Friday, August 07, 2026
1:04 PM |
A Thought About Dumaguete
Because it lies resplendently next to sea, Dumaguete’s water spirit is something I will always cherish: it ebbs and flows, like its denizens do. People come, people go, and that’s fine, although that once vexed me as a native. I know now that most would call it a refuge, an incubator, a haven, then they go; many, however, would it call it home. Dumaguete is sometimes that space where we consider what it is we want in the world.
Labels: dumaguete, life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, May 10, 2026
9:00 AM |
Celebrations and Commiserations
April was one big beautiful madness for me. Right from its very start that month, I was in Iloilo City [for the first time ever] to take part of that UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy’s celebration of National Food Month—a few days of magnificent feasting which more than proved Iloilo City’s point over why it was thus designated as a culinary capital for the country. A week later, I was off doing the 3rd Dumaguete Literary Festival, where I also launched my latest fiction collection, and also got to witness Dumaguete being officially designated as UNESCO Creative City of Literature. On the day the festival ended, I was also part of the UNESCO National Commission of the Philippines [UNACOM]’s writeshop, which gathered together cultural advocates from around the country in a project to foster a book detailing the richness of UNESCO-designated places in the Philippines. And then a week later, after settling down for a few days to start summer school, I was doing a week-long book tour in Manila, from making my debut at Dia del Libro to doing a book talk at UP Likhaan at the University of the Philippines in Diliman. Sometimes I wondered where I was channeling my energy. I am fifty years old, not exactly a spring chicken anymore.
I realized even then that I was very privileged to have been given the chances to do all of these things. But now, on the tenth day of May, I have finally rested enough to do a bit of introspection. It’s a bit jarring, truth to tell, to find myself beholding slower days these days, but thank God for that. Rest is essential.
Last Friday, just for the sake of being around friends in a more social context [besides doing events together], we went for a dinner, a very lovely one, at Mohammad Malik’s farm in Palinpinon, Valencia with Pinspired’s Evgeniya Spiridonova and Max Vasiliev as our guests of honor. This was ostensibly to celebrate their new baby, and so we informally called the gathering “Jane’s Russian Dinner”—simply for the fact that this dinner was supposed to have happened last December, where she promised to prepare a Russian dish called “shuba,” on the very night she unexpectedly gave birth to her second child, which caused its deferment.
The fulfillment of that canceled dinner came five months later, because there was much to celebrate. There was news of new pregnancies, of impending weddings, of new scholarships abroad, and of recent events coming to successful fulfillments—and so we gathered. Aside from Jane and Max, there was Mohammed Malik and Finola Uy, our hosts. And Libraria’s Ernest and Gayle Acar. And the artists Hersley-Ven Casero and Toulla Mavromati-Casero. And Renz Torres and me—really the gay representation of the lot. [Unfortunately, another couple, the writer Hannah Portugal-Magno and her medical doctor husband Pito Magno, had to beg off at the last minute, because of an emergency.] So we celebrated all these over Renz’s grilled bangus and ampalaya salad, and Gayle’s lemon orzo with feta and alugbati, and Toulla’s peanut noodles and Greek stir-fry, Ella’s coffee bake and fresh fruits, Mo’s biko, Hersley’s baye-baye from Baywan, and Jane’s beef stroganoff and the pièce de résistance, her shuba [or “herring under a fur coat”].
The talk over the delicious, very international, meal was celebratory, but we also came to realize that despite all the good news, we were also commiserating over sudden deaths and accidents that pushed us to the edge. One of us on that table actually revealed he almost had a heart attack last month—probably from stress and from the unbearable heat that is now defining the current summer in Dumaguete. This was shocking. (Because what do you mean we almost lost you, and we didn’t even know?)
Then we made a brief recounting of unfortunate things of recent days.
How Onna Rhea Quizo’s father died a few days before the start of the Duma LitFest, but that she still chose to perform in the short play Sisa: Panaghoy ng Pinakamiserableng Babaeng Katha ni Rizal, which we moved from the first day of the festival to the last upon Onna’s request, with the play becoming a good rejoinder to Atom Araullo’s talk regarding writing in dangerous times. [Onna memorized the last page of the play on the day she buried her father!]
How the essayist Rica Bolipata-Santos had to fly home to Manila early in the festival, because her brother, the renowned cellist Chino Bolipata, suddenly died. And then this revealed a strange pattern with her Dumaguete visits over the years: when she was a fellow at the Silliman Writers Workshop in 2010, her father died. When she became a panelist in 2019, someone in her family also died, but she chose to stay for the rest of her week in Dumaguete and kept the news of that death to herself. And now, as a panelist for the literary festival, this recent death of a brother. “Dumaguete does not love me, Ian,” she messaged me after we arranged for her emergency flight back home to Manila. I responded, feebly: “But we do.” How do you respond to this strange happenstance?
Then there was how theatre artist and YATTA stalwart Nikki Cimafranca met a serious motor accident the same week we opened the LitFest—and was in the ICU for days on end, unconscious, with a clot in his brain. [Thank God he has since woken up and is feeling much better.]
Then there was how a few of our LitFest guests, flying home to Manila on the last day of the festival via a certain airline, found themselves in an emergency that necessitated a detour to Iloilo City. One guest in that flight messaged me about how the cabin was a furnace and how everyone was struggling to breath [a baby turned blue!], how the emergency masks dropped from the ceiling in a scene that could only be recalled in movies about plane crashes, and how everyone in the flight were suddenly prayerful and muttering “I love you’s” to each other, getting ready for whatever end might come. Upon landing in Iloilo, my friend chose to fly home in a separate airline from her husband, “just in case.” [Another friend chose to stay in Iloilo City for a few days, in an unplanned vacation.]
It‘s so easy to reduce all these to the simplest catch-all: life is short. But frankly I don’t know what to glean from all these except that in the end, while we deeply mourn the loss of our friends and loved ones, and while we deeply empathize with strange emergencies, ultimately the best of our nature wants us to celebrate our humanity and our art. Like what Onna did. [Which I love her for.]
And sometimes a small dinner with friends, on a relaxed night in a farm, gathered together without any agenda except to foster friendship and camaraderie, can define that celebration.
Labels: death, dinners, dumaguete, friends, life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Monday, March 30, 2026
9:00 AM |
The Return of Silliman Film Open
It has been more than a half a decade since Silliman University—via the College of Mass Communication and the Culture and Arts Council—was able to hold the Silliman Film Open, the university’s festival of student films that used to be the one date every year, usually around February or March, when budding campus filmmakers tried their hand at cinematic storytelling.
Last March 7, we finally unveiled its latest edition—the fifth under its current name. Although if history has to be told, this endeavor started in 2009 as the 61 Film Festival [because it showcased the final film requirements of the students of Communication 61]; and then briefly, beginning in 2012, as the Dumaguete Shorts Festival, where it became a showcase of short films being created by Dumaguete filmmakers [regardless of whether or not they were Sillimanian]; and finally as the Silliman Film Open [or SFO] in 2015, this one designed to be more insular, screening only the works of currently enrolled students. [By then, other schools, like Foundation University, were already offering their own festivals. We had to change course.]
What happened after its fourth iteration sometime in 2018? There were some unfortunate shenanigans I really cannot be bothered to rehash, but ultimately it was really because of the pandemic, which made organizing it an impossibility. Although, truth to tell, COVID-19 had no power over some of SFO’s alumni, the likes of Andrew Alvarez and Ara Mina Amor and Von Adrian Colina, who went on to make fantastic films on their own while the world stood still in quarantine.
I began missing it though.
I missed it the way one would miss a calling. In 2008, I was invited to the Cinemalaya Film Festival at the Cultural Center of the Philippines to take part in its Film Congress, and I was there to represent Dumaguete filmmaking. At that time, I’ve only had one short film to my name, and when I was asked in my panel what the best practices of Dumaguete filmmaking were, I could only say one sad thing: there was no such thing as Dumaguete filmmaking.
