From One Photographer, About Another

August 12, 2008 at 9:08 pm (Quotes, Writers and Others)
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Here’s what photographer Elizabeth Fleming said on her blog Tethered about friend Stella Kalaw’s work. It meant a lot to Stella because she admires Elizabeth’s work so much :

    I first learned of Stella Kalaw’s work when she kindly left a comment on Tethered a few months ago, and I’m only just now getting around to posting about her, as is usually the case. I find her photographs hauntingly beautiful–the quality of light and color really blow me away. Family Spaces is my personal favorite from among her three galleries–each diptych is like its own short story, the kind that stays with you, the kind that’s there when you close the page and turn out the bedside light. I felt this even before I looked at the second series on her website, entitled The House Remembered, which fittingly is a collaboration with writer Marianne Villanueva.

    Combining word and image can be tricky–at its worst it can be like the copy of the Tao Te Ching I bought on Amazon a while back, with its cheesy, typical black-and-white photos of birds in flight and silhouettes of trees against the sky. But I believe Kalaw and Villanueva mostly hit the right note here: lyrical words are paired with lyrical images, each informing the other, quietly taking their time to sink in. I suppose my favorite kind of photographs generally have this lyricism, revealing layers from within their quiet complexity.

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The Latest IV

August 12, 2008 at 7:36 pm (Conversations, Writers and Others, Writing)
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Self interviewed by Tania Hershman, of The Short Review.

The same issue has a review of Mayor of the Roses (and self can’t thank Tania Hershman enough for finding a reviewer for it.) The review was written by Steven Wingate, and all self knows about him is what’s listed on his website:

I have reviewed books for American Book Review, Colorado Review, Rain Taxi, and other journals. My B.A. is from the University of Massachusetts at Boston and my M.F.A. from Florida State University. Since 2001 I have taught writing workshops full-time at the University of Colorado at Boulder. For a few samples of my work, see the Media etc. page on this site.

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Literature and Medicine

August 12, 2008 at 12:29 am (Books, Quotes, Surprises, Writers and Others, Writing)
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Today was a quiet day. Self watered back and front yards, then read in the living room, Gracie peacefully snoring at her feet. She also trolled the web (for hours — as evidenced by her aching neck!) And she landed (somehow) on a website for the Department of Medicine in the University of Minnesota.

Self couldn’t resist perusing the list of recommended readings. And a very interesting list it was, too. Self has a particular interest in reading “cross-over” writers from the medical field, writers such as Atul Gawande, Oliver Sacks and Abraham Verghese. Atul Gawande is represented on the list, as are books by Biloine Young (with the most intriguing title, My Heart It is Delicious), Sherman Alexie (The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, still one of self’s all-time favorites), Robert Olen Butler (A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain), Jean D’Haem (The Last Camel: True Stories of Somalia), Donna Gehrke-White (The Face Behind the Veil: The Extraordinary Lives of Muslim Women in America), Philip Gourevitch (We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda), Aleksander Hemon (Nowhere Man), and Ryszard Kapuscinski (The Shadow of the Sun).

And then there is this book, that was published by New Rivers Press quite some time ago:

* Lim, Shirley; Chua, Cheng Lok; Lim, Shirley Geok-Lin. Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing

The site has a short review, and self is most astonished to discover herself described as “well known” — !! To which self’s only response is a hearty, hubby-style BWAH-HA HA HA HA!!.

Without further ado, the review:

This anthology of American writers originally from Southeast Asia (Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaya, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam) includes poems and short stories by 41 “emerging” writers in English. The anthology has been divided into themes such as “Family,” “Eating,” “The Different Past,” and “Returnings.” Some of the writers are already well known (editor Lim, Marianne Villanueva), and the others, with one or two exceptions, have already been published. All the writers deal with making a life in the United States while recognizing their differences, adjustments, and traumas. Particularly poignant are poems and stories by Anh Quynh Bui, Aurora Harris, Hanh Hoang, Joseph O. Legaspi, Lim, Ira Sukrungruang, and Villanueva; but all the works are well written and thoughtful. The editors, both professors of literature at California universities, have chosen well. Recommended for public and academic libraries.

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Bino’s Gift

August 9, 2008 at 12:14 am (Books, Writers and Others)
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How cool is this?

