of Sound Scapes was itself an act of reclamation, designed that way by the pianist. According to him, in the Philippines, so much of our music’s history lies in dust and disappearance—scores lost to war, to neglect, to the indifference of cultural gatekeepers. Nuguid has made it his mission to retrieve these works from obscurity, curating and publishing an anthology—Philippine Piano Pieces (2023)—that has suddenly opened a long-closed window into our pianistic past. Sound Scapes at the Luce was the living and breathing embodiment of that project: nine pieces by nine Filipino composers, spanning decades, styles, and sensibilities, each given a voice on this night in Dumaguete. He proceeded through the program like a lecturer, introducing the importance of each piece at the podium, and then sitting down before the grand piano to demonstrate the wonderfully musicality he had just described.
From the very first notes of “Caricias (Danza)” by Juan de Saliagun Hernandez (1881–1945), who was known as a composer of dances, marches, and music for theatrical performances, it was clear that Nuguid was not merely reproducing what was on the score. His left hand, rich with warm bass resonance, grounded the dance’s rhythm; his right hand let the melody float in the air with limpid clarity. The contrast was a quiet marvel—you could almost “see” the separation of musical notes, and yet they conversed so naturally.
“Poeme” by Carmencita Arambulo (1938–2023) was another personal highlight for me. The 1957 piece is, like what it subtitle claims, “a song without words,” which Nuguid rendered with a tenderness that felt almost private, like overhearing someone’s cherished memory. He let the melody breathe, resisting the temptation to rush. At his age—seasoned, yes, with perhaps the occasional elasticity in tempo—there was no need for metronomic precision. Instead, there was the deeper rhythm of someone shaping a phrase to match the heartbeat of this beautiful song.
“Okaka (Theme and Variations)” by Rodolfo Cornejo (1909–1991) was the program’s playful centerpiece, an intricate work that tested the pianist’s dexterity and interpretive range. Nuguid navigated its shifting moods with ease, from the almost childlike charm of the theme to the more dramatic, harmonically adventurous variations. And then there was “Bontok Ili” by Rosendo Santos Jr. (1922–1994), a piece steeped in indigenous echoes, where Nuguid’s left-hand ostinatos—a continually repeated musical phrase or rhythm—pulsed like ritual drumbeats while the right hand spun modal melodies like threads of smoke.
One of the evening’s most quietly moving moments, at least for me, was “Meditacion (Nocturno)” by Filemon Sotto (1872–1966). Here, Nuguid leaned into the music’s meditative intent, letting each chord shimmer and fade, as if allowing the audience to listen not only to the sound but also to the silence that followed. In contrast, “Tarantelle No. 2” by Lucino Sacramento (1908–1984), which the composer wrote for a NAMCYA competition in 1978, burst forth with kinetic energy—and though Nuguid’s tempo was, by necessity, tempered, the rhythmic drive and the joy in the playing were intact.
When Nuguid arrived at “Kundiman” by Felipe Padilla de Leon (1912–1992), the recital shifted into something unmistakably Filipino. The bittersweet lyricism, the gentle swells of emotion… Nuguid played it as though telling a love story across generations. Nuguid’s rendition of “Malikmata” by Antonio Molina (1894–1980) shimmered with impressionistic colors, like a heavy dream one tries to recall in the morning light, unsettling but also bemusing. And finally, “Mayon (Fantasia de Concierto)” by Francisco Buencamino Sr. (1883–1952) closed the concert with a sense of Pinoy grandeur, its elevated folksiness made beautiful with Nuguid weaving together the virtuosity and lyricism that mark the best of our piano literature.
What struck me most, across all these works, was the utter lack of pretension in Nuguid’s playing. Nuguid did not play to impress. He played because this music deserved to be heard again. He played because these scores—many of them once teetering on the edge of oblivion—still had beauty to give. He played because, quite simply, he loved them. And we, listening, were made to love them too.