Granted, we have our very own Eddie Romero, a renowned National Artist for Film. Granted, we have some filmmakers from here, such as Ramon del Prado, Jonah Lim, and Seymour Barros Sanchez. And granted, Dumaguete seems to be a favorite place to shoot for commercial films. But in terms of grassroots filmmaking, at that time, there was nothing. Hence, no best practice.
But I told the audience at the CCP that perhaps we could start some change, however small. When I got back to Dumaguete, and then to my film class at the College of Mass Communication, I had one resolve: to jumpstart filmmaking in this city, by hook or by crook. There are no filmmakers willing to make films? We will move heaven and earth then—and by “moving heaven and earth,” I mean requiring my film class to go beyond just writing film criticism of the movies they saw in my class. I quoted the French director Jean Luc Godard, who once said: “The only way to critique a movie is to make a movie.” Make a movie, I told my classes. They were scared out of their wits, and they were understandably reluctant—but they did manage to turn out films, which to me were minor miracles borne out of sweat, liters of Red Bull, endless coffee, endless bickering among the crew, sleepless nights, panic attacks, and even minor emotional breakdowns. Then again, who said filmmaking was easy? You have to be insane to set out to make a movie, I told them—but the dividends are fantastic.
And what are the dividends so far? We are now on the fifth iteration of the SFO, and many of the films we’ve exhibited in previous editions have gone on to be included at Lutas Film Festival, at the Sine Negrense, and at the Cinema Rehiyon—and one film, Razceljan Salvarita’s I Am Patience, was actually nominated for the Gawad Urian for Best Short Film. The future could bright for Dumaguete film if we actually create an ecosystem where film practice could be established. It is still a fledgling thing—but at least it shows some signs of thriving. Here’s to this batch of student filmmakers, and may they go places indeed.
The filmmakers behind Silliman Film Open 5, with jury members Andrew Alvarez, Tara De Leon, and Renz Torres, festival director Ian Rosales Casocot, and College of Mass Communication Dean Irma Faith Pal [fourth from right]
For the fifth edition, which we dubbed our “comeback season,” we screened only seven short films of varying genres, which included Karisa Marie Barote’s 404: Self Not Found [a science fiction take], Olivia Anne Cabral’s Girls Next Door [a romantic comedy], Jurielle Cornelia’s After the Silence [a domestic thriller], Ryan Rikaz Ibrahim’s Second Best [a crime film that turned out to be campy comedy], Samuel Lagulao Jr.’s Run on Empty [an actioner], Jullan Louise Sido’s Ang Dili Kahulat [a comedy], and Zschaielle Ainsh Tiglao’s When the Wind Blows [a melodrama]. All of them are students of Communication 62, a directing course, and Literature 30, a course on film and literature. [Three other filmmakers, unfortunately, were not able to make the deadline for the festival.]
In the end, the jury composed of local filmmakers Andrew Alvarez, Tara De Leon, and Renz Torres, gave generously and selected a wide swath of titles for awards, including Best Poster to After the Silence; Best Original Song to Le John’s “Naiilang” for Ang Dili Kahulat; Best Production Design to Olivia Cabral’s work in Girls Next Door; Best Make-up Design to Ryan Rikaz Ibrahim and Kessiya Silva for Second Best; Best Cinematography to Ben Guarin, Jeff Jamolod, and Roll Borres for Run on Empty; Best Editing to Angelina Rival for Second Best; and Best Screenplay to Samuel Lagulao Jr. for Run on Empty.
The award for Best Supporting Actress went to Franz Tolentino for Second Best. Ryan Rikaz Ibrahim, who directed that film, won Best Supporting Actor for another film, 404: Self Not Found. That film also garnered Best Actor for Vince Gerard Balbuena, while Best Actress went to Kessiya Silva for Second Best. Jurielle Cornelio was named Best Director for After the Silence, and a Jury Award was given to Zschaielle Ainsh Tiglao’s When the Wind Blows. Ryan Rikaz Ibrahim’s Second Best was finally named Best Film. All in all, a happy ending for a film festival no one thought would make a comeback in 2025!
It was a journey—painstaking and demanding—for all of them.
Samuel Lagulao, for example, is a Creative Writing major, and he had no inkling that the semester that just passed would require him to make a short film. “My fourth year as a graduating student was already heavy with thesis work, my mythology class, and other subjects, but this [film class] was the hardest for me,” he wrote. “The whole experience taught me a great deal, not only about writing itself, but also about the publishing and marketing side of it. Making a film forced me into a different kind of education to what you would normally expect from literary and creative writing classes, one that had less to do with words and more to do with logistics and money and weather and scheduling and accepting the limits of what could actually be done… In film work, [I learned that] talent is important but reliability [on my crew] also matters just as much. A project can survive a lot of limitations, but it struggles when people cannot be there.
He continued: “There were moments when I wanted the camera to hide too much, or the edit to fix problems that should have been solved in the actual shoot, with one scene especially that made that clear when I had wanted to make it look as though a conversation was happening naturally, even though it would really be stitched together from separate footage of people performing against empty space. On paper, that seemed possible. In practice, it was not convincing enough … That was one of the hardest lessons the process taught me. Writing can make almost anything happen because the page is obedient. Film is not. Film depends on bodies, places, light, timing, weather, equipment, and the availability of other people. The actors could not always make it. Some shoots had to be rearranged because one person was free and another was not. One day was cancelled because of the weather. The easiest scene [to shoot] turned out to be the one inside a classroom, probably because it was controlled and contained. Everything else felt exposed to interruption.
“… Now that the film is finished, I remember the strain of it but I also see it more clearly for what it was. It was one of the few times in my student life when I had to move beyond writing something good on paper and face the mess of making something real with other people. … It was tense, expensive, and often frustrating but it also taught me what kind of work filmmaking really is. [But] I am grateful that the process was not smooth since it forced me to understand that a film is never built by imagination alone. It is built through people and limits and corrections and persistence.”
A scene from Samuel Lagulao Jr.'s Run on Empty, which won Best Screenplay and Best Cinematography
For Ryan Rikaz Ibrahim, winner of the top award, joining the festival—and making the film—was a humbling experience. “The most difficult stage was getting the screenplay approved,” he admitted. “… My early drafts were met with strong criticism, [and] at one point, the feedback was direct: the story needed to be rewritten or reframed, because it did not make sense. As someone who was confident in my writing, hearing this was difficult. Each revision felt like going back to the beginning, and the process slowly chipped away at my confidence.”
There were other production challenges, like scheduling the shoot with actors, or even finalizing something as primary as having a cinematographer in place. “But slowly, things began to fall into place,” Ryan said, and then a lot of learning had to be done when shooting commenced. “One moment during filming stood out in particular. While shooting the interrogation scene, the entire team began contributing ideas to improve the sequence. The actors, the videographer, and even I, as the director, experimented with different angles, deliveries, and approaches to the scene. What started as a simple shot turned into a collaborative effort, and that moment reminded me that filmmaking is truly a shared creative process.”
But for him, the real turning point came in the post-production phase. “When my editor, Angelina Rival, sent the first draft of the film, I immediately felt something had changed. The scenes were arranged in a way that matched the vision I had imagined from the beginning. Her work with camera angles, pacing, and sound design brought the story to life in ways I could not have achieved alone. At that moment, the film I had struggled with for weeks finally started to feel real.”
When Ryan’s film was announced as the top winner, he was “genuinely stunned.” He said: “In that moment, it became clear that the victory was never mine alone. It belonged to my actors who poured their energy into every scene, to my editor who shaped the film with remarkable creativity, and to my entire team that helped transform a difficult idea into a finished story. [But] looking back, this entire process taught me the value of humility, perseverance, and openness to criticism. There were times when every correction felt discouraging, and every revision felt like starting over. Yet those moments of struggle slowly revealed an important truth: growth often happens in the most uncomfortable situations. More than anything, I learned that filmmaking is not just about having a vision. It is about trusting the people who help bring that vision to life and allowing yourself to grow through the process.”
