Saturday, April 16, 2022
1:32 PM |
From Peg to Illustration
I began writing The Great Little Hunter in the summer of 2018 with the hopes of entering it into an international picture book competition. I knew I wanted to write about a boy confronting his fears, and I also knew I needed the story to be steeped in local culture. And then the idea of a child “mangangayam” [or hunter] came about. After a few days trying to bring the story down to less than 500 words, I thought of only one person who could bring my vision of this story to life: Hersley-Ven Casero. But before even meeting him, I needed to prepare the visuals for each spread of the potential book, so that my story and his potential illustrations would perfectly sync into the structure of a book. These are the pegs I prepared, culled from various art I collected online. [I didn't have the energy or the time to properly draw.] Hersley was quickly on board. Two months later, Hersley showed me his work — and I was astonished at how much he was able to flesh out the world of Ngayam, making the story also his own: it was his idea to make each canvas/spread bleed into each other like in a continuous scroll, making all sixteen spreads part of one very long work, with the last spread bleeding into the first one. And every canvas hides all sorts of flora and fauna Hersley studied while making the work. Part of the fun is identifying these!
The first spread...
The second spread...
The third spread...
The fourth spread...
The fifth spread...
The sixth spread...
The seventh spread...
The eighth spread...
The ninth spread...
The tenth spread...
The eleventh spread...
The twelfth spread...
The thirteenth spread...
The fourteenth spread...
The fifteenth spread...
The last spread, which bleeds into the first page, which is not part of a spread...
Labels: art, children's books, dumaguete, life, myths, philippine culture, philippine literature, writing
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Saturday, April 09, 2022
12:05 AM |
Inventing the Fighter of Monsters
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 at Pinspired.ph.
Labels: art, art and culture, children's books, dumaguete, fiction, life, myths, painting, philippine literature
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Wednesday, August 26, 2020
9:00 AM |
Epefania and Dumpawa
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.
Labels: art and culture, fiction, life, myths, philippine culture, philippine literature, theatre, writing
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Tuesday, August 25, 2020
10:57 PM |
What We Can Learn From Myths
I find comfort in stories, and the truth we can glean from them. But we have forgotten the common trajectory of myths and where the hero comes in for their journey. We forget that myths have a back story, that of the first rise of evil [Voldemort coming to power, Sauron fashioning the ring and controlling most of Middle Earth, Marcos declaring Martial Law] -- and then their unexpected demise [Voldemort repelled by a baby to near mortal oblivion, Sauron vanquished and losing his ring, Marcos booted out by People Power and then dying]. We forget there always follows a long period of lull, characterized by apathy and forgetfulness [Voldemort dormant for fourteen years, Sauron dormant for a thousand years, the spirit of Marcos dormant for thirty years], and a complacency that believes evil can never happen again. But it does happen [Voldemort and Sauron finally stir, and the specter of Marcos reappears in Duterte]. The forces of evil begin winning again, their second rise. And this is where the stories, our beloved books, always start, right? And always began by the unlikely: a boy named Harry, a hobbit named Frodo, all the angry voices all over the Philippines finally waking up to the smell of murderousness and incompetence. We are the hero, and this is the start of our journey of becoming. Heed the call. The story
always ends with the triumph of good over evil.
Labels: current events, life, myths
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Tuesday, July 19, 2016
11:50 PM |
Bangbangin and the Mango of Heartbreak
Here's Bangbangin and the very
mailbog and
mahiwagang manga!
I
love this mango -- I even made it the cover image of
Heartbreak and Magic (Anvil, 2012). I honestly thought I'd never live to see this story come to life in some other form -- but here we are, all thanks to
Alexandra May Cardoso who skilfully adapted it for the Virgin Labfest stage, and
Charles Yee who directed it with such imagination. [That's
Paul Cedric Juan as Bangbangin in the photo.] I remember giggling a lot while writing "The Sugilanon of Epefania's Heartbreak" in 2007, but also struggling how to exactly get the tone right and the mythology outlandish but also believable. (At one point, I had to ask myself: "How do I get the heavens to rain, and yet still make the ground dry and sizzling from immense heat -- and still make it sound plausible?" Because Epefania's heartbreak demanded it.) Rosario Cruz Lucero inspired its writing, but I wrote this for Dean Francis Alfar, and Ma'am Jing Hidalgo later included it in her
anthology of Filipino fantasy. Here's to stories and the enchanted well they come from!
