Celebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop Sands and Coral, 2011-2013
Silliman University, 2013
It is not really a rare case when judges for a literary contest gather together to deliberate on the winners—and find out, to their delighted astonishment, that they practically share the same titles in their shortlists, give or take one or three. It is not a rarity, but it is always a welcome happenstance—because it makes the deliberation easier to accomplish, with no one fighting for stray entries that are nowhere to be found on each other’s lists, making the decision sometimes difficult. This was what happened when the judges for the 2025 Nick Joaquin Literary Awards—poet Marra PL Lanot, fictionist Susan S. Lara, and I—met online over Zoom last August 23. It took less than an hour to agree on the winning titles—covering stories and poems that appeared on Graphic Reader from February 2024 to January 2025—and we spent most of the time just doing chika. We were unanimous in our choices, and by the time this article would see print, these winners would have already been announced last August 28 in a ceremony held at Luxent Hotel in Quezon City.
The NJLA is the annual derby sponsored by Philippines Graphic Magazine, which seeks to award the best short stories and poems published in its monthly literary supplement, Graphic Reader. It is named after the great writer and National Artist for Literature who served as literary editor of the magazine for many years until his death in 2004. [As an aside, I am always happy to note that Nick Joaquin chose one of my stories for publication in the Graphic before he died—a particularly rambunctious piece about a hustler who gets flummoxed when he is “rented out” by a high schooler.] I’ve been shortlisted for the award a few times over the years, but only won the grand prize in 2023, for my story “Ceferina in Apartment 2B.” This year, I stepped in as judge, taking over the spot vacated by one of my writing idols, Butch Dalisay.
It was not an easy task reading and assessing 47 short stories of varying quality, as well as 50+ poems. I had about a month to read through the pile—which was a challenge, because I have somewhat become a “slower” reader recent years, perhaps owing to my ADHD. That meant though that I had to muster all my concentration for each story, and when a fantastic one came my way, my pleasure in the reading was double. There were stories about mysterious goings-on in the Cordilleras that verge on the supernatural; about the historical Enrique in the company of Magellan sailing towards fate in 1521; about serial murderers and serial daters; about good people trapped in the Battle of Manila in 1945; about trans children choosing names;, about ambitious boxers whose dreams get thwarted by the punishing realities of the sport; about commencement speakers embarking on nostalgia trips; about hapless people in love affairs; about storytellers contemplating the doomed love stories they’re penning.
In the end, from our combined shortlists of stories, we fell in love with “All Fall Down” by Menchu Aquino Sarmiento, a comedic comeuppance of the upwardly mobile in society; “Ashfall” by E. V. Rieza, which turns from funny ruminations of a local journalist covering a volcanic eruption to a serious consideration of the tragedy that lies in the end; “Palaspas” by Cesar Miguel Escaño, which is about a boating competition in Dumaguete, and deftly explores the vagaries of revenge, class disparities, and the flimsiness of luck; “Holiday Pay” by Rick Patriarca, which, in two segments, delves into the psyche of an ordinary, down-on-his luck office worker, who finds out that he has been bamboozled by a street vendor—and then shows up a year later with a strange idea for revenge; and finally, “Homecoming” by Joshua Berida—a story that feels epic in its examination of a man who runs away from what is expected of him back home in the Philippines, and tries to find himself in the snowy landscape of Siberia. That story’s minute description of rural life in the wilds of Russia is so maximalist in its breadth, but somehow manages to concentrate all of that into a lean story of loneliness and defiance. I was in awe reading this story. [Note: I have omitted titles that did not land on all our lists.]
These beautiful stories—surprise, surprise—were just our collective runners-up. Eventually, we chose three titles as our winners for the short story: “Dial D for Desire” by George Deoso, bagging first prize; “Angel of Light” by Menchu Aquino Sarmiento, second prize; and “The X-Ray Tech’s Love Story” by Paulino Lim Jr., third prize. These were the stories that haunted me for days on end, after reading them.
Lim’s story glimmers with the deceptive simplicity of two Filipino expats talking, but beneath the ordinary rhythms of conversation is a reservoir of memory, regret, and the weight of lives lived elsewhere. What begins as a casual exchange in a California hospital—two countrymen discovering kinship in shared language—gradually unfurls into a meditation on exile, lost loves, and deferred dreams.