There were no flamboyant gestures, no exaggerated rubatos meant to elicit gasps. Even the occasional unevenness in tempo seemed part of the music’s lived-in honesty. In an era obsessed with perfection, this was a concert that embraced humanity—its frailty, yes, but also its capacity for grace.
By the final applause—and I was really surprised by the gusto of the audience after many years of watching piano recitals eliciting only tepid responses—I realized what Sound Scapes truly was: not just a recital, but an act of cultural memory. Nuguid had taken us on a journey through our own musical heritage, dusting off forgotten pages and giving them breath again. And as we filed out of the Luce, it felt less like leaving a performance and more like emerging from a long, nourishing conversation, one where every melody had been clear, every note had mattered, and the silences between them had spoken volumes.
Truth to tell, I was not really aware of Philippine piano music much until last Wednesday night. What the concert taught me is that it is a most curious and beautiful thing, a garden of melodies where Spanish-European grace, American verve, and the deep earthiness of our own indigenous rhythms mingle in unexpected bloom. (Forgive the flowery metaphor!) But apparently, like many gardens in our history, much of it has been left untended, its flowers hidden from view. The tragedy is partly logistical: pianists have simply not had access to the printed scores. The few that made it into print—often through the composer’s own efforts—have long since slipped out of circulation, their surviving copies asleep in library archives, or kept as delicate heirlooms, or ravaged by World War II, a fraught period when untold manuscripts and printed scores vanished in the fire and rubble.
But Nuguid’s work tells us that this story does not end in loss. In recent years, there has been a gathering tide of interest in finding these scattered notes, in piecing together a legacy nearly lost. And in August 2023, Nuguid stepped into this story with something remarkable: a published anthology of twenty-five piano pieces by sixteen Filipino composers, each work lovingly rescued, critically edited, and annotated for a new generation. The book and the concert are both an act of scholarship and an act of devotion.
You can listen to most of these piece in Horacio Nuguid’s YouTube channel. The concert was sponsored by the Silliman University Culture and Arts Council. Thanks to Dr. Elizabeth Susan Vista-Suarez for explaining the technicalities of the piano-playing for me.
Labels: art and culture, classical music, dumaguete, luce, music, philippine culture, pianists, silliman
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, August 06, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 251.
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, August 03, 2025
9:00 AM |
The Confessions of Second Hand Rose
“Age changes you. The first half of my life, I wanted to be interesting to many people. Now as I am on the second half, I only want to be interested and invested in the lives of those who are still around.”
~ Gabe Mercado
At the beginning of my birthday month, where I will be turning 50, I cannot help but think inwards and wonder about the ways my life thus far has unfolded. From the vantage point of being half a century old, I see strengths. I see frailties—so much frailties. I see patterns. Definitely patterns. In the sum of it all, what I’ve had has indeed been a singular experience of me being me, warts and all, and barring regrets, which is a useless exercise. But that is everyone’s story, isn’t it? All our lives are singular experiences to ourselves, and we can only hope to derive at least the satisfaction of having lived through all that. Does that make sense?
By the time you’ve reached middle age, you see patterns in the ways you cycle through your days. Do you see patterns in your life thus far? I do. One pattern I see overwhelmingly is how I am the embodiment of the song “Second Hand Rose,” a 1921 tune written by Grant Clarke and James F. Hanley for Fanny Brice, and popularized by Barbra Streisand in the late 1960s. It’s a funny song where the persona complains about never getting things when they’re new, but always getting them second-hand—“Even clothes I’m wearing / Someone wore before!” she complains in the song.
This is the anthem of my life! Because, truth to tell, I mostly never get things firsthand; always second-hand—and to me, I’ve learned to be perfectly fine with that reality. I am, I daresay, a creature of the second place, the second wind, the second chance.
Most of us have some sort of landmarks to measure success in life. I have never subscribed to the common dream of pursuing a cycle of college graduation / corporate job / car / condominium / conjugal bliss / children / croaking. We all have different measuring sticks, but one such that I somehow subscribed to was academic excellence. But I remember that all throughout grade school, I never was a consistent honor student. My record was quite checkered: there was a fourth place finish in the honor roll in Grade 1, nothing at all in Grade 2, a third place finish in Grade 3, none in Grade 4, a second place finish in Grade 5—and then to my utter astonishment, I graduated valedictorian. How did that happen? That was my first experience as a Second Hand Rose.
