Monday, November 11, 2024
5:48 PM |
Things Take Time
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.Labels: education, fiction, life, school, teaching, workshops
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Monday, November 04, 2024
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!
You can order this book on the
Milflores website.
Labels: books, fiction, novels, philippine literature, publishing, writers
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Saturday, June 08, 2024
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.
Labels: fiction, writing
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Saturday, May 18, 2024
3:13 PM |
‘Challengers’ is Queer Horny
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.
Labels: fiction, film, life, queer
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Tuesday, December 12, 2023
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.
Labels: fiction, life, philippine literature, 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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Tuesday, April 04, 2023
5:30 PM |
The Gargoyles
Flash Fiction
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.
Labels: fiction
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Saturday, March 25, 2023
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!
Labels: fiction, life, 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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Friday, August 06, 2021
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!]
Labels: fiction, philippine literature, speculative fiction, writers, writing
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Tuesday, July 20, 2021
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!
Read the story here.Labels: fiction, magazines, speculative fiction, writing
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Monday, September 21, 2020
9:00 AM |
The Boy in Ikaduhang Andana
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.
Labels: books, dumaguete, fiction, friends, life, 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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Sunday, June 21, 2020
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]Labels: fiction, philippine literature, writers
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Saturday, April 18, 2020
8:36 AM |
Kuřata v Hadí Kleci
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!
Link
here.
Labels: books, fiction, philippine literature
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Friday, March 20, 2020
10:10 AM |
A Review from Taipei Times
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.Labels: asian literature, books, fiction, life, queer
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Thursday, March 14, 2019
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.
Labels: fiction, life, radio, writing
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Sunday, June 03, 2018
8:00 AM |
The Fires of Dumaguete
I was six when I saw my first big fire. It was 1981, we lived in an old building—a rickety wooden affair that had plenty of rooms for several tenants and creaked during rainy days—which was owned by someone we called
Tiya Tansing, and the house just happened to be located right near the corner of Calle Sta. Rosa and Calle Real, a stone’s throw away from the
tianggue.
The
tianggue in the old days was two or three blocks worth of stalls—mostly wooden and makeshift—constituting a grand maze of no discernable design, although I remember there was a movie theater there somewhere, where we saw the latest Snooky Serna and Maricel Soriano teeny bopper films from Regal. I can’t remember the name of the theater, but I can recall the heady topsy-turviness of the place, and the inescapable smell of vegetable rot and fish entrails.
One night in 1981, while Dumaguete slept, the whole tianggue burned down, a grand conflagration that was so immense, it felt like the apocalypse. That we lived nearby pushed us to panic, and I remember my family trying to evacuate what possessions we had—the dining table, boxes of clothes, assorted items marking lives suddenly seeming so fragile—from our apartment in Tiya Tansing’s house and right onto the street, which was swarming with onlookers who were in equal measure frightened and excited. I remember the rain of embers from the night sky—dots of firelight that looked like fireflies, but here and there were creating new fires in nearby houses.
That scene remains indelible in my memory. In 2006, when I wrote my short story “A Strange Map of Time,” which is included in my book
Heartbreak and Magic, I memorialized all of that in this passage, where the hero confronts a similar fire to get to a mystical gate: “[H]e opened his eyes to a strange night, a fiery brightness everywhere in Dumaguet he could not shake away like a bad dream. The world crawled into his consciousness. His senses took time to recover, and only little by little did he make out the details of things: the smell was of acrid burning; the feel was of far-off heat licking the sensitive hair on his arms and face; the noise was of shouts in crescendo, the wailing of alarm constant in the air.
“It was the year of the Big Fire. The sight disconcerted him: a huge city block was in flames, the fire ravenously licking wood and toppling cement walls. There seemed to be an endlessness to the devastation, with fire spreading everywhere. It seemed like the end of the world. From everywhere, strange and old-looking earthbound trucks, painted red, buzzed about in fashion, sending gushes of hosed water into the air, into the heart of the flame, onto the surfaces of buildings opposite.
“The young man who used to be Sawi stood up and walked towards the fire and the gathering throng. Around him, people panicked, grabbing hold of so many things—a very thin old man was carrying a refrigerator, an old woman had six toddlers in her arms, two boys were rushing towards the crowd with a huge
aparador between them—all of them running around to somewhere and nowhere. He saw that there was also a growing crowd—
hundreds—that also descended to watch, in a clinch of awe and horror, the conflagration.”
I write this about fires and the grim fascination over them because only last Wednesday, Times Mercantile along Dr. V. Locsin Street burned down. Again.
Photo by Sho Tuazon
This is the second time this has happened to this local grocery store, arguably a Dumaguete business icon, something all locals know to go to for the best priced liquor and the like. With Fortune Mart also gone, only Ricky’s remain of the Dumaguete of old. In 2000, Times’ old front along Perdices Street burned down along with the old Ricky’s, a fire that claimed two lives and reshaped how Dumagueteños did their after-hours grocery shopping.
But fires have an interesting history in Dumaguete, a terrible but decisive shaper of its landscape. The local church historian Fr. Roman Sagun has an interesting article about local conflagrations, and in “Fire and the Changing Cityscape of Dumaguete City,” he writes: “In 1990, a massive fire leveled down commercial establishments and residences along Real and Cervantes Streets. It affected two adjacent blocks that were mainly occupied by 34 families and eight commercial establishments. The fire started at 3:00 A.M and was contained two hours after. There were no casualties … but all 34 families were left homeless. The fire rapidly blazed all that was found within the adjacent blocks since most of the houses were made of nipa. Witnesses said that two fire trucks arrived early but one of the hoses snapped, [which] was because the valve was opened too soon before an additional link could be installed. [There was also looting, as] people pretended to help but … stole from the victims and commercial establishments [instead].”