A scene from Ryan Rikaz Ibrahim's Second Best, which won Best Film
Filmmaking as a metaphor for processing life. I hope that’s one good lesson instilled with fervor in our current crop of campus filmmakers who made Silliman Film Open 5 happen. Congratulations, everyone!
A scene from Jurielle Cornelia's After the Silence, which won Best Director
A scene from Zschaielle Ainsh Tiglao's When the Wind Blows, which won the Jury Award
Labels: art and culture, dumaguete, film, silliman
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Friday, March 13, 2026
7:00 PM |
Let's Get Lit!
It’s the weekend, and I can honestly say the past week has been one of the busiest weeks I’ve had since the year started! A ton of academic work [with a looming graduation ceremony bearing down our necks.] And a lot of literary campaigns for the Dumaguete UNESCO City of Literature, particularly, and especially for the upcoming Dumaguete Literary Festival this April.
Today, March 13, we had a school caravan at NORSU, but last Tuesday, March 10, we did the same for Silliman University where I gave a talk educating Sillimanians about what it means for Dumaguete to be a UNESCO Creative City of Literature. Alana Narciso helped out by sketching the influence of Edilberto and Edith Tiempo on Philippine literature, and Kaycee Melon was part of a panel on AI and writing. Patch Puengan is the firebrand behind the Let’s Get Lit campaign. Medyo kapoy baya, pero padayon!
[Photos from The Weekly Sillimanian, slightly modified by me]
Labels: city of literature, dumaguete, dumalitfest, literature, philippine literature, UNESCO
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Saturday, December 06, 2025
7:00 PM |
Reading to Children
To get back on track, I accepted this invitation from Virginia Stack and her Valencia Book Mobile brigade to read my picture book The Great Little Hunter, to a bunch of youngsters, aged 7-10, in Bong-ao, Valencia last Saturday. I had the time of my life! The children were initially shy but they were also curious and interested, and I really do think this is the best age range to get kids to start and love reading, the way I was when I was their age and encountered Henny Penny. This is the thing about Dumaguete becoming a UNESCO City of Literature: it is curious to have this designation now in an age when literacy among children is falling away fast. How can we have a City of Literature when nobody reads anymore? That's a question we are grappling with, and this literacy program is part of our solution. Thank you Tata and your Indefatigable team of teachers and volunteers for making this commitment work!
Here's a video of me reading:
Labels: children, children's books, city of literature, dumaguete, life, literacy, negros, reading, UNESCO
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, November 09, 2025
9:00 AM |
The Dream of City of Literature, Fulfilled
I still remember that fraught week in August 2024 when I had to churn out the preliminary bid for Dumaguete City as UNESCO Creative City of Literature—about six pages of questions that needed thorough answers, which resulted to almost 30 pages of the final bid.
I was actually set to enjoy Founders Day in Silliman University when then DTI Negros Oriental Director Nimfa Virtucio and then DTI Creative Sector Specialist Anton Gabila invited me and Renz for “a cup of coffee” in Adorno Galeria y Cafe. Abi nako coffee lang, but it turned out they were keen on submitting Dumaguete for the distinction and was roping me in to help them. Of course I said yes. I had already articulated too many times before how much I dreamed of Dumaguete getting this distinction—and they knew.
The catch was, I only had about one week to put together the pre-bid, because the deadline was on August 31! Oh, the pain! But that fraught week also made me realize, when I was formulating the responses in the portfolio, that Dumaguete actually could do this, that we really had everything [except, ehem, publishing houses and translation projects]. The closest example I could get to comparing Dumaguete with was Iowa City, also a small city—but its literary heart was big.
We were able to submit the pre-bid to UNACOM on time, on March 3. And then I forgot all about it.
Until UNACOM, the Philippine Commission for UNESCO, contacted us sometime in November 2024 to happily inform us that we were on their final list of recommendees to UNESCO, alongside Quezon City for Film.
That galvanized us to do the final bid, from December 2024 to March 2025, again fretting over the final questionnaire and other things to do. Together with then Dumaguete City Tourism Officer Katherine Aguilar, we formed a think tank of about 20 people, to make the bid truly community- and sector-driven.
There were sacrifices to be made in the pursuit. I let go of finishing several of my books actually slated for publication in 2025 just to be able finish the bid. Then there was the toll on the body and mental health. The sleepless nights were abominable. The anxiety was formidable, and I actually went back to taking Ritalin after being off-meds for two years.
We submitted the bid on time, but we never were able to do the planned video documentary to supplement it. There was just no time. Days and months later, the thought that plagued me was that I could have done more, especially for our website, which was at best nice-looking but quite rudimentary in terms of laying out what literature was all about in Dumaguete. There was just no time. In the end, I just hoped the bid itself would suffice for UNESCO. Truth to tell, I was prepared to receive bad news. I dreaded the coming of October 31. Please forgive me if I cried Friday night when I received the news. It was my body heaving a sigh of relief.
I was in a Halloween party being hosted by Renz Torres last night, but October 31 being World Cities Day – which meant UNESCO was going to announce the new cohorts of its Creative Cities Network – was always lurking in my consciousness. This was the exact second, captured perfectly by the quick phone camera of Tita Melisa Maghanoy, when I read the message from Anton Gabila, one of my co-conspirators in the bid for UNESCO City of Literature for Dumaguete City ... And then I burst into tears, with Renz comforting and congratulating me and the team behind this endeavor. [Photos by Melisa Towers]
Because what does one do with joy that comes after such a long and uncertain wait? When the news broke that Dumaguete had finally been named a UNESCO Creative City of Literature, I was gobsmacked. I read UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay’s words describing the new designated cities: “UNESCO Creative Cities demonstrate that culture and creative industries can be concrete drivers of development. By welcoming 58 new cities, we are strengthening a Network where creativity supports local initiatives, attracts investment and promotes social cohesion.” I couldn’t believe that our small city—with a big literary heart—was among these.
I felt the exhaustion of a year’s worth of labor turn into something like grace.
I thought of the many nights trying to map out what made our city’s literary soul unique, and map out what else we could do to make it a vibrant creative sector. I thought of the countless writers who had, across decades, quietly built the foundation that made the bid even possible—from the Silliman Universityi National Writers Workshop that Edilberto and Edith Tiempo began in 1962, to the new voices emerging from the Buglas Writers Guild, to the poets scribbling verses on napkins in our ubiquitous cafés.
I remember the labor, but Dumaguete becoming a UNESCO City of Literature was never about me or even about a single institution. It was about articulating, finally, the long story of a city that has always written itself into being. Dumaguete is a city that breathes literature. This recognition from UNESCO simply affirms what we have long known in our bones: that our words matter, that our stories shape us, that the act of writing here is both heritage and hope.
I do need to remind everyone that the designation—which comes up for review every four years—is not a medal to polish and display, or a “forever title.” Like how I’ve said it before, it is a promise, perhaps even a burden—to make sure that this literary city remains worthy of the name. To be a City of Literature means committing ourselves to nurturing new voices, to making sure that the next generation of writers from Dumaguete will have more platforms, more spaces, more readers, and more courage. It means making literature not just an elite preoccupation but a living conversation with the community—with the tricycle driver who recites tercets, the fisherwoman who tells her grandchildren stories by the shore, or the student learning to find her voice in the classroom.
I echo what Dauin writer Michael Aaron Gomez said about the responsibility of getting this distinction: “To me, it clarifies the purpose of writers in the city: one must be able to look clearly at the successes and failures of Dumaguete and the conditions shaping itself and, more importantly, its people in the modern century. Because ultimately the reader is what it comes down to. I hope the title clarifies instead of obscures what a Dumaguete writer must do in the face of the rushing waves of what we call progress and development.”
It means that Dumaguete’s literary map must expand beyond its old boundaries. We need to champion our writers in Binisaya, not just those who write in English—and even in all the in-between languages that reflect who we are. We must find ways to publish locally, to translate, to reach readers beyond our islands. The irony of a City of Literature without a strong publishing ecosystem [which Dumaguete alas suffers from] must be addressed, and this designation gives us the mandate to do so. The hope is that soon, we will have more independent presses, more bookstores, even more literary residencies, and that Dumaguete will once again become what it was in the golden decades: a true haven for writers.