That academic adventure continued. In high school, there were many classmates who were more brilliant than I was, and so I chose to pursue something I was at least good at—which was writing, and thus I became editor-in-chief for the school paper. I chose an idea of “excellence” in my own terms, I guess. The brilliant classmates I had—all of them women—were ultimately graduated with very high places in the honor roll, but somehow I also found myself the lone male in their company, but one who was quite satisfied with a fourth honorable mention.
In college, determined this time to excel, I became part of the pioneering batch of Physical Therapy students at Silliman University, but a searing soul-searching episode during my first hospital duty in junior year made me realize I was not cut out for the field. I had just battled a losing skirmish with getting ordinary vital signs from the first patient assigned to me, and once outside that patient’s hospital room, I stared down the corridor which was bathed in soul-sucking fluorescent lights—and I realized all this was not for me. So I shifted to Mass Communication, much to the dismay of my family who had already bought the dream of me as a future OFW in some hospital abroad. I was soon in my second course! And I was not in a hurry to graduate either, relishing my second life as a college student now freed from the specter of what seemed to be the wrong career path. Second choices, second lives for Second Hand Rose.
After enduring three years of a halfhearted pursuit for physical therapy training, I wanted to taste what it was like to study abroad, believing that the best time to travel is when you’re a college student. I subsequently applied for a competitive exchange scholarship in Japan. I didn’t get that—the psychological exam I was made to take pronounced me somehow unfit for the endeavor [shades of future mental health issues!], and the slot was given to someone else. I stewed heavily and felt like a loser. But by the next year, the scholarship office decided to award me the opportunity anyway—and I did spend a year as a student in Japan, my first time to live out of the country, and throughout that exhilarating year—I was 21—I gloried in my new experiences, but also cried every night because of terrible homesickness. [I must have cried all my homesickness away that year, because I never became homesick again in future travels.] Nevertheless, in my estimation, Second Hand Rose won.
I finished Mass Com but didn’t even become a journalist. Upon graduation, there was an offer of job with the Manila Bulletin, but I didn’t see myself as a newshound, going around the big city chasing leads. So I nixed that, and went to graduate school instead, belatedly embracing the possibilities of a creative writing career. And just like that, without design, I became a teacher—just as the world began changing in the shattering realities after 9/11.
I taught without a break for a decade after that, and really went earnestly into writing, winning two Palanca Awards in a row—both of them second prizes for the short story. [It would take a few more tries before I got a first prize finish.] I wrote and I taught without taking a break for many years, and finally I got terribly burned out in 2009, which was around the time I also broke with a long-term relationship. I remember almost quitting teaching. I partied hard in the late 2000s, enjoying a second bout of carousing gusto in my early thirties. A second adolescence for Second Hand Rose!
Eventually, tired of partying, I began looking to redefine my life again. Armed with my old idea of taking a break, I applied for an arts fellowship in the U.S., this one with the promise of a week’s stay in New York. I wanted to cure my burnout and heartbreak with skyscrapers and big city life—the anti-thesis of Dumaguete. I actually made it to the final rounds of consideration!—but ultimately, they chose someone else. I stewed again and felt like a loser. But the local administrator of that program [basically, the U.S. Embassy in Manila] soon reached out to me, and felt that I was suited for something else: a fellowship at the International Writing Program in Iowa. And this one lasted three months, plus trips to Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., aaaaand New York. Of course I said yes. Again, it was an instance of not getting what I applied for, but getting something better in return. It happens. Second Hand Rose won again.
[A digression: While I was studying in Japan, I applied for a tourist visa to visit my brother in Los Angeles. I got denied. I tried a second time a few years later, back in the Philippines. I once again got denied—and then exiting the consular offices, I remember being furious and I remembering cursing the American dream before I left the compound along Roxas Boulevard: “I will never ever apply for an American visa again! Someday, it will be you—U.S. Embassy—who will invite me!” Ten years later, it was in fact the U.S. Embassy who facilitated my first American sojourn in 2010. Hurrah for Second Hand Rose!]