What I love most is the story’s restraint. There is no melodrama here, no need for heightened conflict; instead, Lim allows nuance to do the heavy lifting. Each detail reverberates: the mention of a first love rejected at a rich family’s doorstep, the broken hearts left behind in the Philippines, the delicate balancing act of faith, marriage, and temptation in a new country. The betrayal of infidelity. These are the textures of diaspora, rendered with precision but also with deep compassion. The story ultimately lingers because it understands how loss accumulates quietly in the lives of migrants. The characters talk about jobs, about choir performances, about family routines, but in the spaces between their words, you hear the ache of what might have been. Andy’s roses, dumped into a trash can in youth and sent again decades later, become the story’s quiet emblem: a love story both aborted and rekindled, hopeful and tainted, impossible and unforgettable. And the language—clean, supple, unforced—carries all this with grace. Lim’s prose resists ornament, but each sentence hums with resonance, like a hymn sung under one’s breath. By the end, we realize this is not just Andy’s love story, but also the narrator’s, and perhaps our own: the universal story of what we leave behind, and how memory, in its stubborn persistence, never quite lets us go.
Sarmiento’s story, on the other hand, is truly diabolical—Susan Lara calls it “Jane Austen with an evil twist”—but above all, it is a marvel of character work, an unflinching portrait of privilege gone rancid, of beauty weaponized into cruelty. At its center is Eden Reyes Blanco, doctora, socialite, political wife, and eldest sister who treats her younger siblings as burdens rather than kin. From the first page, Sarmiento renders Eden with such precision—her vanity, her entitlement, her breathtaking lack of empathy—that the reader is both enthralled and appalled.
This is, at heart, a character study of corruption not in the sense of crime or scandal, but in the corrosion of spirit that entitlement produces. Eden is brilliant, accomplished, glamorous. But she is also monstrous: she cannot help but see her sisters not as family but as genetic embarrassments, obstacles to her polished narrative. The brilliance of the story is that it refuses to soften her, and refuses catharsis. There is no redemption arc here, only the relentless unfolding of a woman who has made herself untouchable, even in the face of her sisters’ suffering.
It is, admittedly, a very evil portrait, but therein lies its power. In Eden we see the distillation of a class and a culture that valorizes success while erasing compassion. The Fairview house becomes the story’s cruel pivot: a symbol of inheritance, obligation, and betrayal. Every exchange with her sisters drips with condescension, her veneer of charity little more than transactional cruelty. This is all rendered perfectly in Sarmiento’s cool, exact, surgical prose. There are no easy emotional payoffs, no melodrama, only the chilling recognition that some lives are hollowed out not by tragedy, but by triumph itself. “Angel of Light” dares to give us a protagonist too evil to be forgivable, and in doing so, exposes the banality of privilege at its most corrosive.
Then there is George Deoso’s story. A story I was so envious over, I wanted to be the one to have written it. Alas, George has—and as a former mentor of his at the Silliman University National Writers Workshop, I am so proud at how far he has come with his fiction.
“Dial D for Desire” is a story that thrums with urgency. From its very first scene, we are made to feel the tautness of a world where intimacy is rehearsed, packaged, and sold by the minute, where the borders between work and desire, performance and truth, blur into something at once exhilarating and devastating. At the center is Ruben Rivera, a towering presence who enters the training room at this BPO with the swagger of someone who knows how to command attention. He is brash, magnetic, and impossibly alive. But the story is told through the gaze of a weary male trainer, someone jaded by years of corporate scripts, who finds himself increasingly drawn to Ruben in ways he cannot entirely admit. This tension—erotic, unspoken, dangerous—gives the story its pulse.
It is that erotic charge I responded to the most. It is a story, after all, that is steeped in longing—and longing and heartbreak together has been my own fiction’s province for some time now. Every page in Deoso’s story feels haunted by the ache of unsaid things, by the quiet devastations of queer desire under fluorescent light. The narrator finds himself tethered to Ruben in all his posturing, menace, and tenderness. The story reads like a confession written against the grain of routine. Calls, scripts, metrics … they all dissolve whenever Ruben enters the frame. What remains is the impossible tension of attraction denied its expression, of intimacy glimpsed but never held. Deoso captures that precarious state with a voice both restrained and trembling, the way grief disguises itself in professionalism until it bursts through.
