June 9, 2017 at 2:33 pm (Artists and Writers, Conversations, Filipino Writers, Food and Drink, Links, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Annaghmakerrig, artists residency, breakfast, California, coffee, desserts, Fridays, Ireland, memories, Tyrone Guthrie Centre, websites, writing process
Self originally posted a different photo for Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge, but that was because she hadn’t read the prompt, only looked at the title, boo.
The prompt is supposed to be about finding Photo Ops In Your Own House.
Since self hasn’t been in her own house in years, here are the closest things to it:
- Her writing table at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig, with her cup of coffee next to her MacBook Air. She always starts the day with a pot of coffee.
- A friend’s house in San Gabriel, CA
Crushing the Writing: Thursday, 2 July
Having breakfast outside with Connie Ignacio Genato, friends since grade school in Manila
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
1 Comment
June 5, 2017 at 10:30 am (Conversations, destinations, Explorers, Filipino Writers, Places, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: dystopia, fantasy, flash fiction, humor, Mondays, Paris, short story, writing process
Self worked on this story in Paris. It’s about the end of the world, naturalement.
A pink bathosphere named Pinkie Pi (Joke, joke, joke!), navigated by a pair of squabbling men, is the last to leave the surface of the planet (A new city awaits on the Ocean Floor):
We’re going under.
When?
Today.
Just like that.
Oui. N’est-ce pas. What do you think?
You’re talking about under.
That’s what I’m saying, oui.
That down there, on the ocean floor, we can — je ne sais quoi.
Yes.
In the shift and roll of waves . . .
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Leave a Comment
June 4, 2017 at 7:04 pm (Artists and Writers, Filipino Writers, Links, Publishers, Sundays, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: dystopia, Events, fantasy, Literary Magazines, memories, Readings, restaurants, short story, Washington DC
Read it at Sixth Engine in Washington DC, at a group reading organized by Quarterly West in conjunction with AWP February 2017. The editors took a chance with this one, it’s all fractured syntax and stars a professor named Fire Lizard. Self is writing a sequel right now.
What a blast:
Quarterly West reading at Sixth Engine, Washington DC, February 2017
Discussion of the First Corollary: What is average is perfect. Thoughts dark as dark. Big arguing with her. But but but. Her winking at me behind his back. Me thinking: sunlight and glass.
Leave a Comment
June 3, 2017 at 9:24 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Family, Filipino Writers, Lists, postaday, Publishers, Relatives, short story collections, Traveling, Venice, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: AWP, Los Angeles, Mayor of the Roses, memories, Miami University Press, postaday, postaweek, teaching, UCLA Extension, Wordpress, writing conferences
This week’s Daily Post Photo Challenge is FRIENDS.
Which is a very fun theme!
Three Cheers for UCLA Extension’s Writers Program! Love the people. Here they are, doing Spin the Wheel at the 2016 AWP Book Fair in Los Angeles.
Keith Tuma of Miami University Press, at the 2016 AWP Book Fair in Los Angeles
Self and Irene, Café Flor, San Marco Square, Venice: November, 2015
- Nutschell Ann Windsor, Program Administrator, UCLA Extension Writers Program (She writes, too!)
- Keith Tuma, Director of Miami University Press, which published self’s Mayor of the Roses, the first in their fiction series
- Amy Toland at last year’s AWP Book Fair in Los Angeles
- Irene Lacson, niece and travel buddy
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Leave a Comment
May 9, 2017 at 1:55 pm (Artists and Writers, Filipino Writers, Links, postaday, Sayings, Surprises, Traveling, Women Writers)
Tags: art, Cork, discoveries, humor, Ireland, memories, postaday, postaweek, Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Wordpress
Self must admit, this past week’s Photo Challenge — DANGER! — has been tricky. She’s decided to keep her interpretations straightforward and focus on signage or warning symbols.
- Detail of a nautical map in the Time Traveller’s Bookshop, Skibbereen, West Cork: This is one of the most intricate maps self has ever seen. But of course, it had to be. Lives depended on the correct soundings.
Detail of Nautical Map Showing, Self Thinks, West Cork
- A Sketch by Bernadette Burns, Artist from Sherkin Island, off Skibbereen, West Cork: It’s a study for a work-in-progress.