When I think of what lies ahead, I recall how the bid itself was written—by many hands, each adding a sentence to a shared story. For our technical working group, we got creatives, teachers, students, government workers, cultural workers, publishers, and bookstore owners who came together to define what “literary” means in a place like Dumaguete. The process was itself an act of literature: collaborative, imaginative, and deeply rooted in place. It showed me then that literature is not confined to the printed page. It can also be policy, advocacy, and vision—the very work of imagining better futures for our city.
So yes, I cried. Because Dumaguete’s recognition as a UNESCO City of Literature is both culmination and beginning. It is the acknowledgment of decades of literary life, and the invitation to write its next chapters. We have joined a global network of cities that believe culture can transform communities— Edinburgh, Jakarta, Melbourne, Iowa City, Prague, Reykjavik, Wonju—and now, Dumaguete.
But what makes this achievement extraordinary is how intimate it feels. It’s not a distant honor bestowed from above; it’s a story that began with a simple “cup of coffee” in Adorno. From there, a city dared to dream on paper, and that dream became real. I think that’s the truest metaphor for writing: to wrestle with words until the world shifts a little closer to what you imagine.
Labels: city of literature, dumaguete, life, philippine literature, UNESCO, writers, writing
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Friday, October 31, 2025
9:00 PM |
Wake Me Because I Must Be Dreaming! Dumaguete is Now UNESCO City of Literature!
We got it. My hands are shaking.
I still remember that fraught week in August 2024 when I had to churn out the preliminary bid for Dumaguete City as UNESCO City of Literature – about six pages of questions that needed thorough answers, which resulted to almost 40 pages of the final bid. I was actually set to enjoy Founders Day in Silliman University when then DTI Negros Oriental Director Nimfa Marcos Virtucio and Anton Gabila invited me and Renz for "a cup of coffee" in Adorno Galeria y Cafe. Akala ko coffee lang, turned out they were keen on submitting Dumaguete for the distinction and was roping me in to help them. Of course I said yes. But I only had about one week to put together the pre-bid, because the deadline was on August 31! Oh, the pain! But that week also made me realize: Dumaguete actually could do this, we had everything [except, ehem, publishing houses and translation projects]. We were able to submit the pre-bid to UNACOM on time.
And then I forgot all about it, until UNACOM contacted us sometime in November 2024 to inform us that we were on their final list of recommendees to UNESCO, alongside Quezon City for Film! That galvanized us to do the final bid from December 2024 to March 2025, again fretting over the final questionnaire and other things to do. Together with then Dumaguete City Tourism Officer Katherine Aguilar, we formed a think tank of about 20 people, to make the bid truly community- and sector-driven. I sacrificed finishing several of my books slated for publication this year just to finish this bid. The sleepless nights were abominable. The anxiety was formidable, I went back to taking Ritalin after being off-meds for two years. We submitted before the midnight of March 1, the deadline. [We never were able to do the planned video documentary to supplement our bid. There was just no time.]
I always thought I could have done more, especially for our website – so I was just hoping the bid itself would suffice for the judges. But, truth to tell, I was prepared to receive bad news. I dreaded the coming of October 31. Please forgive me if I cried Friday night. It was my body heaving a sigh of relief.Labels: city of literature, dumaguete, dumaguete writers workshop, life, philippine literature, silliman, UNESCO, writers, writing
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, October 12, 2025
9:00 AM |
Leaving Enchantment
I’m not sure if this happens to everyone, but every time I am about to leave Dumaguete for an extended trip to somewhere else, my anxiety goes off like a fire alarm in a gigantic bonfire. Be it via a ferry, or a bus, or a plane. [But strangely not cars. I think this is because cars imply a simple day-trip—and hence an eventual return to Dumaguete without the trappings of travel.]
When I am about to leave Dumaguete, I feel my entire existence go on molasses mode—and there is a high percentage of my psyche going bonkers: it absolutely cannot fathom, cannot stomach, cannot execute the idea of leaving. I don’t try to analyze why: it is just a gut feeling that demands to be tolerated. You don’t want to leave, it taunts me. Why are you leaving?
I don’t really listen to it. It’s just a nagging voice at the back of my head, soft but cruel. Besides, I know most of my trips somewhere else are always essential and cannot be postponed, and I know that nagging voice will eventually fade once I really get on the business of traveling. But it is loudest as a trumpet announcing the Rapture while I am on transit to the airport, to the port, to the bus terminal.
Once, about a decade ago, I was invited to attend an important literary event in Manila, and the organizers were spending everything for me, including a hotel and plane ticket. So I packed my bags, and got ready to go. My anxiety cartwheeled as usual. When I got to the airport, I found out that the organizers made a huge mistake in booking my flight: my ticket indicated that I was to leave Manila for Dumaguete instead of vice versa, and I never really bothered checking because I assumed the organizers were good at this stuff.
So I couldn’t leave Dumaguete.
And you know what I felt right after realizing that? A huge sense of relief. True, I pretended to be disappointed and said so to the organizers over the phone—but in all honesty, I happily went back to my apartment, unpacked everything, and felt mightily spared from having to travel all the way to Manila. It was a relief—but it was not a proud moment. This memory has haunted me ever since.
And yet this is also true: the moment my bus speeds out of the city limit, the moment my boat starts churning the waters and leaves the port, the moment my plane hops from taxiing down the runway to actually flying in the sky—I feel all that anxiety leave my body like a mass of hot, heavy air. I’d find myself heaving a sigh of relief, of finding contentment that somehow I found myself out of the enchanted clutches of Dumaguete.
What’s going on?
I call this “enchantment,” because it feels like that. Like some voodoo of place that keeps me tied to Dumaguete like a clutch. And Dumaguete, being Dumaguete, plays this spell so well it almost feels sinister. Everyone who comes here—even the ones just stopping by on a backpacker’s whim or the ones arriving on academic assignments—find themselves tethered in ways they cannot explain. “There is something about Dumaguete,” they say, and it is not a marketing tagline; it is testimony. A poet once told me he had come here for a three-day visit and ended up staying for thirty years. A painter I know swore he would only last a semester teaching at Silliman, but the semester multiplied into decades, and now he is retired here, almost proudly unable to leave. This is the city’s enchantment: it lures you in with its easy pace, its acacia-lined boulevards, its sea that turns gold at sunset, and it whispers—why go elsewhere when everything you’ve been longing for is here?
The irony, of course, is that the very same enchantment is also what makes leaving so difficult. Dumaguete is both paradise and prison, but only because it is so good at being paradise. You leave reluctantly, and when you do, you spend much of your time away plotting a return, as if absence were a kind of punishment. I’ve seen this play out countless times: students who study abroad always circle back, retirees find their way home, even tourists become residents. It’s not Manila they pine for, nor Cebu, nor Davao. It’s this small coastal city that seems to live rent-free in everyone’s heart.
And so when I feel that crippling anxiety before leaving, I know it is not mere neurosis. It is the spell of Dumaguete tightening its grip, reminding me that departure is a betrayal, even a temporary one. But once I’m out there, on the road, in the air, at sea, the spell breaks. I begin to see myself again, stripped of the comfort Dumaguete provides, and in that distance, I also begin to appreciate it more.
That’s the other side of enchantment: it works even in absence. The city haunts you when you’re gone. The taste of tempura at the boulevard stalls. The echo of laughter in a silong filled with guitars. The salt of the wind carried inland by habagat breezes. Dumaguete travels with you even when you leave it, which is why perhaps the relief I feel after departure is not the relief of escape, but the comfort of knowing that the city will not leave me, even if I leave it.
Maybe the lesson is this: Dumaguete holds you in a paradox. You can’t bear to leave, but when you finally do, you realize you never really left. Its enchantment is not geographic. It is spiritual, psychological, emotional. It is the sense that this is the place that knows you best, and you will always belong to it, no matter how far you go.