But it is also more than a queer story; it is a searing document of BPO life in the Philippines, where labor and intimacy are commodified in equal measure. The story places us in the world of Phone Love, an outsourcing account that feels very much like a phone-sex enterprise, where agents are required to sell not just time but fantasy, where one’s voice becomes a product line, and where bodies become extensions of the corporate machine. Ruben is presented as a call center veteran whose skill at “selling himself” is both survival strategy and trap. We witness how in him charisma is easily turned into capital, and even how queerness is both marketable and punishable. The brilliance of Deoso’s narrative lies in its ability to show the dissonance between corporate celebration—Ruben as “top performer”—and the lived precarity of workers whose safety, dignity, and very lives remain expendable. But the story refuses to flatten BPO life into neon glamour or economic miracle. Instead, it exposes the psychic violence beneath the headset: the exhaustion of repetition, the erosion of boundaries, the exploitation hidden beneath statistics. When Ruben becomes the target of a violent client’s whims, the company’s response is chilling in its apathy. Profit outweighs protection; labor is nothing more than replaceable flesh. Of course, it ends in tragedy.
Infidelity. A woman’s monstrous lack of empathy. BPO life in a murderous grind. I’m glad that we chose these stories, even if they invite an examination into the darkness of the Filipino soul, our soul. I call these tandem our “winning darkness.” Sometimes, the dark stories are the narratives that best provide the mirror of who we are as a society. They resonated so fiercely, and they stayed with me, mostly because of the painful truths they tried distilling in their dramas.
From these dark tales, we jump to the poetry—and the common titles in our shortlists all vied, with equal vigor, to be the one poem, or suite of poems, that would land its author the distinction of being Poet of the Year. “Bound by the Same Umbilical Cord” by Jim Pascual Agustin. “Four Poems for 2024” by F. Jordan Carnice, who has won the Poet of the Year prize two years in a row. “Parallel Poems, Like Parallel Lines, Don’t Meet” by Cesar Ruiz Aquino. “Consequences, 3 Poems” by Karina Africa Bolasco. “Indignation as Elegy” by Ralph Semino Galán. “A Prayer for Leni Robredo” by Simeon Dumdum Jr. And finally, “Arranging Furniture at Midnight” by Totel V. de Jesus—which we loved partly because it has cats in it. [Susan and I are cat lovers.]
We eventually chose Joel Toledo as Poet of the Year, with his poem, “Saint-Paul de Mausole Sonnet.” It is a brief but incandescent act of ekphrasis, a poem that remakes Van Gogh’s The Starry Night in language that is at once tender and restless. Beginning with “one crude sketch,” Toledo traces the painter’s fevered transformation of smudge into cosmos, of turbulence into brilliance. What emerges is not a fixed tribute but a moving meditation on the impossibility of stillness—skies become oceans, spires levitate, galaxies sear into being. Addressing the poem itself as “dear sonnet,” Toledo reminds us that art is both sanctuary and struggle, a fragile “nightlight forever” wrested from suffering. It is a plea against silence, a recognition of the unquiet labor that turns pain into radiance. With precision and lyric restraint, Toledo captures Van Gogh’s urgency: nowhere are the hands not moving, and nowhere is the world more alive than in their untethered strokes.
Encountering all these worlds and words in poetry and prose was such a heady experience for me as judge. I love that the NJLA opened my eyes to the kinds of poetry and fiction, at least in English, that is being produced and published these days. I love that in the final conclusion, Philippine literature feels very much alive—and the best of them are still being adequately rewarded, especially in a time when literary creativity is being challenged everywhere.
The judges deliberating over Zoom with Graphic editor Psyche Mendoza as host
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.
Some time ago, it was Rory Gilmore. For the past three years or so, it has been Carrie Bradshaw. The cycle goes on, and there are fresh targets now and then being pilloried in the dark recessed of TikTok, X, and YouTube: Meredith Grey, or Olivia Pope, or—let’s be honest—any woman in fiction who dared to be messy, to be layered, to be human.
I think we have reached the era of the Digital Inquisition, where every fictional woman is put on trial, their sins collected like receipts and tallied on social media, their worthiness as characters weighed against an impossible moral scale.
Exhibit A: Rory slept with a married man.
Exhibit B: Carrie was selfish and inconsiderate to her friends.