Bino Realuyo posts on his website the covers of every book published by a Filipino American writer since 2005. Self is absolutely awestruck at the gorgeous array of cover art.

And here’s one more you should know about:

Helen Madamba Mossman’s awesome memoir, A Letter to My Father: Growing Up Filipino and American (University of Oklahoma Press, 2008 )

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The Short Review: Issue 10

August 8, 2008 at 2:13 am (Books, Quotes, Writers and Others)
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From the website:

Issue 10 has a truly international theme: three collections from Down Under, Chinese short-shorts in honour of the Olympics, stories of Filipino Americans. Also: two shots of science fiction, two authors with middle initials, a “bracing” anthology and a liberal sprinkling of fabulist fantasy.

In addition, the wonderful Tania Hershman, whose own story collection, The White Road, is just out from Salt Publishing, published an interview with self.

Please read and support this wonderful website, a real labor of love!

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Self Makes It to Barnes & Noble

August 4, 2008 at 9:54 pm (Books, Son, Writers and Others)
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Self made it to Barnes and Noble around noon, and that was after having watered by hand (eight buckets) and pruning her roses. A few of the leaves on her gardenia “First Love” were yellowing, the Rabble Rouser rose looked like it was quite dry, and all the roses on the Betty Boop were spent, but for the most part the garden seems to have survived hubby’s neglect.

This morning there were two e-mails from son: Could self please pay with her credit card for a Vatican tour that he and his traveling companion, Sean, want to take? Self examines the tour: It is three hours long, it covers the Basilica and the Pieta and the Sistine Chapel, but does not cover the Catacombs. For that, son will have to take another, more expensive tour. Hmmm . . .

As for hubby, the man was very involved in watching an exhibition basketball game between the U.S. and Russia when self walked in the door last night, fresh from her writing conference in Mendocino. He seemed mystifyingly depressed and taciturn last night and this morning but self has reached him at work (twice so far today, to discuss which Vatican tour would be the best bang for the buck, ha ha ha ha) and both times she seems to have caught him in mid-laugh. And self is not talking mere chuckles, here. She means loud, knee-slapping laughs, the kind that seem to go on and on and on, like so: BWAH-HA-HA-HA-HA !!! Will wonders never cease?

This morning, self heard the news that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature when self was still in grade school, who wrote The Cancer Ward and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, had passed away. Also, that Christine Applegate has breast cancer. Also, that Mary Kate Olsen is refusing to answer any questions about painkillers that Heath Ledger took that may have contributed to his accidental overdose.

And self discovered that her Barnes & Noble (which is one of the better ones, as far as fiction titles are concerned), did not have any of the novels of one of self’s favorite writers, Sandor Marai (He wrote Embers), but had almost everything written by Alice Munro, including Runaway, which is on self’s reading list.

And it is hot here, so very hot (at least compared to Mendocino). And self is trying not to think too much of the start of fall classes and the tooth that’s going to be pulled on Thursday.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

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Headlands Coffeehouse, Fort Bragg

August 1, 2008 at 12:14 am (Places, Son, Writers and Others)
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5:08 p.m., Fort Bragg — in a coffee shop called Headlands, sipping frozen caffe mocha. Fellow writer Andrew T. was already here, writing on his laptop, when Daphne and self waltzed in, looking for sustenance after a few hours spent exploring area thrift shops.

Self tried on blouses in all kinds of shiny metallic fabric! And bought a blouse that was electric teal! And bought the sweetest blue flannel nightgown! And Andrew tells us there is another neat shop just down the street, called Tangents!

How gorgeous is the day? The sky is absolutely blue (self would like to say “cloudless”). All the colors of the street jumped out at self with a hard-edged clarity. The thrift shops were full of interesting smells and musty oddities that brought self back to a memory of looking at a glass cabinet where her long deceased grandfather stored his collection of clay pipes.

Two perfect days in a row. Did self luck out or what???

Read the rest of this entry »

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Thea Ivens Had This Great Idea

July 31, 2008 at 4:01 am (Opportunities, Other Sites of Interest, Writers and Others)
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And that was, in her own words, “to connect, participate, collaborate, and create an audience for Filipino American artists and strengthen the diversity in the field of arts.”