[Photo by Alvin I. Dacanay]
Labels: fiction, life, myths, philippine literature, theater, theatre, virgin labfest, writers, writing
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Tuesday, June 23, 2015
12:47 PM |
Santa Catalina of our Fictions
This is St. Catherine of Alexandria, patron saint of Carcar. And Dumaguete. I like the idea that two cities known for writers would have as a patron saint someone who is entirely fictional. She doesn't exist except in the ecstasy of our
mugna, literary and otherwise.
A street in Dumagete is named after her. In her essay "The Streets of Dumaguete," the sociologist Lorna Makil writes: "Calle Santa Catalina was named after Dumaguete’s patron saint, St. Catherine of Alexandria, known as the 'Warrior Saint.' We read that she was chosen to be the town’s patron saint due to the great need for protection against the southern slave raiders. Legends about her courage and physical prowess were narrated by the townsfolk who had observed that her image on certain mornings would carry
amor seco (a grass weed) clinging to the hem of her dress, and making them believe that the saint had gone out at night to drive away the pirates."
Labels: art and culture, carcar, catholicism, cebu, dumaguete, heritage cities, myths, negros, religion, saints, writing
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Monday, May 09, 2011
12:27 AM |
The Origins of Trese and the Kambals
I like Origins stories. In the tradition of graphic literature (komiks to some of you), they're a staple in the narrative, and most superheroes come barging into our consciousness with an Origin story. There's something about knowing where a hero comes from -- what shaped him to become this something -- that's infinitely intriguing and satisfies a hungry curiosity (we all like asking, "Why?"), and when done right, they provide the meat to the mythos without reducing the hero to a caricature of easy motivations. But that's only one thing that I liked about Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo's third installation in their
Trese series.
Mass Murders, which gives us the curious and very supernatural childhood of Tan and Baldisimo's kick-ass titular female detective of the uncanny, also gives us a look into the origins of Alexandra Trese's fast and furious sidekicks -- the Kambals, those mask-wearing half-breeds who do Trese's bidding with fierce loyalty and an extreme taste for blood. (
The horror writer Yvette Tan finds them extremely hot -- and so do I.) There's also the graphic violence which not only takes off from the gut-wrenching ballets of Alan Moore and Quentin Tarantino, but also has the glorious roughness and tumble of old Filipino action movies. But what impresses me most about this volume (two other volumes precede this one) is not just Tan's tight narrative and Baldisimo's concisely conceived black and white world, but also in how they dip into local gods and fantastic monsters and assorted lower mythology creatures of the pre-Spanish Filipino netherworld. In a kind of an afterword, Tan writes: "The works of Neil Gaiman was a major influence when it came to writing
Trese, most especially
Sandman and
American Gods. In those stories, he asked the question, 'What happened to the gods of old? Where are they now?' And he showed us a goddess of love who found her worshippers in a strip club, gods of death who now run a funeral parlor, and gods of mischief still up to their old tricks. Which made me ask the question, 'Where are the gods that were once worshipped by Filipinos before the Spaniards came? Have they found a new place in the city of Manila?'" Which is how they have come up, in this volume, with the bloodthirsty god of war, Talagbusao, whose bloody rituals and wishes to permanently wreck havoc in the mortal realm leads to this book's main plot, as well as to the explanation for the Kambal's existence. I admire this organic and pulsing attempt to bring back the ancient myths and subject them to the creativity, darkness, and demands of the modern world. It was indeed Gaiman who once told us -- when he first came up with the Philippine Graphic/Fiction Awards -- that we have a wealth of local legends and lore that are more than ready-made for explorations in local speculative fiction, and
Trese is a good example of that. The last time I was this excited over a similar project was Arnold Arre's
The Mythology Class. (Similarly, Dean Francis Alfar and the core LitCritters also have a cycle of stories about a land called Hinirang -- and I have long demanded an anthology of such stories, but only the future can tell whether that project comes to fruition.) And yet, despite the horror and fantasy that make stories like this ghettoed into Genreville, you see reflections of real-life issues and conflicts -- the corruption of civil government and military, the salacious criminality of small-town politicians, the clueless desperation of the law, the mud of chaos that has engulfed the country, which can only be explained through the prism of dark enchantment: this is a land bewitched and cursed, and every malevolent detail that erupts in our lives are the secret explosions of aswangs and duendes and the like. That Trese -- both mandirigma and babaylan rolled into one -- is around with the Kambals in tow gives us relief from our ordinary horrors, at least in these pages. I love this book. I bought it today, and consumed it a few hours later in one go. It is simply begging to be made into a very, very good film that does it more than justice.