And on and on.
The tone is always gleeful, smug, as though someone has finally solved the puzzle of why this character is problematic—and therefore must be thrown into the pit.
What is this need to reduce women characters to lists of their failures, stripped of context and complexity? It’s like watching someone read Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and saying, “Well, she shouldn’t have had an affair then.” You’d be laughed out of any serious literature class. And yet this same behavior is considered incisive cultural criticism on the internet.
I’ve seen this happen over and over again, and it feels eerily familiar. It’s not that different from the small-town tsismis we all know: the kind of gossip that isn’t content with shades of grey but demands black and white, saints and sinners. That neighbor who used to be so polite? Oh, didn’t you hear? She once left her child alone in the car for five minutes to run into Mercury Drug. Terrible mother. Cancelled. This is the same energy, just with a glossier filter and a wider audience.
I often wonder what we want when we consume fiction these days. We say we want complex characters—flawed, human, real—but the moment they exhibit the very messiness that makes them interesting, we slap a label on them and throw them away.
“Toxic.”
“Narcissist.”
“Red flag.”
Words that once had precise meanings now just serve as aesthetic judgments in character assassination posts.
And I can’t help but notice that this happens disproportionately to women characters. When Walter White spirals into murder and meth and monstrosity, we call him a tragic antihero. When Don Draper sleeps his way through Manhattan with the emotional intelligence of a bar of soap, we study him. We analyze. We marvel at the storytelling. But when Carrie Bradshaw does something dumb—like, say, leave Aidan for Mr. Big—we call her irredeemable. Not misguided. Not emotionally stunted. Just irredeemable.
What is that if not misogyny dressed up as media literacy?
There’s an emptiness in this impulse. A refusal to sit with discomfort. Maybe we’re so used to curating perfection online—every tweet polished, every selfie filtered—that we can no longer tolerate messiness in others, even fictional ones. It’s a kind of hyper-morality that isn’t interested in redemption, or growth, or contradiction. It just wants to assign blame and move on. Like a moral accountant tallying sins in a spreadsheet.
But where’s the pleasure in perfection?
Honestly, what is the point of watching a character who does everything right? Who never slips up, never makes a bad decision, never says something selfish, never hurts someone by accident or on purpose? That’s not a character. That’s a cardboard cutout in a Sunday School pamphlet.
Real stories live in the mess. In the contradictions. In the quiet failures and loud mistakes. In the long arc of someone who doesn’t get it right the first time, or even the fifth. This is where we see ourselves. Because let’s be honest: no one on this planet fits the checklist of moral purity. You? Me? That girl from Gen Z with the infographic on “Why Rory Gilmore is Actually a Monster”? None of us. And yet we demand from our fiction what we cannot live up to in our own lives.
I think often about what it means to be a reader, a viewer, an audience in this moment. And maybe it means learning to sit with the uncomfortable. To look at Carrie Bradshaw and say, “God, she’s insufferable,” but also, “Wow, she’s real.” To recognize in Rory Gilmore the fragile dreams of girlhood curdling into something selfish and still feel a pang of heartbreak, not righteousness.
Stories are meant to disturb us sometimes. Characters are meant to disappoint us. That’s the contract. That’s what makes them stay with us long after the screen fades to black or the book closes.
So no, I will not hate these characters because a Twitter thread told me to. I will not participate in this flattening of fiction into a moral binary where we root for saints and burn the rest. I will, instead, keep loving the difficult women [and men] of the screen and page, because they are reflections of our most human selves.
And if that makes me a bad feminist, then so be it. At least I still know how to read.
Things take time. Just came from my fiction workshop, where we tackled the second draft of their first short story required in class. Call me satisfied! Admittedly, my rhythm for teaching workshop was kinda off when I came back to teaching last year, because I had to relearn everything again, especially the process, after three pandemic years of not doing it. But it does come back, slowly. Today I’m satisfied.
I finally received my copy of Isagani R. Cruz's new novel, So Heaven! Thank you, Milflores Publishing [ IG: @milfloresbooks ]! I was asked to give this a blurb, and I don't know how I found the time to read this, but I did, if not because going over the first novel by an acclaimed Filipino writer was such a privilege. And this is such an unusual novel, too! Congratulations, Sir Gani!
