Friday, August 29, 2025
9:00 AM |
The Winning Darkness
It is not really a rare case when judges for a literary contest gather together to deliberate on the winners—and find out, to their delighted astonishment, that they practically share the same titles in their shortlists, give or take one or three. It is not a rarity, but it is always a welcome happenstance—because it makes the deliberation easier to accomplish, with no one fighting for stray entries that are nowhere to be found on each other’s lists, making the decision sometimes difficult. This was what happened when the judges for the 2025 Nick Joaquin Literary Awards—poet Marra PL Lanot, fictionist Susan S. Lara, and I—met online over Zoom last August 23. It took less than an hour to agree on the winning titles—covering stories and poems that appeared on Graphic Reader from February 2024 to January 2025—and we spent most of the time just doing chika. We were unanimous in our choices, and by the time this article would see print, these winners would have already been announced last August 28 in a ceremony held at Luxent Hotel in Quezon City.
The NJLA is the annual derby sponsored by Philippines Graphic Magazine, which seeks to award the best short stories and poems published in its monthly literary supplement, Graphic Reader. It is named after the great writer and National Artist for Literature who served as literary editor of the magazine for many years until his death in 2004. [As an aside, I am always happy to note that Nick Joaquin chose one of my stories for publication in the Graphic before he died—a particularly rambunctious piece about a hustler who gets flummoxed when he is “rented out” by a high schooler.] I’ve been shortlisted for the award a few times over the years, but only won the grand prize in 2023, for my story “Ceferina in Apartment 2B.” This year, I stepped in as judge, taking over the spot vacated by one of my writing idols, Butch Dalisay.
It was not an easy task reading and assessing 47 short stories of varying quality, as well as 50+ poems. I had about a month to read through the pile—which was a challenge, because I have somewhat become a “slower” reader recent years, perhaps owing to my ADHD. That meant though that I had to muster all my concentration for each story, and when a fantastic one came my way, my pleasure in the reading was double. There were stories about mysterious goings-on in the Cordilleras that verge on the supernatural; about the historical Enrique in the company of Magellan sailing towards fate in 1521; about serial murderers and serial daters; about good people trapped in the Battle of Manila in 1945; about trans children choosing names;, about ambitious boxers whose dreams get thwarted by the punishing realities of the sport; about commencement speakers embarking on nostalgia trips; about hapless people in love affairs; about storytellers contemplating the doomed love stories they’re penning.
In the end, from our combined shortlists of stories, we fell in love with “All Fall Down” by Menchu Aquino Sarmiento, a comedic comeuppance of the upwardly mobile in society; “Ashfall” by E. V. Rieza, which turns from funny ruminations of a local journalist covering a volcanic eruption to a serious consideration of the tragedy that lies in the end; “Palaspas” by Cesar Miguel Escaño, which is about a boating competition in Dumaguete, and deftly explores the vagaries of revenge, class disparities, and the flimsiness of luck; “Holiday Pay” by Rick Patriarca, which, in two segments, delves into the psyche of an ordinary, down-on-his luck office worker, who finds out that he has been bamboozled by a street vendor—and then shows up a year later with a strange idea for revenge; and finally, “Homecoming” by Joshua Berida—a story that feels epic in its examination of a man who runs away from what is expected of him back home in the Philippines, and tries to find himself in the snowy landscape of Siberia. That story’s minute description of rural life in the wilds of Russia is so maximalist in its breadth, but somehow manages to concentrate all of that into a lean story of loneliness and defiance. I was in awe reading this story. [Note: I have omitted titles that did not land on all our lists.]
These beautiful stories—surprise, surprise—were just our collective runners-up. Eventually, we chose three titles as our winners for the short story: “Dial D for Desire” by George Deoso, bagging first prize; “Angel of Light” by Menchu Aquino Sarmiento, second prize; and “The X-Ray Tech’s Love Story” by Paulino Lim Jr., third prize. These were the stories that haunted me for days on end, after reading them.
Lim’s story glimmers with the deceptive simplicity of two Filipino expats talking, but beneath the ordinary rhythms of conversation is a reservoir of memory, regret, and the weight of lives lived elsewhere. What begins as a casual exchange in a California hospital—two countrymen discovering kinship in shared language—gradually unfurls into a meditation on exile, lost loves, and deferred dreams.