Labels: dumaguete, life, superstition, travel
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Friday, October 03, 2025
9:00 PM |
Dumaguete is Now UNESCO City of Literature!
We got it. My hands are shaking.
I still remember that fraught week in August 2024 when I had to churn out the preliminary bid for Dumaguete City as UNESCO City of Literature – about six pages of questions that needed thorough answers, which resulted to almost 40 pages of the final bid. I was actually set to enjoy Founders Day in Silliman University when then DTI Negros Oriental Director Nimfa Marcos Virtucio and Anton Gabila invited me and Renz for "a cup of coffee" in Adorno Galeria y Cafe. Akala ko coffee lang, turned out they were keen on submitting Dumaguete for the distinction and was roping me in to help them. Of course I said yes. But I only had about one week to put together the pre-bid, because the deadline was on August 31! Oh, the pain! But that week also made me realize: Dumaguete actually could do this, we had everything [except, ehem, publishing houses and translation projects]. We were able to submit the pre-bid to UNACOM on time.
And then I forgot all about it, until UNACOM contacted us sometime in November 2024 to inform us that we were on their final list of recommendees to UNESCO, alongside Quezon City for Film! That galvanized us to do the final bid from December 2024 to March 2025, again fretting over the final questionnaire and other things to do.
Together with then Dumaguete City Tourism Officer Katherine Aguilar, we formed a think tank of about 20 people, to make the bid truly community- and sector-driven. I sacrificed finishing several of my books slated for publication this year just to finish this bid. The sleepless nights were abominable. The anxiety was formidable, I went back to taking Ritalin after being off-meds for two years. We submitted before the midnight of March 1, the deadline. [We never were able to do the planned video documentary to supplement our bid. There was just no time.] I always thought I could have done more, especially for our website – so I was just hoping the bid itself would suffice for the judges.
But, truth to tell, I was prepared to receive bad news. I dreaded the coming of October 31. Please forgive me if I cried Friday night. It was my body heaving a sigh of relief.Labels: city of literature, dumaguete, dumaguete writers workshop, life, philippine literature, silliman, UNESCO, writers, writing
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Thursday, October 02, 2025
9:00 AM |
Tropical Comforts and Watercolor Serenity
I did not get to see Gretchen Villanueva-Heras’ new solo exhibition, Tropical State of Mind, when it opened at The Gallery by Pinspired at The Henry Resort last August 23—which feels like forever. The show has since been extended to October 14, which speaks volumes about its popularity. Indeed, when I finally made time to see the exhibition for myself, most of the works have been marked “reserved”—the good news of buyers waiting in the wings.
I liked it. I think the show showcases Gretchen’s delicate watercolor works with the unmistakable intimacy of someone who paints not to impress but to remember. [Point of disclosure: Gretchen is a former student.] Also known by her moniker “GretchensWater,” I know her to be a self-taught artist from Bais City whose previous works have seemed to me to be shaped by memory, place, and personal history. In this new collection, she definitely draws inspiration from her coastal hometown and the tropics that surround her. I like, above all their clarity, and simplicity: there is no grandstanding in this show, no forced irony, no attempts at avant-garde shock. Instead, what we have is a clearness of vision steeped in the ordinary, but translated into light, into color, and into tenderness.
In this sense, Gretchen’s work has to be read as something deeply personal. You can also sense in her brushstrokes the shadow of her artist father’s craftsmanship. You can also sense her nostalgia of growing up in a house where hands built things meant to last. You can sense that there is a deep affection for heritage and family woven into her compositions, which is why each painting feels like a page from a watercolor diary. Clearly influenced by her own fascination with the past, Gretchen’s works are not just depictions of flora and provincial landscapes but fragments of storytelling—they are memories folded into botanical patterns and sunlit textures.
There is a quiet lushness in these watercolors, a sense of calm that feels almost radical in an age addicted to speed and spectacle. The series—botanical vignettes, glimpses of familiar roads, curated moments of tropical life—wears its heart on its sleeve. They do not shout. They do not demand. They invite. And in that invitation, they allow us to remember what it means to breathe.
What strikes me first is the brushwork. Watercolor is a famously unforgiving medium; one careless stroke and the whole composition buckles into mud. Yet here we see restraint: the veins of banana leaves rendered with precision, the glisten of palm fronds caught mid-sway, the woven fibers of a solihiya chair articulated with tenderness. The artist gives us details that never overwhelm but always anchor, as if to say: the tropics are not chaos, they are order disguised as abundance.
The subject matter might tempt dismissal by some as “hotel art”—those safe, decorative canvases designed to be pleasant backdrops in lobbies and conference rooms, scrubbed clean of specificity. But to call these works as such would be to misread their intention. What we have here is not mere décor, but comfort art—and there is a difference. Hotel art is soulless, a manufactured neutrality. Comfort art, for me, is art that chooses warmth over confrontation, solace over provocation. It acknowledges the necessity of beauty in a world already heavy with fracture.
Consider the piece with the empty chair nestled among heliconias and monstera. It is not just a chair—it is a longing. Someone has just left, or someone is about to arrive. It suggests presence through absence, memory through arrangement. Or the piece of sugarcane trucks lined up on a highway beneath a row of palms: it’s not just a rural roadscape, but a meditation on rhythm and patience, on the pulse of provincial life. These are images that comfort not because they are shallow, but because they are deeply familiar.
There is also something quietly radical about insisting on tropical beauty as subject matter. For too long, the tropics have been exoticized from the outside, or dismissed from within as mere backdrop. Here, the artist reclaims it as central. The leaves, the plants, the cane fields—they are not supporting cast, but protagonists. In an art world that often insists on rupture and dissonance as markers of seriousness, it is refreshing to see someone insist that serenity is just as valid a pursuit.
And this is where Gretchen’s work finds its place within Dumaguete’s art scene. Dumaguete has long been a haven for artists, writers, and performers, but it often leans toward the cerebral and the literary, where provocation is prized and irony is the order of the day. In the visual arts, too, there has been a surge of experimental and conceptual work—installations, mixed media, even performance-based pieces—that speak to the intellectual ferment of the city. Against that backdrop, Gretchen’s watercolors—like that of her comrade in art, Kat Banay—may seem modest, but their modesty is precisely their power.
Her paintings remind us that Dumaguete’s art scene need not only be about breaking forms or pushing limits; it can also be about grounding ourselves in the pleasures of the familiar. In a city by the sea, lined with acacia trees and shadowed by mountains, Gretchen gives us a mirror of the place we already inhabit but often forget to see. Her art is both a celebration and a preservation of the tropical sensibility that marks life in Negros Oriental.
True, the paintings are not ironic. They are not self-consciously clever. But they are sincere, and that sincerity might be the boldest thing about them. They remind us that sometimes the truest art is not the art that unsettles, but the art that steadies. And in their tropical state of mind, these watercolors give us the most necessary of gifts: a space to sit, to look, and to feel at home.
Labels: art, art and culture, dumaguete, friends, negros, painting
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, September 28, 2025
9:00 AM |
The Worst People in the World, Winning
Let’s just say so many interesting things happened to me this week—for example, an opinion piece from this very space going viral and stirring talks in high places [as well as low].
But one other thing that happened, of which I have no interest at all in elaborating, both disturbed and amused me—because it reeked so much of privilege, arrogance, and unprovoked show of toxicity. In the end, it just was not worth being troubled about.
One thing that slightly disturbed me, though, was the avalanche of responses to that thing that were essentially approving high-fives to the instigator. Some were by people I knew. And it got me thinking: people like to be thought of as “good people”—so how come they cannot recognize when something definitely “not good” unfolds in front of their faces?
Then again:
Why are there Hitler apologists?
Why did people vote Marcoleta into the Senate?
Why are there Vico Sotto bashers?
Why did someone like Leni—who proved herself capable of fantastic governance one thousand times over, and is now proving that again as mayor of Naga City—lose in the last presidential election?