12:00 PM |
Notes on the Writing of 'You Don't Love Me Anymore'
In 2009, the writer Lilledeshan Bose invited me along with other writers to transform some of her dad’s talisman drawings into literary pieces. The great Baguio artist Santiago Bose had died a few years back, in 2002, and Lille wanted to put up an exhibit of his works (along with their literary interpretations) in something she called Confessions of a Talisman.
That’s when I began writing “You Don’t Love Me Anymore.” I was only able to send her an excerpt, because I couldn’t quite finish the story. I felt that it was going to be the story of a husband and wife who have slowly fallen out of love for each other, with the burning of the husband's anting-anting by the wife becoming the ultimate schism in that relationship.
I based it on my memory of my parents. My father once abandoned us when I was a tween, but came back after a few years to live with us again — with an anting-anting in his wallet that he picked up from some adventure in Manila. [He swore by its powers.] This freaked out my mother, who was fervently Born Again, and I remember her taking the anting-anting from him and burning it, and shouting all manner of “In Jesus’ name!” while doing so. That whole scene is embedded in my memory. I wanted to make that the basis for my story — and this may be why it took me such a long time to finish. I didn’t want it to be too autobiographical.
Year after year, I would come back to the story, writing a paragraph here, another paragraph there. One year, I decided to set it in Malaybalay, Bukidnon for some reason. A few years later, the husband became a writer, and the wife a maker of longganisa. A few more years later, he wasn’t just a writer, he was a writer of balak [or Binisaya poetry]. The story built on like that. And now it’s finished.
The illustration below is the original Santiago Bose art Lille gave me. This story will be one of four new stories to be included in the reissue of Beautiful Accidents to be published by the University of the Philippines Press in 2025. Obviously, I’m still working on the new edition.
It’s like Luca Guadagnino saw the ending of Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También (2002) and said, “I’ll take that further.” He knew what exactly he was doing in this Challengers (2024). You can feel every inch of his queer intentions in every frame, in every twist, in every horny look the characters give each other. This is the horniest movie of the year, and should do for tennis what Calvin Klein did for for jeans.
Challengers is the same kind of fever dream that made me write “Pete Sampras’s Neck” back in the day. Tennis is sexy. Tennis is gay.
4:45 PM |
Don't Follow Me, I Don't Even Know Where I'm Going
My short story “Don’t Follow Me, I Don't Even Know Where I’m Going” [Second Prize for the Short Story in English, Palanca Awards 2023] is finally out on Philippines Graphic Reader! It’s available on Shopee at this link.
10:22 PM |
Everything Taken Together Has the Weight of Heaven
My story is now online! [Click here.] What do you do when you regret the things you have given up in the name of love? [But not exactly how you think this will go.]
They were at the funeral, the gargoyles: these blistering bores who thought themselves so highly as society women in a city without a social calendar. They’re just mostly old and rich and bored, or at least were once rich — some had been stealthily selling off property piecemeal to keep up with appearances they could barely afford, the dreck of third generation of landed family without an ounce of an idea how to make a living, the heydays of their sugar wealth already decades behind. [The rest of them were athletes in the social game of climbing ladders.] There’s Katrina, whose claim to fame was having a gay father, now long dead, who did pageants for the city. There’s Melissa, whose family owns the biggest grocery store in town — and whose pink plastic shopping bags constitute the very colors of our overloaded landfills. There’s Minette, a secretary for a government official who feels that the light of power she basks in was hers. There’s Monina, whose English is as atrocious as rotten balut, and whose salvation was marrying a moneyed white man. Then there’s Greggyboy, a predatory gay man who calls himself a historian but whose laughable articles are littered with grammatical errors and stolen research, and makes much of the fact that he was [the poor] relation to many of the rich clans in town. I could pretend it was a bit sad to see them preen themselves like important birds outside the funeral home, but I snickered instead. They were a hive of noise, the chatter of gossip their shield, inflected sometimes by a phrase or two in bad Spanish. It was hilarious. But a friend was dead, a confirmed bachelor who had been their figurehead in that club they kept while pretending they did local culture and the arts proud in our small city, as if it was charity that needed their choking attention. That man was kind and nice and talented, and I could not see how he could be friends with these monstresses. Now all that was left of him was this urn of ashes, and maybe that was grace — perfect exit from a life in the company of gargoyles.