Labels: comics, myths, philippine literature, speculative fiction, writers
[2] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, February 27, 2011
3:34 PM |
The Glory and the Darkness
“… [T]he first step to the knowledge of the wonder and mystery of life is the recognition of the monstrous nature of the earthly human realm as well as its glory, the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think they know how the universe could have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without death, are unfit for illumination.”
~ Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live ByLabels: issues, myths, quotes, religion
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Saturday, June 12, 2010
7:11 PM |
According to Myth, Our World is Just a Rat's Excreta
I have always loved this creation story from Bohol, culled from Fr. Francisco Demetrio's "Creation Myths Among The Early Filipinos" in the
Asian Folklore Studies:
In the beginning there was only darkness. Then the heavens covered the earth so that the two together looked like an immense tabo or coconut-shell bowl. Within the bowl a rat was born. It graduaIIy grew in size until it transformed itself into the giant Angngalo, the Bisayan Atlas who carried the heavens on his shoulders. One day, he eased himself, and from his feces and urine were born the islands, lakes and rivers, of the Archipelago. God who saw him thus occupied gave him a kick which sent him to China by way of Mariveles.
I don't know why knowing that we all live in divine excreta fascinates me.
[
more here]
Labels: myths
[1] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
GO TO OLDER POSTS
I like Origins stories. In the tradition of graphic literature (komiks to some of you), they're a staple in the narrative, and most superheroes come barging into our consciousness with an Origin story. There's something about knowing where a hero comes from -- what shaped him to become this something -- that's infinitely intriguing and satisfies a hungry curiosity (we all like asking, "Why?"), and when done right, they provide the meat to the mythos without reducing the hero to a caricature of easy motivations. But that's only one thing that I liked about Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo's third installation in their Trese series. Mass Murders, which gives us the curious and very supernatural childhood of Tan and Baldisimo's kick-ass titular female detective of the uncanny, also gives us a look into the origins of Alexandra Trese's fast and furious sidekicks -- the Kambals, those mask-wearing half-breeds who do Trese's bidding with fierce loyalty and an extreme taste for blood. (The horror writer Yvette Tan finds them extremely hot -- and so do I.) There's also the graphic violence which not only takes off from the gut-wrenching ballets of Alan Moore and Quentin Tarantino, but also has the glorious roughness and tumble of old Filipino action movies. But what impresses me most about this volume (two other volumes precede this one) is not just Tan's tight narrative and Baldisimo's concisely conceived black and white world, but also in how they dip into local gods and fantastic monsters and assorted lower mythology creatures of the pre-Spanish Filipino netherworld. In a kind of an afterword, Tan writes: "The works of Neil Gaiman was a major influence when it came to writing Trese, most especially Sandman and American Gods. In those stories, he asked the question, 'What happened to the gods of old? Where are they now?' And he showed us a goddess of love who found her worshippers in a strip club, gods of death who now run a funeral parlor, and gods of mischief still up to their old tricks. Which made me ask the question, 'Where are the gods that were once worshipped by Filipinos before the Spaniards came? Have they found a new place in the city of Manila?'" Which is how they have come up, in this volume, with the bloodthirsty god of war, Talagbusao, whose bloody rituals and wishes to permanently wreck havoc in the mortal realm leads to this book's main plot, as well as to the explanation for the Kambal's existence. I admire this organic and pulsing attempt to bring back the ancient myths and subject them to the creativity, darkness, and demands of the modern world. It was indeed Gaiman who once told us -- when he first came up with the Philippine Graphic/Fiction Awards -- that we have a wealth of local legends and lore that are more than ready-made for explorations in local speculative fiction, and Trese is a good example of that. The last time I was this excited over a similar project was Arnold Arre's The Mythology Class. (Similarly, Dean Francis Alfar and the core LitCritters also have a cycle of stories about a land called Hinirang -- and I have long demanded an anthology of such stories, but only the future can tell whether that project comes to fruition.) And yet, despite the horror and fantasy that make stories like this ghettoed into Genreville, you see reflections of real-life issues and conflicts -- the corruption of civil government and military, the salacious criminality of small-town politicians, the clueless desperation of the law, the mud of chaos that has engulfed the country, which can only be explained through the prism of dark enchantment: this is a land bewitched and cursed, and every malevolent detail that erupts in our lives are the secret explosions of aswangs and duendes and the like. That Trese -- both mandirigma and babaylan rolled into one -- is around with the Kambals in tow gives us relief from our ordinary horrors, at least in these pages. I love this book. I bought it today, and consumed it a few hours later in one go. It is simply begging to be made into a very, very good film that does it more than justice.