And so she created this website: Filipino American Artists Network, which as far as I can tell she runs single-handedly.

And the website has a Fil-Am artists calendar which is called “FilAm Events.” Check it out here:

www.filamartists.com/2008/07/06/filam-calendar/

Better yet, post a listing.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

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By Preston Mark Stone, Whose Mother is Filipina

July 29, 2008 at 3:12 pm (Quotes, Voices, Writers and Others)
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White Power

To explain, for instance, this gas station clerk
who speaks to me in emphasized English, as though
my native language were something he heard in a
movie. I have to go back to my neighbors in Bakersfield,
who listened to metal and shaved their heads

because their neighborhood was filling up with spics,
niggers, fags and me. “Go back to the jungle!” they’d shout
at fruit pickers and drag queens, and I wondered what
imagined world they fought, what tropic in which
people swing from banana trees like crazed gay
Mexican lemurs. “Go back inside,” their mother told them

when she saw me watching from my porch, my face
brown with California sun, my eyes like slants of rice grain.
They vanished into their cluttered besieged house, the deadbolt
dropping as the door shut. To understand the deadbolt,
I have to go back to high school, to a boy who called me gook

every afternoon as he walked past me. His father was a veteran,
his brother a marine, my face the enemy’s face.
Every day for a year, he strolled by me and looked straight ahead
as he said gook in emphasized English, or chink, rice nigger,
slant-eye, Chinaman. The afternoon I caught him alone

and saw the swastika drawn on the back of his hand,
I punched him in the face until he curled up on the floor, arms
shielding his temples, and then I kicked him until
the police came. To explain why I was crying when my boot
met his belly, I have to go back to my first neighborhood

where, when I was eight, white people moved in.
Their sons were a little older, and loved to play cowboys
and Indians. They were the blond and fair frontiersmen,
the rest of us hordes of small dark Cherokee struck down
to make America. You two are Indian scouts, they said.
and you over there, you’re braves. Everyone was a cowboy
or an Indian, except for a little girl and me. We don’t need
no more Indians, they said. Too many
damn Indians already. You two, you’re horses.

We giggled until they pushed us to our hands and knees
and ordered us to eat grass. A year later, I would fight
one of them until he made me cry, but there on all fours,
I ate the grass. The little girl bawled, her mouth green
as money. Get along, they said. They drew
their pistols, and they rode us.

    — from The Missouri Review, Winter 2007

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July 2008: A Round-Up

July 25, 2008 at 4:42 pm (Books, Surprises, Writers and Others, Writing)
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Now that July is limping along to its end, and there will be no more of it until next year, self thinks this would be a good time to evaluate how the past few weeks have gone.

This month, self received excellent news about various Filipino writers:

    JoAnn Balingit, it was announced in Filipinas Magazine, became Delaware’s first Filipino American poet laureate.
    Luisa Igloria’s panel proposal for the Chicago AWP was accepted (”Archipelagos of Dust”), and self learned that she will be presenting along with Luisa, Karen Llagas, Grace Talusan, Reine Melvin, and Angela Narciso Torres.
    Paolo Javier launched LMFAO, published by OMG! press.

Self read: at the annual Foothill Writers Conference.

Self discovered a writer named Anis Shivani in Flyway.

Self was more than usually surprised this month:

    Elisabeth Hasselbeck broke down and cried on “The View.”
    Hubby belatedly informed self that his office was moving from Mountain View to south Fremont.
    Dearest Mum informed self that there are “no plain mistresses in Manila.”
    Self actually enjoyed seeing “Wanted.”
    Dearest Mum scared self exceedingly with tales of how “depressed and weak” Ying was, but each time self called Ying, self found her feeling “up” and perky.
    And, just this morning, self awoke to hear news of a Qantas jet landing in Manila with a gaping hole in its fuselage (thereby putting self’s feverish imagination in mind of “The Twilight Zone” movie in which John Lithgow goes absolutely bananas because no one will believe that he’s seen a gremlin on the wing of his plane)

As for books self read:

    The whole world knows already about self’s exceeding admiration for Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
    Self read another good book: Scott Huler’s Defining the Wind, an account of how the Beaufort Wind Scale came into existence.
    Self re-discovered the philosophical writings of Mencius.

Most important of all, self discovered that in spite of everything, she is still able to write. Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

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