Good tidings on our Fil-Ams

Angela Narciso Torres, poet from San Francisco, visited Manila last June and read before my poetry workshop class in Ateneo. Her brief talk on her very promising vocation as a poet was also well-received by the class.

Angela has attended several prestigious workshops in the US, including one that featured premier American poets Stephen Dunn and Sharon Olds. She has also been winning prizes for her poetry and getting them published in major literary journals. Her latest distinction was gaining a fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference 2005, which she may be currently attending.

Here’s an excellent poem of hers titled "Girl Practicing Piano" that she shared with us in class:

"Warming the black stool, hands poised/ on keys, she hears her parents’ voices/ raised above the drone of the fan–/ words snapping the cool silence,/ the sound of muffled crying. Outside// it is June, the heat a thick blanket/ draping branches and leaves./ Even the flies are slower today./ Putting away the unfinished scales,/ she takes on Chopin–// a simple nocturne. Beseeching,/ her teacher has written in red./ Flats mark forgotten places/ like crimson flags hung upside down,/ half-hearts bleeding into measures.// All afternoon, small swarms of notes/ float on slothful air, leaning on/ arms of overstuffed chairs,/ sidling along walls. They hover/ on the stair to her parents’ bedroom,// then crouch at the door like beggars/ on haunches, ears pressed to the grain."

I’ve read several other remarkable poems by Angela, and dare say that with her constant, rigorous practice and frequent attendance at workshops and poets’ get-togethers, we should be expecting a first collection from her soon enough.

Our last column mentioned another US-based writer, Dr. Theo Gonsalvez, who recently completed a six-month tour of duty in Manila as a Fulbright grantee. When he plays music, he bills himself as Dr. Boogie Nights.

Now his dual personality is back at the University of Hawaii where he‘s Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies. One of his forthcoming projects is to co-edit, together with our good friend Michelle Cruz Skinner, a fine fiction writer also based in Honolulu, a special focus issue for the quality literary journal MANOA: A Pacific Journal of International Writing.

Every so often, editor-in-chief Frank Stewart turns the bulk of MANOA’s pages over to a guest editor for a representative collection of contemporary Philippine poetry and fiction. I was responsible for the first special Philippine Focus in the mid-’90s, after which New York-based Eric Gamalinda guest-edited the bestselling "A Century of Dreams" issue coinciding with our Centennial year. Now I’m glad to know that the third such effort is in good hands.

Per information from Leigh Arcellana Saffold, writing on behalf of Frank Stewart, the issue will be a celebration of 100 years of Filipino immigration to Hawaii. "We hope to fill the issue with the best contemporary writing, visual art, music, and film from the Philippines, Hawaii, and the US mainland."

Writers and artists are enjoined to e-mail submissions to Leigh at saffold@hawaii.edu or mail hardcopy and/or disk to MANOA, University of Hawaii English Dept., 1733 Donaghho Road, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA. The deadline is Sept. 1. You can try to check out the journal at http://manoajournal.hawaii.edu/

At Dr. Boogie Nights a.k.a Theo’s despedida party at Piper’s in Makati were a couple of other visiting Fil-Am writers: R. Zamora Linmark or "Zack," author of the best-selling novel Rolling the R’s, who does his balikbayan bit regularly from either Honolulu or San Francisco, and Leny Mendoza Strobel, who’s due back in California anytime now.

Strobel, an assistant professor of American Multicultural Studies at Sonoma State University in California, was here for several weeks. Her second book, A Book of Her Own: Words and Images to Honor the Babaylan (T’boli Publishing, SF 2004), was launched at Silungan at Balay Kalinaw in UP Diliman.

It’s a collection of essays, poems, narratives, quotations and images, some of which the author rendered herself. Leny had a motoring accident in 1997, and the writings collected here served as a fine healing force for her. The book may be said to be of the inspirational genre, as may be gleaned from her intro.

"My Filipina American student once said: Leny, what we need is a book on ‘Meditations for Filipinos Who Doubt Themselves.’ A facetious take on the many meditation books in the market, I knew she was half-joking. We noted all the ‘chicken soup meditations’ available for every category, but none for Filipinos. Her joke has nagged me ever since. This is my response – a tinola version of chicken soup.

"… This book is a mosaic of sorts. The pages are filled with meditations, found texts, attempts at poetry, meaningful lists, conversations with authors, artists and friends on the journey, photographs, and some chewy long essays on various themes all of which are related to the process of pagbabalikloob – a turning of the soul towards home. All these odd assortments of texts were inspired by Anne Michael’s admonition: You write in order to save yourself. Or you write because you have been saved."

The sections are titled "Love Your Inner Critic"; "Be Honest"; "Be a Good Witness"; "Unfinished Dialogues (which relates as letters and a paean-poem to her fellow Pinoy diasporic writers, in pieces titled "With Peter Bacho’s Dark Blue Suit"; "With Bino Realuyo’s Umbrella Country"; and "With Arlene Chai’s The Last Time I Saw Mother"); "Write in Your Own Voice"; and "Epilogue."