After that fateful American fellowship, I returned home, published my first two books, and then became the founding coordinator of the Edilberto and Edith Tiempo Creative Writing Center—and to that I poured all my sweat and effort, and all my dreams. Plus I taught an insane overload of classes year after year after year. I was invariably told to entertain the idea of pursuing a Ph.D. abroad, but at the same I was retained as the only CW teacher in the department, and the only one teaching all the CW courses [except for poetry]—which proved confusing. Was I supposed to stay and teach, or go and pursue a higher degree? I somehow was made to feel that taking a sabbatical was not in the cards. By the time the pandemic came, I was ready for a burnout and a meltdown. I broke mentally. [Or at least the Zoom classes, and a bad bout of COVID-19, broke me.] I quit teaching, and I thought that was for good. I didn’t want to teach ever again. I became a social media manager instead.
Of course I spoke too soon. Because I’m back to teaching again, armed with lessons on how to navigate these things without me collapsing, or breaking. Is this, at 50, my second, third, or fourth wind? A friend I follow on X keeps posting the same message every day without fail: “Another day, another chance.” I heart his daily mantra every chance I get, because I believe in that wholeheartedly.
I think what I’m trying to get at in this long navel-gazing essay—cut me some slack, August is my birthday month and this is my birthday essay—is that [1] getting things secondhand is not a definition of who you are, and it’s just the way life is and how random it can be, and it is not fate; [2] getting second places is a good place to be, and first will eventually happen; [3] getting second wind means you are willing to rise above failures and try again; and [4] getting second loves [or third] and finally finding one that completes you means that, yes, you’ve kissed many frogs along the way but there will always be a Renz. Second chances are a gift.
I also believe that whenever I falter in the assorted challenges of my life, the one thing that makes me get up is the idea of persistence. Persistence is the secret formula: you do what you do best constantly and without fail, even with the occasional hindrances, even with occasional failures—you’ll get somewhere eventually. At fifty, I’d like to believe that everything I have accomplished and everything I have been awarded for is really because I have managed to persist. Even when I don’t believe in myself sometimes, even when I demonstrate spectacular failures, even when I disappoint myself and other people because of frailties that are undeniable parts of my shadow self, even when I feel discarded by forces beyond my control, even when I am at the brink of some sort of annihilation [sometimes of my own making] … I’ve somehow persisted.
That, and because I am always accommodating with every second chance [or third] that I’ve gotten.
Hello, August!
Labels: birthday, life
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Friday, August 01, 2025
10:00 PM |
Swans Descending in Dumaguete
My former journalism mentor in high school—she’s the current Dean of the College of Education at Silliman University—was effusive upon seeing Ballet Manila’s production of Swan Lake last week, on its final night at the Claire Isabel McGill Luce Auditorium: “I was in tears when I left the Luce tonight, overwhelmed by a mix of emotions,” Dr. Gina Fontejon-Bonior wrote on Facebook. “I needed this moment at the Luce, immersed in an evening of love, beauty, and grace—after a long workweek, and a heartbreaking news about the health condition of someone I deeply care about. Salamat kaayo, Silliman University Culture and Arts Council, for bringing the artistic creation of Lisa Macuja-Elizalde back to Dumaguete, … for the breath of hope and grace.”
That kind of testimony lingers more than most, I think. More than actual reviews even—which is why I have opted to center this column with Dr. Bonior’s emotive impressions of the ballet. And how do I even begin to review Ballet Manila’s Swan Lake, with Ms. Macuja-Elizalde in her creative peak? I won’t even try. I will try to write about it in a different way.