What I love most is the story’s restraint. There is no melodrama here, no need for heightened conflict; instead, Lim allows nuance to do the heavy lifting. Each detail reverberates: the mention of a first love rejected at a rich family’s doorstep, the broken hearts left behind in the Philippines, the delicate balancing act of faith, marriage, and temptation in a new country. The betrayal of infidelity. These are the textures of diaspora, rendered with precision but also with deep compassion. The story ultimately lingers because it understands how loss accumulates quietly in the lives of migrants. The characters talk about jobs, about choir performances, about family routines, but in the spaces between their words, you hear the ache of what might have been. Andy’s roses, dumped into a trash can in youth and sent again decades later, become the story’s quiet emblem: a love story both aborted and rekindled, hopeful and tainted, impossible and unforgettable. And the language—clean, supple, unforced—carries all this with grace. Lim’s prose resists ornament, but each sentence hums with resonance, like a hymn sung under one’s breath. By the end, we realize this is not just Andy’s love story, but also the narrator’s, and perhaps our own: the universal story of what we leave behind, and how memory, in its stubborn persistence, never quite lets us go.
Sarmiento’s story, on the other hand, is truly diabolical—Susan Lara calls it “Jane Austen with an evil twist”—but above all, it is a marvel of character work, an unflinching portrait of privilege gone rancid, of beauty weaponized into cruelty. At its center is Eden Reyes Blanco, doctora, socialite, political wife, and eldest sister who treats her younger siblings as burdens rather than kin. From the first page, Sarmiento renders Eden with such precision—her vanity, her entitlement, her breathtaking lack of empathy—that the reader is both enthralled and appalled.
This is, at heart, a character study of corruption not in the sense of crime or scandal, but in the corrosion of spirit that entitlement produces. Eden is brilliant, accomplished, glamorous. But she is also monstrous: she cannot help but see her sisters not as family but as genetic embarrassments, obstacles to her polished narrative. The brilliance of the story is that it refuses to soften her, and refuses catharsis. There is no redemption arc here, only the relentless unfolding of a woman who has made herself untouchable, even in the face of her sisters’ suffering.
It is, admittedly, a very evil portrait, but therein lies its power. In Eden we see the distillation of a class and a culture that valorizes success while erasing compassion. The Fairview house becomes the story’s cruel pivot: a symbol of inheritance, obligation, and betrayal. Every exchange with her sisters drips with condescension, her veneer of charity little more than transactional cruelty. This is all rendered perfectly in Sarmiento’s cool, exact, surgical prose. There are no easy emotional payoffs, no melodrama, only the chilling recognition that some lives are hollowed out not by tragedy, but by triumph itself. “Angel of Light” dares to give us a protagonist too evil to be forgivable, and in doing so, exposes the banality of privilege at its most corrosive.
Then there is George Deoso’s story. A story I was so envious over, I wanted to be the one to have written it. Alas, George has—and as a former mentor of his at the Silliman University National Writers Workshop, I am so proud at how far he has come with his fiction.
“Dial D for Desire” is a story that thrums with urgency. From its very first scene, we are made to feel the tautness of a world where intimacy is rehearsed, packaged, and sold by the minute, where the borders between work and desire, performance and truth, blur into something at once exhilarating and devastating. At the center is Ruben Rivera, a towering presence who enters the training room at this BPO with the swagger of someone who knows how to command attention. He is brash, magnetic, and impossibly alive. But the story is told through the gaze of a weary male trainer, someone jaded by years of corporate scripts, who finds himself increasingly drawn to Ruben in ways he cannot entirely admit. This tension—erotic, unspoken, dangerous—gives the story its pulse.
It is that erotic charge I responded to the most. It is a story, after all, that is steeped in longing—and longing and heartbreak together has been my own fiction’s province for some time now. Every page in Deoso’s story feels haunted by the ache of unsaid things, by the quiet devastations of queer desire under fluorescent light. The narrator finds himself tethered to Ruben in all his posturing, menace, and tenderness. The story reads like a confession written against the grain of routine. Calls, scripts, metrics … they all dissolve whenever Ruben enters the frame. What remains is the impossible tension of attraction denied its expression, of intimacy glimpsed but never held. Deoso captures that precarious state with a voice both restrained and trembling, the way grief disguises itself in professionalism until it bursts through.