3:00 PM |
The Nick Joaquin Literary Awards is Back!
I'm really glad that the Nick Joaquin Literary Awards is back! [Read here.] I'm grateful to be in the company of all these fantastic writers who are listed for the prize, and also happy that Graphics decided to spin off the Reader as the complimentary publication devoted to our literary works. The NJLA returns on May 4th, and also promises the publication of The Philippines Graphic Reader Book I, which will feature the 48 short stories and 48 poems that the literary magazine has published from February 2022 to January 2023. Thank you to literary editor Marra Lanot for including my story, and for her devoted attention to publishing all our works!
By the time you are reading this in the weekend paper—probably on a Palm Sunday afternoon at the tail end of the second year of the pandemic—I would most likely be at Dakong Balay Gallery along Rizal Avenue tending to social anxiety brought about by a book.
It is not just any book.
I’ve authored this one, the fourteenth title in my so-so career as a literary artist, but it is my first children’s book that’s actually being published in a major way.
It’s titled The Great Little Hunter, published in a deluxe edition by Pinspired Philippines—hardbound with gorgeous illustrations—purposefully on a limited printing run: a combination of a children’s book and an art book. And I’m proud of it. The way one becomes proud of something finally made tangible after dreaming about it for so long. It took almost four years for this book to come to being, and when I think of all that time passing, I marvel at the intricate ways with which things come into being. They don’t always coalesce, despite the best of efforts, so when they do, you marvel.
I’ve written other children’s stories before. In 2006, my children’s book Rosario’s Stories was an honorable mention finalist at the PBBY-Salanga Writer’s Prize—the country’s top award for children’s literature—in a year when no one copped the actual prize. The great artist Jomike Tejido actually had illustrations ready-made for that book, but I didn’t submit it anywhere for publication. Not then. I told myself I was not ready.
In 2007, another children’s story, The Last Days of Magic, won a prize at the Palanca Awards—and this story would have tremendous legs, quickly becoming a staple in grade school textbooks in Philippine schools, and would actually be translated to Vietnamese by the wonderful writer Nguyen Phan Que Mai in 2017. She would later include it in her 2018 anthology Bay Lên (Taking Flight), together with stories by Junot Diaz, Margaret Atwood, Bina Shah, and others. This story never came out as a standalone children’s book, however—although I included it in my collection Heartbreak and Magic, which came out in 2012. It is probably my most popular children’s story.
In 2018, I tried shopping around a personal anthology of unpublished children’s stories to one or two of the major children’s book publishers in the country. I was told by one publisher they were not taking in such a format, especially for a manuscript written in English. Apparently the market leaned heavily towards those written in Tagalog—but then, a month or so later, that same publisher put out exactly the same kind of book, written in English, by another writer. What does one do? I shrugged and took that as pure publishing disinterest. You win some, you lose some. Such is a writer’s life.
So I privately published that personal anthology myself, which I titled The Boy, The Girl, The Rabbit, The Rat, and the Last Magic Days, in a very limited run—which quickly sold out. I never got around to doing a second printing run. It exhausted me.
It’s not easy to write for children [not even teenagers], but there is something about the genre that appeals to me in a masochistic way. It has set parameters in terms of language and vocabulary, word count, and appeal—and demands a very different way of telling a story, mindful that the intended audience is composed of children, but also mindful that it is never a good idea to underestimate this audience’s comprehension and sophistication. I continue to write children’s stories as an intricate challenge of particular storytelling. I am not alone in this regard. Some of my favorite children’s authors—the great Maurice Sendak, for instance—have the same mindset.
It was around that time—the summer of 2018, to be exact—when I started writing a short children’s story meant to be a picture book. I was teaching a workshop in writing children’s stories, and I wanted a chance to get away from my students’ efforts and put out something of my own. I also wanted to join an international contest—but writing the story I wanted to tell felt paramount.
I wanted it to be about a boy confronting his fears, and becoming triumphant in the end. That is the hope, isn’t it? To prevail versus the darkness?
But I’ve never done a picture book story before, which has its own very specific demands—mostly word count, and almost haiku-like in narrative brevity. How does one tell a satisfying narrative arc in less than 500 words? I’m notoriously a wordy writer, but I’m also notoriously a masochist when it comes to literary challenges. I often like writing in a mode I am most uncomfortable with; it stretches my writing muscles.