You hold on to testaments like Dr. Bonior’s it like a talisman, something to pull out when the world begins to unravel. Because the truth is, we’re all slowly unraveling. And if the ache of ordinary life, like illness or bureaucracy or the grief that never leaves you, does not do you in, it’s the quiet despair that comes from scrolling endlessly through your phone in the dead of night, seeking feeling in a world too numbed out to offer it. And then a white bird flies across a hallowed stage in Dumaguete, pirouettes in anguish, and suddenly your chest opens.
What is it about Swan Lake?
It’s a ballet that, by all measures, should be a relic: composed in 1875 by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, borne out of the romanticism of a bygone era, stuffed with royal courts and enchanted lakes and girls turning into swans. But it survives, not just in gilded theaters in Moscow or London, but here in Dumaguete—under the shadow of acacia trees, where the salt of Bohol Sea clings to your skin even in the air-conditioned dark of the Luce.
It survives, I think, because it haunts us.
Because it is, at its core, a tragedy of transformation, of doomed love, of becoming something else entirely just to survive. And isn’t that what we all do? The ballerina, at the height of her dance, becomes the swan—and you forget that it is human limbs that tremble and leap and flutter. You see the feather, the wing, the pain of flight.
Lisa Macuja-Elizalde and Ballet Manila know this, embody this. And in Dumaguete, that knowledge is received not passively, but with deep and trembling gratitude. Here, I would like to believe that we are not jaded by art. Here, when a ballerina flutters to her death in a fog of heartbreak, someone in the back row weeps silently—and means it. [This is very true! In the performance that I saw, the audience I was with were rapturous when our swan leapt to its romantic demise!] Maybe that’s why Dumaguete is still the kind of city where a ballet like Swan Lake matters. Because we haven’t lost our capacity to believe in beauty. Or to mourn it.
As a teenage high schooler working for The Junior Sillimanian, I was taught by Dr. Bonior [always Ma’am Gina to me] to be precise in my reporting, to sum up a story best in a perfect opening paragraph. She taught me to feel with structured language. And now here she is, decades later, watching a girl in a tutu die for love and magic, and sobbing in the darkness. I think there’s poetry in that.
There’s a kind of redemption in being allowed to feel deeply. It doesn’t happen enough.
Maybe that’s what Swan Lake offers: not just its well-worn story of Prince Siegfried and the cursed Odette and her dark double Odile and the malevolent Von Rothbart, but the whole aching ritual of it. The careful discipline of classical ballet, with its merciless demands on the human body [Ballet Manila, for Dumaguete, did the unthinkable and danced a punishing total of six shows in a row in four days!], and its impossible grace. Every movement honed through pain. Every step a sacrifice. And yet, it is through that rigor a transcendence arrives.
Lisa Macuja-Elizalde, who once danced these roles herself, has now given her dancers the gift of that same transcendence that we, in Dumaguete, got to witness, which is nothing short of a blessing. A miracle, even. Because we are far from the cultural centers of the country. We do not have the reach of Manila, or the glitter of CCP galas. But we have the Luce. We have the Silliman University Culture and Arts Council and its indefatigable leader, Diomar Abrio, with his stubborn devotion to the idea that Silliman University and Dumaguete deserve to see the best this country has to offer. That we are not too small. That art is not a luxury—it is the lifeline.
And so this is why Swan Lake endures, at least for us. Not because of nostalgia, but because of its ability to speak to us across centuries and geographies, across languages and generations. It tells us that love can redeem, even if too late. That betrayal can destroy, but also set one free. That sometimes, becoming a swan is the only way to escape.
And here, in this seaside university town where students still write poetry on napkins in cafés, where strangers say thank you after watching a play, where grief is softened by music echoing from the Rizal Boulevard, Swan Lake finds an audience that doesn’t just watch—but listens. Feels. Believes.
So yes, bring back Odette to our stage. Let her dance again and again in our city. Let her leap and fall, rise and vanish. We will always watch. We will always weep. And somewhere in that act, in that collective surrender to beauty, we are healed. Even if just for one night. Because in Dumaguete, Swan Lake doesn’t end with a curtain call. It stays.
Labels: art and culture, ballet, cultural affairs committee, dance, dumaguete, luce, silliman
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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