How did a white supremacist move so many so-called Christians to swooning adoration?
Why are there Elon Musk diehards?
Why are people attracted to bad people? And why do these people often win?
I mean, come on, they win. Some may be in hot water now, given the corruption scandals exploding everywhere, but they are crying from being cancelled from the posh confines of their mansions, their garages still bursting with luxury cars, their safes still bursting with ill-gotten money. And the inconveniences they are feeling right now are totally of another variety. Heart Evangelista, for example, bemoans missing Fashion Week (!!!) in New York, London, Milan, and Paris, on account of her politician husband Chiz Escudero being under scrutiny for allegedly coddling contractors. “I’m sorry to my fans that I’m not going to fashion week,” she wrote in her Instagram. “I know that you guys say laban—I really appreciate you but honestly, I don’t think it’s the right time for anyone, especially from our country, to be going to fashion week because I think we need to be here.”
Lahi ra jud.
Let’s be honest. Most of the wealthy in the world have gotten where they are either by connection, or inherited wealth and privilege, or illegal maneuverings, and most of them have kept their wealth because they are inured to the one fact about capitalism that makes the system work: for one to earn profit, there must be exploitation.
It’s never really about hard work, although that’s the Horatio Alger myth we have been taught to believe. I know so many poor people who work harder than most, but they’re still poor—but I really don’t want this essay to be a lecture on Marxism.
I’ve made my peace about money years ago. With the kind of purpose I have built for myself—and I am, after all, a “mere” teacher and writer who is poor [somebody’s words]—I know I will never be rich. Unless I win the lotto. I’m not even compensated well for the talent [and hard work] I bring to projects! But I know that sometimes there are “opportunities” offered to you, especially if you are not rich, that will ask you to bend your sense of morality and succumb—because the temptation is just too immense, and it can happen to the best of people.
You run for public office on a platform of good governance—and then the temptation comes from political forces around you that’s difficult to shake off. You enter a certain government agency hoping to become a good civil servant—and then on your first week at work, you find an envelope of “balato” on your desk, your “share” of something-something after the big boss had taken their cut. You are a good engineer and you become entrepreneurial by forming a construction company—and then you realize that the only way to get contracts is to bend to the shenanigans of politicians. But, look, you get to have fancy, expensive cars in return!
We can recognize the beginning of such temptations as small “starting points” that become big. It will always start small. Just this once, probably they all say. I just need the money now. And then you do get the money and find out it comes with bigger and bigger perks. A nice motorcycle. Which becomes a nice car. Which becomes a nice house. Which becomes a nice series of vacations abroad. Which becomes an even nicer house. Which becomes a garage full of expensive cars. The temptation becomes endless, and for many of these people, they do feel like all these are deserved, like these good things are their due. Take note what Claudine Co, a privileged daughter of Zaldy Co, recently said: “Like hello? Wala kaming utang na loob sa mga Pilipino, okay? This is not from taxpayers’ money, the government literally paid us for the service that our business provided. Gets?” The disconnect, and the sense of privilege, is bewildering and maddening.
* * *
I’ve seen this kind of slow corruption happen to a good friend. A really nice guy. Was a scholarship student working through school. Entered government service, and was in a position to oversee public works—and soon he’s building a really nice and fancy house that’s obviously not commensurate to his pay grade. What happened?
This is why I have told my closest friends: “If ever you see that I’m about to be tempted to do something fishy in return for small glittering gains, tell me.”
But something has to be said about actual bad people, winning.
It’s 2016, and Uber is melting down in the United States. Travis Kalanick, its CEO, is being pushed out after years of brazen exploitation and abuse, but he walks away with billions, retreats into a Beverly Hills mansion, and still finds new ventures to toy with. It’s a familiar story: the bully, the narcissist, the liar—not only surviving, but thriving. One even became President of the United States!
And it’s not just in Silicon Valley. Here in the Philippines, the story takes on its own provincial flavors. You don’t have to look far. Politicians caught red-handed in corruption scandals, their hands literally in the cookie jar, are re-elected by landslide margins after a few months of “PR rehabilitation.” [Remember Bong Revilla doing that stupid dance in his successful campaign for the Senate, years after being ensnared in a corruption scandal?] Businessmen who exploit workers, pay starvation wages, and avoid taxes are celebrated on glossy magazine covers as “visionaries.” Religious leaders who fleece their flock in exchange for “miracles” become untouchable celebrities.
Meanwhile, the honest, the diligent, the quiet—burned out, broke, and invisible—continue to toil away, unseen.
If this feels backwards, it’s because it is. But it’s not random. There is a logic to it, a brutal one.
From childhood, Filipinos are taught the old catechism of virtue: be kind, play fair, respect elders, share. Sa kabutihan, may gantimpala. And, for a while, in the microcosm of the family, the barkada, or the barangay, this holds true. Do good, and you get good back. Altruism works in small groups where everyone knows everyone’s business, where reputations matter. But when we grow up and enter the larger systems—politics, corporations, institutions—that logic unfortunately unravels.
Our human instincts, you see, are built for intimacy, for small communities where wrongdoing is immediate and visible. For example, if you see a child on the streets of Manila being abused, you’d feel outrage and maybe even intervene. But when that same child becomes a statistic, tucked away in government reports about child labor in Zamboanga or sex trafficking in Angeles City, the outrage dissipates. Because unseen. The cruelty now hides behind bureaucracy, media spin, and our limited attention. Out of sight, out of mind. And because of this distance, we become numb. We buy the cheap clothes made in sweatshops, we watch the influencers paid for by the corrupt, we shrug at the news because it feels too overwhelming.
This dilution of moral clarity opens the stage for those who thrive in noise, spectacle, and manipulation. And we’ve had plenty of them: Imelda Marcos with her 3,000 pairs of shoes, Rodrigo Duterte with his bloody bravado, Manny Villar with his property empire built over graves of displacement. They understood something most of us don’t: that in the Philippines, as in the world, power does not reward virtue. It rewards cunning, ruthlessness, and an ability to command attention.
Niccolo Machiavelli saw this centuries ago in Italy, in a time where poisonings and back stabbings actually ruled politics. His lesson—better to be feared than loved—echoes still through Malacañang, through Congress, and even perhaps through our barangay halls. What harms you in small communities—narcissism, manipulation, ruthlessness—can actually reward you immensely in national politics or billion-peso businesses.
Psychologists today call the constellation of traits these people exhibit as the “dark triad”: Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. And don’t we know these types?
The Machiavellian trapo who kisses babies during campaigns but steals calamity funds in the aftermath of typhoons. The narcissistic influencer who treats every tragedy as a backdrop for self-promotion. The psychopathic warlord who orders killings without remorse and still wins a Senate seat. They manipulate, they deceive, they threaten, and—because they’re louder and bolder—they rise.
* * *
And yet, there’s a trick here. We only see the bad “winners,” not the countless failures. For every politician who spins historical revisionism into a political victory, there are dozens of corrupt scions of dynasties who crash and burn, their names forgotten except as cautionary tales whispered in our towns and cities. For every business leader who builds a retail empire, there are a hundred ambitious taipans whose malls rot half-finished along provincial highways. The failures don’t trend, however; only the “victories” do. And that is why we believe the worst people always win.
But remember, even among those who seem to triumph, their victories are actually brittle. Elizabeth Holmes, for example, had her Theranos dream implode. Here in the Philippines, think of Janet Napoles, once untouchable, now languishing in jail. Or Antonio Floirendo Sr., stripped of privilege and humiliated in scandal. Success built on lies creates blind spots. When you see people as pawns or prey, you don’t build resilience—you build delusions.
And there is a price: not just the collapse of reputation, but the corrosion of self. We call this guilt. It is the part of you that keeps you human. Without guilt, there is no compass, no correction. And when our bad deeds unencumbered by guilt comes crashing back, they drag shame and regret with them.
So yes, the system is rigged. The worst sometimes rise, the best often overlooked.
But this doesn’t mean the decent are doomed.