But it is also more than a queer story; it is a searing document of BPO life in the Philippines, where labor and intimacy are commodified in equal measure. The story places us in the world of Phone Love, an outsourcing account that feels very much like a phone-sex enterprise, where agents are required to sell not just time but fantasy, where one’s voice becomes a product line, and where bodies become extensions of the corporate machine. Ruben is presented as a call center veteran whose skill at “selling himself” is both survival strategy and trap. We witness how in him charisma is easily turned into capital, and even how queerness is both marketable and punishable. The brilliance of Deoso’s narrative lies in its ability to show the dissonance between corporate celebration—Ruben as “top performer”—and the lived precarity of workers whose safety, dignity, and very lives remain expendable. But the story refuses to flatten BPO life into neon glamour or economic miracle. Instead, it exposes the psychic violence beneath the headset: the exhaustion of repetition, the erosion of boundaries, the exploitation hidden beneath statistics. When Ruben becomes the target of a violent client’s whims, the company’s response is chilling in its apathy. Profit outweighs protection; labor is nothing more than replaceable flesh. Of course, it ends in tragedy.
Infidelity. A woman’s monstrous lack of empathy. BPO life in a murderous grind. I’m glad that we chose these stories, even if they invite an examination into the darkness of the Filipino soul, our soul. I call these tandem our “winning darkness.” Sometimes, the dark stories are the narratives that best provide the mirror of who we are as a society. They resonated so fiercely, and they stayed with me, mostly because of the painful truths they tried distilling in their dramas.
From these dark tales, we jump to the poetry—and the common titles in our shortlists all vied, with equal vigor, to be the one poem, or suite of poems, that would land its author the distinction of being Poet of the Year. “Bound by the Same Umbilical Cord” by Jim Pascual Agustin. “Four Poems for 2024” by F. Jordan Carnice, who has won the Poet of the Year prize two years in a row. “Parallel Poems, Like Parallel Lines, Don’t Meet” by Cesar Ruiz Aquino. “Consequences, 3 Poems” by Karina Africa Bolasco. “Indignation as Elegy” by Ralph Semino Galán. “A Prayer for Leni Robredo” by Simeon Dumdum Jr. And finally, “Arranging Furniture at Midnight” by Totel V. de Jesus—which we loved partly because it has cats in it. [Susan and I are cat lovers.]
We eventually chose Joel Toledo as Poet of the Year, with his poem, “Saint-Paul de Mausole Sonnet.” It is a brief but incandescent act of ekphrasis, a poem that remakes Van Gogh’s The Starry Night in language that is at once tender and restless. Beginning with “one crude sketch,” Toledo traces the painter’s fevered transformation of smudge into cosmos, of turbulence into brilliance. What emerges is not a fixed tribute but a moving meditation on the impossibility of stillness—skies become oceans, spires levitate, galaxies sear into being. Addressing the poem itself as “dear sonnet,” Toledo reminds us that art is both sanctuary and struggle, a fragile “nightlight forever” wrested from suffering. It is a plea against silence, a recognition of the unquiet labor that turns pain into radiance. With precision and lyric restraint, Toledo captures Van Gogh’s urgency: nowhere are the hands not moving, and nowhere is the world more alive than in their untethered strokes.
Encountering all these worlds and words in poetry and prose was such a heady experience for me as judge. I love that the NJLA opened my eyes to the kinds of poetry and fiction, at least in English, that is being produced and published these days. I love that in the final conclusion, Philippine literature feels very much alive—and the best of them are still being adequately rewarded, especially in a time when literary creativity is being challenged everywhere.
The judges deliberating over Zoom with Graphic editor Psyche Mendoza as host
Labels: awards, fiction, life, philippine literature, philippines graphic, poetry, writers, writing
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Thursday, September 14, 2023
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.]
Labels: fiction, life, philippine literature, philippines graphic
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Friday, May 05, 2023
6:21 PM |
At the 2023 Nick Joaquin Literary Awards
I’m back in Dumaguete after a brief visit to Manila, and everything still feels surreal. And wonderful. All at the same time. I know why. Please permit me in this space to celebrate a win. Because there are four reasons why winning the Nick Joaquin Literary Award means so much to me.