Here’s sharing "Questions I’ve Been Asked Ever Since I Arrived in the US in 1983" (a litany of one-liners that we have to compress typographically):

"Did he buy you from a catalog? Was he in the military? Where did you learn to speak English so well? How come you know all our songs? Where IS the Philippines? I’m looking for a domestic helper; do you know one? So what’s it like to be married to a white man? I bet you know all about chakras, don’t you? Why do you talk about de-colonization? But Filipinos weren’t civilized before de-colonization, were they? Wouldn’t de-colonization lead to anti-American feelings?

"Why talk about the past now? What good does it do? Why are minorities always complaining? Why do we emphasize our differences instead of our similarities? Why should I feel guilty for what my ancestors did? What exactly do you mean? Can you be more specific? What do you want? You can always go back where you came from! Why is there so much corruption in your government? Why aren’t Filipinos united? … "

I better stop there, else I’d have to editorialize: The questions ring true; the answers must ring truer.

Leny Mendoza Strobel may have consigned some copies at the UP Press Bookstore at Balay Kalinaw. Or anyone interested to acquire the book may write Ed Datangel at T’boli Publishing and Distributor, P.O. Box 347147, San Francisco, CA 94134, USA or reach him at tiboli@comcast.net

Recent good tidings involving Filipino writers based in the US include cheers and much breast-beating for distinctions gained.

Bino A. Realuyo of New York City, author of the memorable first novel The Umbrella Country, will now have an opportunity to impress his legion of fans with his poetry. His manuscript, "The Gods We Worship Live Next Door," won in a major national poetry competition – the 2005 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry, which honors the memory of a celebrated poet and beloved teacher. The annual prize is sponsored by the University of Utah Press and Department of English. Bino’s first poetry book will be released in February 2006.

In a recent e-mail, Bino intimated that he intends to ask the publisher if he can suggest what to use as cover art for the book. He wants to select an artwork by the late Santiago Bose.

Here’s a poem from that impending fine collection, titled "Procession" (In memoriam, Father Narciso Pico, human rights activist):

"Air descends in spirals. On a street,/ a flock waits, not in their usual Sunday white/ but black, a long line, spiraling as well./ Their sweat you can’t see./ Their faces would make you wonder what really/ matters to them–the wait or the destination,/ something you often asked: the now or what comes next./ In this village, whoever dares ask that question/ does it in murmurs, in twists of fingers,/ like their ears and eyes, attentive to every house/ they pass: who still lives there, who doesn’t,/ what’s gone, what remains, their names, mentioned/ every time they think of yours./ They recognize the thoughts behind fallen lips,/ sunken skin: where does a dead priest go,/ the one gunned down for leaves and soil–/ tell them, if not, they would simply guess, if there is an/ opening in the sun, then there, into its eye, to watch/ shovels rise above the ground, your own, the sprinkle/ of soil over your casket, of dust, prayers, and names,/ once again, the names of those who will fall next to you."

Note: Realuyo acknowledges that the title of his prospective collection is from a poem of the same title by Bienvenido N. Santos.

Another recent winner of a literary competition is Veronica Montes of San Francisco who won First Prize in the Ivy Terasaka Short Story Competition sponsored by Our Own Voice, a literary e-zine. The winning story, "Bernie Aragon Jr. Looks for Love," will appear online at http://www.oovrag.com in September.  

Montes’ fiction has been published in several literary journals and anthologies, including Growing Up Filipino (Philippine American Literary House, 2003), and Going Home to a Landscape: Writings by Filipinas (Calyx, 2003). She maintains a blog at www.vmontes.blogspot.com.

The sole judge for the competition was Dr. Luisa Igloria, premier poet and fictionist, an associate professor in the Creative Writing Program & Department of English at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. In reviewing the entries, she praised her choice as a "well-rounded story, because of its balanced mix of humor and pathos…" and its "confident sense of dialogue and place… resurrect(ing) the narratives of (an) era rife with the tensions of racial violence, anti-miscegenation and other discriminatory practices; and dramatizes the situation of Filipino busboys and migrant workers in 1927 Watsonville and up and down the West Coast."

Veronica Montes will receive a check for $100 and a copy of Our Own Voice Literary/Arts Journal (Firstfruits/PWU, 2003). She will also read her prize-winning story at a gathering of writers in the Library of Congress, Washington, DC in Spring 2006 for the LOC Asian Division’s centennial commemoration of the Filipino First Wave Migration to the US.

Per oovrag: "The competition was named for Ivy Terasaka who was an emerging writer vacationing (in Southeast Asia) with her family when the Tsunami of 2004 swept the beach resort where they were spending their holiday. She was a familiar face and voice at various Singapore literary events. In late 2003, Ivy discovered Our Own Voice and submitted a short story. ‘The Last Time I Saw Nanay’ was published posthumously in the January 2005 issue of Our Own Voice. To honor her dream of being a writer, the editors of the e-zine will be holding the annual competition in her memory."

For her part, Luisa Igloria should also be congratulated for winning the Richard Lemon Poetry Fellowship. She gets to attend the Napa Valley Writers Conference, where she’ll be studying with New England Review editor C. Dale Young.

You go, girl. Er, manang. Smiley.