It means they must adapt.
The lesson is not to become ruthless, according to Mark Manson in a YouTube video essay, but to do these three things: first, to become strategically compassionate, to understand that empathy can overwhelm in a complex world, but compassion—clear-eyed, balanced—can sustain you.
Second, to let go of universal approval. Wanting everyone to like you is its own subtle narcissism, and in this country, where utang na loob and pakikisama often silence people, it’s downright dangerous. Sometimes you must risk being disliked, even vilified, just to do what is right. [Like being called “bayut” and being laughed at by 500+ people! That one amused me.]
And third, crucially, to learn to speak up. The Philippines is a nation where silence has too often been complicity—during martial law, during the drug war, during countless “pork barrel” scandals. To be quiet is to be erased. According to Manson, to speak, even if uncertain, is to be remembered.
The challenge for us is not to mimic the worst people but to learn what they get right about power: visibility, boldness, audacity. And then to wield those with integrity. Because in the long run, history may glamorize tyrants, but it also burns them down. What survives are not the narcissists and bullies, but the memory of those who dared to live with compassion, courage, and yes, a little bit of cunning.
Labels: dumaguete, moral rages, politics
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Friday, September 19, 2025
9:00 PM |
Salome, Agnes, and All the Anguish in the World
Over the past few weekends, those who love the Dumaguete theatre scene—and it has been quite a bountiful season so far—found themselves confronted with drama at its most essential: bare, unflinching, and alive with questions that cut to the bone.” To begin with, Artista Sillimaniana presented two plays over two weekends in succession, dubbed Double Take, with the conceit that their titles were not to be revealed in any of its publicity, inviting their potential audiences to trust the theatre artists with just the promise of great stories performed to their best expressions by some of Dumaguete’s mightiest thespians. I called it “secret theatre,” with the reveal of the titles only happening at the very start of each show. It was experiment, and by the time Double Take took its last bow last September 13, that experiment proved to be a grand success—the audiences growing with each performance, brought on by fantastic word of mouth.
But now that it’s over, we can reveal the titles in this review. First up was M/ark St. G/ermain’s F/reud’s L/ast S/ession, directed by Jaime del Mundo, and featuring Del Mundo himself as the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud opposite Nelsito Gomez as C.S. Lewis, the famous author behind The Chronicles of Narnia and other tomes which have become classics of Christian literature. Both came to Dumaguete from Manila under the modest billing of a live reading. But modest is the last word one would use to describe what unfolded on the Woodward Little Theatre stage in the first weekend of September. What we were given was theatre distilled to its most essential, its most dangerous, and its most rewarding: two actors, two chairs, a script, and the raw electricity of performance.
The absence of theatrical spectacle—no elaborate set, no special lights, almost no blocking—was never a lack. In fact, it heightened the evening I saw the play in, forcing the audience to lean in, to listen, to wrestle with the very same questions the play poses: belief or unbelief, faith or despair, the stubborn human spirit against the inevitability of death. Del Mundo’s Freud was masterful: here was the old man, frail and dying, yet still wielding wit like a scalpel, each phrase honed with the authority of a mind refusing to surrender. Gomez’s Lewis was a supple counterpoint, all luminous conviction and trembling vulnerability, his belief not naïve but hard-won, tender, and full of ache.
What followed was no mere dialogue but a duel, ideas clashing and dancing in equal measure. And yet, in the pauses, in the shared quiet, there bloomed an intimacy that was profoundly moving. In that intimate space, Dumaguete was gifted not spectacle, but essence: words made flesh, thought turned theatre, performance stripped to its soul—and it was glorious.
These are nights in local theatre when we can see that spectacle can be unnecessary, when the simplest act of reading becomes revelation. Such was the case with the second play of Double Take—J/ohn P/ielmeier’s A/gnes of G/od, again directed by Jaime del Mundo, this time orchestrating a trio of actresses who are rightfully considered as among the finest of three generations of Dumaguete theatre—Dessa Quesada-Palm as Dr. M/artha Livingstone, Belen Calingacion as Mother M/iriam Ruth, and Anna del Prado as Sister A/gnes. What unfolded that second weekend of September was theatre in its most concentrated, unflinching form: three women, three chairs, and a story that dared to wound and enlighten at the same time.
The brilliance of the live reading lay in how these actresses localized the story, rendering its conflicts of faith, truth, and madness into something that felt disturbingly intimate for Dumaguete audiences. Dessa’s Livingstone was a force of skepticism wrapped in vulnerability, her lines haunted by betrayals of faith. Belen’s Miriam Ruth was fierce and evasive, her contradictions dangerous in their evasions. And Anna’s Agnes was astonishing—innocence curdled into menace, her fragile voice laced with something monstrous.
The clash of these three women unfolded like a storm, all of them armed with questions about divinity, about sexuality, about truth colliding in a crucible of pain and wonder. The silence of the appreciative audience spoke volumes, broken only by applause in the end rising like benediction. I noticed that among the crowd I saw the evening in were seminarians from nearby St. Joseph, a reminder of how close this story cut to lived lives of faith in our city. They loved the play.
And then, that same second weekend of September, came Salome, this time at the Luce Auditorium.
Oscar Wilde’s curious one-act tragedy, presented by the Silliman University Culture and Arts Council and staged Andrew Alvarez in Benjie Kitay’s brilliant Bisaya translation, plunged us into blood and desire with startling intimacy. Performed in the round, the audience encircling the stage like conspirators, this Salome found its full flowering in the precise lighting design by Keith Delgado, in the sensual choreography by Fionabelle Marie Cabe, in the hypnotic music by Jules Steven Josol, in the delightfully decadent costuming by Josip Tumapa, and in the minimalist set design by Eazel Savellino. I mention these members of the creative team, because their contributions truly heightened a masterful rendering of the play—an astonishing feat by first-time director Alvarez.
What unfolded for us on the Luce stage was as inevitable as it was shocking, the fantastic unfolding really the result of beautiful performances. Jade Mary Cornelia embodied Salome with revelatory nuance—playful innocence transforming into terrifying obsession. In the way she lilts her voice, we get childish, almost innocent, petulance curdling into corrupted desire for Jokanaan [John the Baptist], the prophet who spurns her, and who pushes her to make her fateful demand for his head in exchange for her dance for King Herod. Surrounding Cornelia’s tour de force performance are three veteran Dumaguete stage actors—Hope Tinambacan, Onna Rhea Quizo, and Benjie Kitay [all senior mentors from Youth Advocates Through Theatre Arts]—who gave the staging a much-needed gravitas: Hope’s Jokanaan was a force thundering with sanctity; Onna’s Herodias was deliciously imperious, commanding disdain in every gesture, in every line reading; and Benjie’s Herod was a different marvel altogether—witty, clownish, sinister, fully inhabiting Wilde’s paradox of depravity laced with comedy. [He also got the best lines, perhaps owing to the fact that the entire play is his fantastic translation effort.] On the other hand, Fort Narciso’s Naraboth, a new face in Dumaguete theatre, lent a handsome and tragic yearning in the play, which completed the fin de siecle tableau.
For me, what makes this Salome astonishing is its “completeness,” embodied by the efforts of the cast and the creative team, the daring use of the arena stage, and the pulse of Wilde’s words rendered in our own tongue. It’s just a different beast, seeing this play rendered in beautiful Binisaya. [Gorgeous lines like, “Gigutom ko sa imong katahum; nangala ko sa imong lawas; og bisan ang bino ug mga mansanas, dili makapawala sa akong tinguha,” sent shivers down my spine.] It feels like a perfect production—confident, sensual, unsettling, and absolutely alive. Wilde’s play, Alvarez tells us in his director’s notes, is about victims of circumstance making choices that define their becoming. I get that. Also, on the Dumaguete stage, Salome becomes more than revival of a classic play: it is revelation of current tribulations, a mirror of modern obsession and its terrible costs.