I spent three consecutive days in a café, drinking my usual latte and crafting the tale of Ngayam. It became The Great Little Hunter, a story of a boy whose fearful fantasies triggered by the moon conjure a dark jungle in his bedroom, and he soon encounters some of Philippine lower mythology’s dreadful monsters—a wak-wak, a sigbin, and a tikbalang. Shades of Sendak here, but transplanted in the texture of local culture, of personal struggles.
The story done, I knew I wanted an illustrator who best understood me and what went on in the recesses of my imagination. There was no other artist to tap except Hersley-Ven Casero.
Hersley and I go a long way back. I first knew of him sometime in the mid-2000s when MetroPost presented me with a Christmas gift: a pencil portrait of myself drawn by him. [But I thought “Hersley” was a girl’s name.] I loved the portrait, sought out the artist—who turned out to be a wunderkind based in Foundation University. He was prolific, churning out art and photography with the energy of a creative virtuoso. It was not long before I took up the challenge of curating an exhibit of his photography, together with that of John Stevenson’s, at the Silliman Library Gallery—in a 2008 show [Dumaguete Light and Dark] that compared and contrasted various views of the city both in vibrant color [Hersley’s] and in somber black-and-white [John’s]. That exhibit cemented a long-term relationship of artistic collaborations—and I’m proud to say that I am perhaps the one art critic constant in my championing of his work over the years.
In 2011, for the release of my second major fiction collection, Heartbreak and Magic, published by Anvil—I tapped Hersley to do the illustrations that heralded every story in the book. The works he submitted were astonishing, and so when it came to launching the book in Dumaguete, I broached the idea of doing both a book launch and an art exhibit, showcasing not just the illustrations Hersley made for the book but also gathering together all the art pieces and paintings he had made by then, which I curated. The resulting show, Uncommon Ordinary Magic, would also mark a turning point in Hersley’s artistic career: it was to be his first solo exhibition as an artist.
In the summer of 2018, after I extended to him my invitation to come on board as the illustrator for The Great Little Hunter, Hersley—who was already busy doing many commissioned work and preparing for various exhibitions—became possessed by the story, at least according to what he later told me. Ngayam possessed his imagination, and so, in a stretch of several consecutive days and nights [almost going sleepless], he set about putting the world of Ngayam’s fantasies on canvas.
The resulting seventeen paintings were [and are] exquisite. Each canvas, embued in rich shades of color, told separate segments of Ngayam’s story. But taking the inspiration [and form] of an unfolding tale, each canvas he made also became pieces of an interconnected visual narrative, each picture spilling into the next with almost magical continuity. The paintings taken together become like a scroll from beginning to the end, and even the last canvas connects in an organic way to the first, making an infinite loop of a magical story. I was enamored by what Hersley had done.
But everything remained in a standstill for two years after. Only in March 2021, right smack in the middle of the pandemic, did things start to move again. The principle reason for things being set in motion once more was the entry of Evgeniya Spiridonova—Jane to friends—into our lives. Having made Dumaguete home all the way from Russia, she—together with husband Max Vasiliev—have created a small but thriving empire devoted to all things imaginative and creative in Dumaguete. They have an escape room and a VR gaming salon with Outpost031, and they have a postcard, stationery, and art shop with Pinspired Philippines. Their first venture into local publishing was putting out a book of Hersley’s street photography titled All in Good Time, which was wildly successful, inviting several print runs. Jane saw our manuscript, and signed on as publisher right then and there.
It was good to have someone captain this ship, especially in fraught times. I had to deal with my mental health in the ensuing months, and having Jane on top of things made me feel safe, as I found myself unable to deal with the nitty-gritties involved. I am extremely thankful to my partner Renz Torres for acting as my agent [and my working brain and sanity] throughout the entire process of publishing this book. And I am sure that Hersley is equally thankful to his wife, the filmmaker Toulla Mavromati. In that regard then, The Great Little Hunter has been a labor of love, in all sense of that word.
What lesson can we—especially me—take from Ngayam’s tale? That it is okay to venture out into the despairing dark and confront what you fear. Your triumph however is in befriending those very monsters, acknowledging them as being part of who you are. I take this as my pandemic story, as my mental health struggle story, as my coming-of-age story.