First: When I was in freshman year high school and barely knew anything about writing [or Philippine literature for that matter], I discovered Nick Joaquin’s iconic short story “May Day Eve” bundled in one of those mimeographed handouts my older brothers who were in college would regularly bring home and scatter around the house. [That’s also how I discovered Edilberto Tiempo and Edith Tiempo — and I read and loved their works without quite knowing who they were.] Joaquin’s style in “May Day Eve” astonished me, and made me see the possibilities of a simple story made more astonishing because of the underlying craft involved. I remember telling myself, “So, you can actually write a story like this...,” and I remember attempting to write a story exactly like it, with all the twists and turns of time and the human heart. In retrospect, that attempt to copy Joaquin was a foolhardy idea — my juvenile story was predictably bad — but if beginning to write is all about mimicking your idols until you find your own voice, then with my choice of Nick Joaquin, I was certainly off to a good start.
Second: When I began writing and publishing my stories for real in the early 2000s, Nick Joaquin was still literary editor of Philippines Graphic — and I was loath to actually send in stories to this magazine because I was afraid I would not pass muster. [Philippines Free Press published my first short story instead, not counting all the early attempts in Silliman periodicals.] But after a while, I gained enough courage to send in something, and I submitted “Cruising,” a story about a Shakespeare-spouting rent boy in Dumaguete. And then later the news came: Nick Joaquin had died. I thought I lost my chance at being edited [and selected for publication] by the master. It turned out he had accepted it indeed for publication weeks before he died, and I was glad to know that the writer that made me want to write in the first place had a chance to read my fiction and deemed it worthy enough for publication. Winning the NJLA thus feels for me like a kind of coming full circle. Nick Joaquin has always been the supreme inspiration for my writing — and my Philippine Literature students also know that I teach “May Day Eve” with such gusto, endlessly marveling at its inventiveness.
Third: When I continued to read more Filipino works over the years to augment what I taught, to understand where I come from, and to gain more insight to help my own attempts at the craft, there were particular stories that I resonated with, which informed my style and what I wanted to say in my work. Jose Y. Dalisay Jr.’s “In the Garden” was instructive for its magnificent handling of horror, as we witness a teacher in a mountain school struggle to protect his students from the incursions of malevolent soldiers. Susan S. Lara’s “The Reprieve” is a masterclass of emotional restraint even if the story plumbs the chaos in the mind of an old patriarch whose infirmities has brought new indignities. These stories, among a few others, became my paragon. But I also read poetry to better my own fiction, so there’s Marra PL. Lanot, whose poems about women defining and defying their circumstances were instructive in their cutting insights and tantalizing because they were always unafraid to explore all manners of questions and provocations. [Her essays are also wonderful.] I have devoured all their collections, and have been mentored by them in real life, which is a privilege. That they would turn out to be the judges for this year's NJLA feels humbling; I will always be their student.
And fourth: When I began teaching creative writing for real at Silliman University, one of my greatest joys was founding a writing club in Dumaguete in the late 2000s called LitCritters Dumaguete. A bunch of former students came up to me and asked to be mentored in story writing, so I created the group for them. We met every Saturday, reading and discussing at least three stories to see how they work [or not work], and for every fourth Saturday, we wrote our own stories to be workshopped by all. We were very serious, and those kids competed with each other so hard to come up with fantastic stories. [As a moderator, I was not exempt from also writing my own stuff, to be workshopped by everyone. Those years truly were some of the most productive years in my life as a fictionist.] One of these kids was F Jordan Carnice. And this year, he wins the Poet of the Year Award at the NJLA. So winning with him feels just right for his former teacher!
There are so many people to thank—foremost of all, Philippines Graphic Magazine for continuing this tradition of honoring literature, especially in a time when magazines like it are becoming rarities. So many people also sent me their greetings in the past few days, and I appreciate every word. At this stage of my life, I recognize the importance of gratitude above all. And then there’s Renz, for always knowing what’s best for me and for making me go to Manila [despite my initial plans not to attend the awards program].
Congratulations to the other winners, Criselda Yabes and Richard Giye! Congratulations to all the other finalists!
And thank you to my mother Ceferina, whose life I love to set to fiction. She was the inspiration for this winning work, and deserves all the attention.Labels: awards, friends, nick joaquin, philippine literature, philippines graphic, writers
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