Taken together, these three plays—F/reud’s Last Session, A/gnes of God, and Salome—for me formed a triptych of anguish and faith that Dumaguete audiences were so very privileged to witness. Each play in its own way wrestled with belief and despair: men circling questions of mortality with reasoned eloquence, women clawing through madness and doctrine toward fragile truths, and a young princess spiraling from innocence into monstrous obsession.
They were plays that confronted the fragility of conviction, the dangers of desire, and the necessity of doubt. Staged with minimal spectacle or with ritualistic grandeur, they shared one thing: an unrelenting interrogation of what it means to be human, to believe, and to suffer. Theatre in Dumaguete, in these productions, became a crucible, where anguish was not hidden but laid bare, and where faith, whether affirmed, denied, or corrupted, became the trembling heart of drama itself.
Labels: art and culture, city of literature, dumaguete, theater
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, September 07, 2025
9:00 AM |
The Art of Failing in Dumaguete
Just because you are a popular franchise does not immediately entail you will be successful in Dumaguete. This is a lesson many chains—restaurants and cafés included—trying to make headway into the curious Dumaguete market have failed to learn, sometimes spectacularly, like a plate of overcooked pasta sent back to the kitchen. Dumaguete is not a blank canvas awaiting corporate paint. It is, rather, a living ecosystem, a town with its own rhythms, rituals, and hunger. To ignore these is to serve up failure on a sizzling plate.
I have seen it again and again: shiny new franchises opening with fanfare—balloons, ribbon-cuttings, a social media blitz promising the capital’s taste now available “in the provinces.” They attract the first-week crowd [or the first three-month crowd], the curious, and the selfie-hungry. And then the lights dim, the tables thin out, and one day you pass by and notice the signage has been quietly taken down, as though the restaurant had ghosted the city. What happened? The answer is usually simple: they didn’t know Dumaguete.
Take, for instance, the ridiculous phenomenon of restaurants taking last orders at 8:45 PM. Eight forty-five! As though Dumaguete were a city of children tucked in by nine. “Sorry, we’re closed na, last orders at 8:45 PM,” the waitress at the newly-opened Bigby’s over at Filinvest Mall told us last Friday night, when we wandered in for a late dinner after watching a play. Fine, if that’s how you operate. Our recourse: Sans Rival in the same mall, which opens till late at night—and is, if you noticed, a Dumaguete brand.
This is Dumaguete—a town that dines out, or goes to cafés, at nine. Always at nine. I don’t know why that is the case, but at 9 PM, people always trickle in. I’ll be working at a café like Bo’s, and then at 9 PM sharp, I look up and I see people trickle in. [This was especially true in the pre-pandemic.] If Manila eats at six and Cebu at seven, Dumaguete is unapologetically nocturnal. This is why Why Not?, even if it has become frightfully expensive these days, will always be special in our Dumagueteño hearts—because it opens as late as 2 AM. This is why places like Café Estacion or Hemmingway are popular, because they close at midnight. The day here is long and slow, and no one is in a rush to eat dinner early. Students are still hanging out at cafés past eight, professors are only just stirring from naps, doctors and lawyers are closing up their clinics, and suddenly everyone decides they are hungry—at 9 PM. To close the kitchen before the town is even ready to eat is not just bad business, it is cultural malpractice.
Is this because most of these franchises have decision-makers who are not really Dumaguete-based? And thus unable to really fathom the way we have contoured our lives in this city?
You see this happen during Founders Day—which is really two weeks in late August when the city essentially explodes in a celebration that is all about Silliman University. The city does get very busy—but it is a busyness that should be read in a careful way, or else something you do will turn out to be a fiasco.
Let’s say you are a new restaurant trying to make a splash, so you schedule your big opening or your big promo or some ill-timed “wine night” right smack in the middle of Founders Day. Rookie mistake. Founders Day is Dumaguete’s Mardi Gras, its Coachella, its everything rolled into fifteen chaotic days of parades, alumni parties, high school reunions, art exhibits, food fairs, concerts, etc. Everyone is busy. Everyone already has an itinerary. Nobody has time for your corporate stunt, least of all at your restaurant. If you are not part of the Founders Day constellation—if you have not embedded yourself in the alumni circuit, the Hibalag booths, the local pub crawls—then you are invisible. You simply do not stage an event during Founders Day. You join Founders Day, or you wait until September.
This is why local knowledge is everything. This city has its seasons, its rhythms, its secret codes. You have to know when the cicadas scream at noon, when the pedicab drivers converge at the corner of Silliman Avenue or Miciano Drive, when the professors decamp to Café Mamia after department meetings, when the doctors sneak to Casablanca for after-hours gin. You cannot run Dumaguete from a Manila spreadsheet, or Manila blueprint, no matter how many “trend reports” you paid for. Management must be local. Hire people who live here, who breathe the air and know when it smells of rain, who understand that a brownout can shut down an entire day’s business [unless you have generators], that a funeral in one barangay can drain the traffic of customers for hours. Hire people who know who eats and spends where, and why.
Dumaguete is not just any city. It is a university town, a place of endless transience and permanence locked in dance. Students come and go, professors linger, retirees settle, tourists drift in and out. The lifeblood of the city is conversation, not consumption. People don’t just eat here to fill their bellies; they eat to talk, to linger, to stretch out an evening into midnight over plates of Manang Siony’s tocino or bowls of pochero.
And Dumaguete has a nose for authenticity: it can sniff out corporate calculation from a mile away. What endures here are the places that feel true. Jo’s Chicken Inato, born here, not imported. Sans Rival, a dynasty of silvanas, with a legacy as rich as its buttercream. Neva’s, growing from humble beginnings in Puerto Princesa into an institution of Dumaguete pizza and pasta nights. Lab-as, still the definition of Dumaguete seafood, and longtime definer of Dumaguete night outs—although its legendary Reggae Wednesday has definitely seen better days. Even the humble tempurahan carts at the Pantawan in the Rizal Boulevard command more loyalty than a thousand franchises combined, because they belong to the city, they smell of sea breeze and memory. [And locals know they’re not really “tempura,” either.” We just call it ”tempura,” just because. It’s a local thing.]
So when a franchise comes in with its rigid hours, its Manila-style promos, its tone-deaf events, Dumaguete shrugs. Or worse, Dumaguete resists. Because here, loyalty is earned by listening, not imposing. You cannot bully Dumaguete into your business model. You have to court it, woo it, seduce it with understanding.
Once upon a time, National Bookstore opened a branch at Portal West, and was an instant success. Then, a few short years later, it transferred to Robinsons in what many locals has since considered to be a lamebrained corporate move—thinking that mall traffic was better than organic traffic in the heart of Dumaguete. Now, that bookstore is gone.
Once upon a time, Chapters Café opened here and thought it get by with its Instagram aesthetics inspired by books—not knowing that Dumagueteños are notoriously picky with its food. The bland menu was a quick turn-off, and the city—home of Asia’s oldest creative writing workshop, and home of many legendary writers—fled from its inauthentic book theme. [Do you remember those books they made displays of in their walls? Terrible books. Books you could in bulk get from a warehouse sale.] Now, that cafe is gone and is unremembered.
We just went to a new restaurant fronted by Manila celebrities, by the way.
Yikes.
Plastic cups for drinks? Yikes.
Bad plating? Yikes.
Unmemorable food? Yikes. [This is the worst offense. In a city bursting at the seams with many restaurants, you cannot, simply cannot, be unmemorable with your food.]
But the lines are still long since it’s new.
I’ll give it a year.
The irony is that Dumaguete is generous. But only if you play by its rhythms. Given that, the city will reward you with loyalty that can span years. But first, you will have to surrender the arrogance of thinking your brand name is enough. It is not. Not here. Here, you must prove yourself at nine o’clock sharp, during Founders Day, with locals at the helm. Otherwise, you will be just another forgotten franchise sign gathering dust in the city’s short memory, replaced by the next curious experiment. And Dumaguete will go on, unbothered, still dining at nine, still laughing into the night over plates that taste of home.
Labels: culture, dumaguete, life
[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
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