Bernadette said she did this “for fun”!
- London City Airport attached this to self’s suitcase, when she was on the way to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, in March. Self’s suitcases are always heavy: they’re filled with books. One Irish cabbie dubbed self “a book addict.”
London City Airport attached this warning label to one of her suitcases, last March.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
1 Comment
April 28, 2017 at 6:58 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Filipino Writers, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: Fridays, poetry
Landscape, With Sudden Rain, Wet Blooms, and a Van Eyck Painting (an excerpt)
— by Luisa A. Igloria
Who else loves his own decorum as I do? The names
of trees are lovely in Latinate. I can’t recite those,
can only name their changing colors: flush
and canary, stripped and rose; or moan like the voice
of a cello in the leaves, imitating human speech.
That artful bit of landscape description we encountered in the first couplet? Now we can understand that was an act of avoidance, of self-distraction. I can name the colors, the speaker tells us, or I can merely moan. Naming “the changing colors” becomes a means both of revealing pain and containing it, just as these decorous couplets provide kind of orderly structure in which to organize this poem’s song of lament. There is the lovely paradox: the poem is a moan, but it is a song too.
To paraphrase: the written piece is a moan, but it is a song too.
Music is not an outcry, or an only one.
A piece of writing is not an outcry, or an only one; it is a made thing that testifies to our persistence, and to a faith in the power and necessity of art. Which sometimes does nothing but make an outcry bearable — but that gesture, in itself, can be quite enough.
— Mark Doty, from the Foreword to Luisa A. Igloria’s collection, Ode to the Heart Small as a Pencil Eraser (Winner of the 2014 May Swenson Award)
Leave a Comment
April 27, 2017 at 7:40 am (Books, Conversations, Family, Filipino Writers, Memoirs, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Sayings, Women Writers)
Tags: memoir, nonfiction
The friend is Kathleen J. Burkhalter, and her memoir is called The Greatest of These Is Love: Selections From Kathleen’s Celebration of Daily Life, edited by David Bell
- It takes courage to begin writing because to write is to reveal. When you live in a critical environment, it is hard to write authentically. Even to begin writing is an act of bravery. But on the other hand, writing is a form of liberation. Like singers who sing, or composers who make music, or artists who paint, the use of one’s talent is an essential element of being happy.
— p. 116, The Greatest of These Is Love, vol. III
Kathleen Joaquin Burkhalter was born in Augusta, Georgia and grew up in Baguio, Mountain Province, in the Philippines. Her mother was from plantation families in Pampanga and Marinduque, and her father was from a colonial Georgia family. Kathleen would proudly say, “I am 100% Filipino and 100% American.”
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Leave a Comment
April 17, 2017 at 10:19 am (Artists and Writers, Filipino Writers, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Annaghmakerrig, art, inspiration, Ireland, Mondays, writing process
Writing. Writing and reading. Like mad.
Also, checking Facebook, lol
The card on the MacBook is from Jacinta Oreilly, an artist from Dublin.
The small picture taped to my keyboard is from Bernadette Burns, an artist from Skibbereen, West Cork.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Leave a Comment
April 12, 2017 at 10:04 am (Filipino Writers, Links, Places, postaday, Traveling, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Annaghmakerrig, happiness, inspiration, Ireland, postaday, postaweek, short story, Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Wordpress, writing process
- Share a photo that depicts your interpretation of security . . . It could be a worry stone you keep in your pocket or that favorite tee shirt that makes you feel awesome every time you put it on.
— Krista, The Daily Post
I can never be creative unless I have an absolute feeling of security. I always have that in Annaghmakerrig.
In the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, I sleep next to my writing desk. Because life is too short.
Main House, the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig
The Main House, Under a Crescent Moon
Finished a story yesterday! A continuation to Magellan’s Mirror. Also, ordering more copies of self’s Mayor of the Roses.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
2 Comments
April 6, 2017 at 11:26 am (Artists and Writers, Explorers, Filipino Writers, Places, Recommended, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: dystopia, fantasy, flash fiction, Juked.com, Literary Magazines, Philippines, short story
“First Life” first line:
- Ever since they moved our colony from Tonle Sap to the Philippines, my mind hasn’t been the same.
Leave a Comment
« Older entries