I do hope you get a copy of this book. It should be available at the Pinspired shop at Dakong Balay along Rizal Avenue, or online at pinspired.ph. This story has been a gift to me and to Hersley, and I hope it will mean the same to everyone who will read it and marvel at the pictures.
The book and art launch of The Great Little Hunter is slated on 10 April 2022, Sunday at 3 PM at the Dakong Balay Gallery, Rizal Avenue. The exhibit will run until April 24. The book, which comes with an assortment of freebies, is available atPinspired.ph.
If you haven’t already, you can read my new speculative fiction piece set in Hinirang, “The Cataloguer of Deceit,” on Strange Horizons! Read the story here.
Hinirang is a shared fantasy world created by Dean Francis Alfar, and many other writers — including Nikki Alfar, Kate Osias, Alexander M. Osias, Andrew Drilon, Vincent Michael Simbulan, Gabriela Lee, and Mavi Cruz — have helped people and chart this world, which is a fantastical, semi-Hispanic version of the Philippines.
Two of them [Dean’s “The Kite of Stars” and my own “The Sugilanon of Epefania's Heartbreak”] have gone on to be successfully adapted to Virgin Labfest plays.
[We’re also working on an anthology — so watch out for that soon!]
1:05 PM |
The Cataloguer of Deceit on Strange Horizons
Aaaaand IT’S FINALLY OUT! My new speculative fiction piece set in Hinirang, “The Cataloguer of Deceit,” is finally out on Strange Horizons! The magazine is one of the best and most sought-after sites for speculative fiction out there, and so hard to get into. I was jumping for joy and out of astonishment when they accepted my story last year!
I wanted to make my first purchase at Ikaduhang Andana -- the new bookstore in Dumaguete -- memorable last Saturday, so I bought my best friend's second novel. You can visit the bookstore at the Solon compound behind the new SUMC building where the new Coffee Collective is also located.
Here are two of my stories getting the theatrical treatment, and COMING SOON. Catch May Cardoso's adaptation of "The Sugilanon of Epefania's Heartbreak" on August 29 over at Relive Your Passion PH, and my own adaptation of my children's story "The Story of Dumpawa’s Lullaby" based on The Folk Songs of the Visayas by Priscilla Magdamo and a Manobo folk tale told by Violeta Gayak on October 31 over at the Silliman University Culture and Arts Council and the Cultural Center of the Philippines.
6:53 AM |
Celebrate the Summer Solstice With Fiction
Today, June 21, is the International Day of the Celebration of the Solstice! Why don't we read the classic Filipino text celebrating its passions in "The Summer Solstice" by National Artist for Literature Nick Joaquin! Link here.
ART: Jo Tanierla's "Ang Sacerdote at Ang Tadtarin," 2015]
Excited for this! My short story "Enough of This is True" has been translated to Czech along with the works of 37 other fantastic Filipino writers in this groundbreaking anthology, selected and edited with an introduction by former Czech ambassador to the Philippines Jaroslav Olsa Jr. together with Silvie Mitlenerová!
Thank you, Taipei Times, for the good notice on my short story “The Boys From Rizal Street,” anthologized in Sanctuary: Short Fiction from Queer Asia! Link here.
4:55 PM |
Ang Sugilanon sa Kasakit ni Epefania, Radio Play
Of my stories, "Old Movies" and "Things You Don't Know" are anthologized more often and taught in schools, but "The Sugilanon of Epefania's Heartbreak" is the one that's always being adapted into something else. It has become a comic book. It has become a stage play [presented as part of the Virgin Labfest and staged at the Cultural Center of the Philippines]. And it has become fodder for many classroom projects. Somebody did a whole shadow play of the story. And now it's also a radio drama titled "Ang Sugilanon sa Kasakit ni Epefania." This one's produced and performed by Diza Apple Rubio, Andrea Maglipac, Carl Joseph Carazo Lara, Isabel Geronimo, Krystel Mae Santisteban, and Shane De Guzman, in J Marie Maxino's senior high class. Thank you, guys! "The Sugilanon of Epefania’s Heartbreak" is special to me because it is the story of my family and their past in Bayawan [which used to be called Tolong]. So every time somebody creates something new out of this story, I think of it as a chance to pay respect to my ancestors, because it is making them alive.
9:00 AM |
The Winning Darkness