The 1990 fire started at what was then VJR Kitchenette, which was located behind the old Rhine Marketing, and it quickly engulfed the surrounding commercial establishments including Tat’s or Goldy Theater, Dove Theater, Glecel’s Kitchenette, Luzonians Restaurant, Lamp Lighter, Badon Repair Shop, City Barbershop, GM Furniture, Anchor’s Tailoring, Tan’s Rechargeable Shop, and Vesin’s Store.
Fr. Sagun also wrote of the 1992 fire that damaged the Gold Label Grocery Store along Locsin and Ma. Cristina Streets caused by faulty electrical wiring. In 1994, the New Bian Yek Commercial Building along Real Street also caught fire, and while the concrete structure remained, the shops in the interior were decimated. In 1996, the Philippine National Police headquarters went up in flames.
The 1990s was a decade of fires in Dumaguete. Most of these fires occurred downtown, and usually happened in the early hours of morning—and while all these are devastating, there is no denying that fires have been instrumental in shaping the landscape of the downtown area.
In the 2000 fire that consumed the first Times Mercantile and Ricky’s Bakery and Grocery Store, the whole episode began around 5 A.M., and in its wake caused 10 million pesos worth of property damage, and the lives of two sisters, Natalie and Ivy Acuña. Fr. Sagun writes of that terrible night: “According to the only survivor, Ronnie Baldoza, a working baker from Ricky’s, the hotdog freezer had a short circuit and caught fire. The two sisters, together with [Ronnie], tried to [contain] the fire with a fire extinguisher,” but the highly flammable materials that were stocked around the store fueled the flames too quickly, and Ronnie managed to escape, but the sisters had passed out from smoke inhalation.”
The new fire, which originated from the clothing store beside Times, lasted five hours long, according to reports by Raffy Cabristante for GMA News. Many of the boarding houses within the block were not spared, although most of the commercial frontages nearby are still intact because of their high firewalls. In retrospect, that now-gone old building housing Times Mercantile had indeed seen better times—but it was a grand wooden one of a style that used to grace the streets of Dumaguete, some of which still remain and are in perfect need for restoration.
What will rise from the ashes of that building? The landscape of Dumaguete changes some more.
Photo by Urich Calumpang
Labels: disasters, dumaguete, fiction, history, life
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Monday, September 18, 2017
5:01 AM |
Ian and Kia Tell Dirty Stories
My latest short story collection,
DON'T TELL ANYONE: LITERARY SMUT, co-authored with Shakira Andrea Sison, is now out from Anvil Publishing, under its new imprint Pride Press, and should be in National Bookstore soon. Below is the inside cover, featuring the enigmatically hidden face of Albert Saspa, of
Hanging Out fame.
And just a little warning: the book's very sexually graphic.
Here's
Esquire Philippines' Kristine Fonacier blurb for it: "Smart is sexy. Faced with a collection that calls itself 'literary smut,' it's a real pleasure to be reminded just how true that can be. We're lucky to have arrived at a time when both the realities and our imaginations of sex are being challenged every day, and this collection of stories—with its varied viewpoints, tones, textures—does its part in pushing boundaries and buttons. But is it hot? The reader might ask. This book turns on that most primal of sex organs—the brain. And then it turns on everything else."
Order
online!
Labels: books, fiction, philippine literature, sex
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Friday, February 10, 2017
3:53 PM |
Writing ‘Compartments’
My short story, “Compartments,” is part of the Love and Sex [February 2017] issue of
Esquire Philippines Magazine! It’s going to be part of my forthcoming collection of erotica
Don't Tell Anyone, published by Anvil. In the meantime, read this and see me bare ... my soul.
Truth to tell, it felt different, seeing this short story finally in print, on the pages of something other than just ephemeral text on my computer screen. I began writing “Compartments” sometime in 2010 after the biggest and most overwhelming heartbreak of my life. I needed to soothe my ache via the only thing I knew could help me: fiction. I wrote one scene — but I couldn’t go beyond that, and so it remained unfinished for a long, long time. But the story was there, in one of the folders in my laptop, at the back of my head.
Rumurumbo sa utak, so they say. I knew how the story was going to end, but I had no idea exactly how to accomplish the middle — despite the fact that I knew already every single detail the story should possess. It was a difficult story to write, not because the words were not forthcoming, but because I felt I wasn’t ready to write it down for good and subsequently confront an intimate period from my immediate past.
In 2014, four years later, I finally managed to write it all down in white heat, over the course of a summer day. (The only other person I confided to about my project around that time was, of all people, the poet Ricardo de Ungria.) It was finally finished. Still, it remained unpublished, because who in this country would publish erotica?
And then
Esquire’s Kristine Fonacier emailed me late last year, and then also Sarge Lacuesta. They wrote separately, didn’t know the other one was emailing me. Did I have erotica they could include for their Love and Sex issue of the magazine? Of course I do! I wrote back. And here it is, finally.
I read the story again last night — and all the pain came back, this time with the wistfulness of surrender, the balm of time, and the comfortable remove of fictionalizing. I have published many, many stories before, in books and in magazines, but this is the first time in a long, long while that I have ever felt a certain satisfaction over having something in print.
Thank you, Kristine and Sarge!
Labels: fiction, life, love, magazines, philippine literature, writing
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