- Do not rely on power.
- Do not rely on social status.
- Do not rely on wealth.
Sage Thoughts From Master Shih Cheng-Yen
September 15, 2018 at 6:16 am (Lists, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended)
Tags: advice, Fridays, wisdom
Saturday Reads: GOING HOME TO A LANDSCAPE
September 8, 2018 at 2:57 pm (anthologies, Artists and Writers, Books, Filipino Writers, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Asian American Writers, Events, poetry, Readings, The Philippines
NO SLEEP
by Catalina Cariaga
Moonlight fills our bedroom
through slats of open blinds.
The brightness of ninety-nine horizontal candles
reveals your expectant smile.
Don’t touch my breasts
while I’m reading,
You knew I was a writer
when you married me.
Copies on sale, today only, at the Redwood City Public Library, 1044 Middlefield, Redwood City.
Stay tuned.
“Lamentation” by Veronica Montes: An Excerpt
September 7, 2018 at 3:36 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Filipino Writers, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, short story collections, Women Writers)
Tags: Asian American Writers, Events, Filipino writers, Readings, Redwood City, The Philippines
Cover of Benedicta Takes Wing by Monterey Artist Jean Vengua
The collection is called Benedicta Takes Wing, and you are crazes if you are anywhere near the Redwood City Main Library (1044 Middlefield at Jefferson) and you do not drive straight over on Saturday, 8 Sept, 2:30 p.m., the Fireplace Room, to hear Veronica Montes and fellow writer Lillian Howan read, from their respective books! Crazes!
Veronica Montes, author of Benedicta Takes Wing: Stories (Philippine America Literary House, 2017)
Self will excerpt from Lillian’s book, The Charm Buyers, next.
“Lamentation” opens thus:
Her name was like a song: Maria Josefa Gabriela Cariño Silang. I wish I had given it to her.
* * * *
In the province of Ilocos Sur, there is a barrio called Canlogan. It sits in the shadow of a mountain range that rises up like an enormous hand telling you to stop, telling you there is no way to pass. But the mountains are not as impenetrable as they seem; they are sliced through with rivers, each one running swift and strong. This is where my daughter, who I did not name, was born.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Lillian Howan and Veronica Montes: Saturday, Sept. 8, at the Redwood City Main Library
September 6, 2018 at 7:05 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Filipino Writers, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, short story collections, Women Writers)
Tags: Asian American Writers, Events, novel, Readings, Redwood City
Two wonderful Asian American women writers are coming to Redwood City for reading and book-signings!
By Lillian Howan, Published by University of Hawai’i Press, 2017
A collection of short stories by the great Wakako Yamauchi who recently passed away. Edited by Lillian Howan, published by Hawai’i University Press.
Veronica Montes, author of Benedicta Takes Wing: Stories (Philippine America Literary House, 2017)
Cover of Benedicta Takes Wing by Monterey Artist Jean Vengua
Saturday, 8 September 2018
2:30 pm
FIRESIDE ROOM, REDWOOD CITY MAIN LIBRARY
1400 Middlefield (corner Jefferson Avenue)
Redwood City
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
The Bataan Peninsula, 1942
August 29, 2018 at 10:38 pm (Books, Personal Bookshelf, Philippine History)
Tags: history, The Philippines, war literature, World War II
Looking through her bookshelves, self never runs short of reading material.
Reading Face of Empire: United States-Philippine Relations, 1898 – 1946, by Frank Hindman-Golay:
On January 1942, “a quartermaster inventory revealed that food stocked on the peninsula comprised a thirty-day supply of unbalanced rations for one-hundred thousand men . . . This shortfall was serious enough, but it was compounded by the existence of eighty-thousand USAFFE troops and twenty-six thousand civilians on Bataan . . . The success of Japanese arms in the first month of the war left little prospect that USAFFE could be supplied from the outside. On January 5, MacArthur ordered the troops and civilians on Bataan reduced to half-rations. At this rate, the USAFFE stocks would be exhausted in less than two months . . .
“. . . most critical was the failure to deal with malaria. One medical officer serving on Bataan later estimated that 95 percent of all those on the peninsula during the first quarter of 1942 contracted the disease.
“To prevent the debilitating consequences of this mosquito-carried disease, the entire defense force should have been taking quinine or some substitute drug. But the supply of such drugs on Bataan was so short that they were reserved for the treatment of active cases of malaria. As a result, the rate of infection increased steadily as the disease was transmitted from those already infected.
In late March, General Wainwright “reported to Washington that food on Bataan would last only until April “at one-third ration, poorly balanced and very deficient in vitamins . . . The troops will be starved into submission.”
The Bataan peninsula fell in April 1942. Corregidor was able to hold on one month longer. There were 12,000 people on Corregidor, as opposed to 100,000-plus on the Bataan Peninsula. And when Bataan fell, this is how the people on Corregidor knew it: there was a deathly silence from across the water, instead of the constant sound of artillery barrages. And then smoke began to rise.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
The Fortress: Reading The 48 Laws of Power, by Robert Greene
August 17, 2018 at 10:05 pm (Books, Lists, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended)
Tags: advice, Fridays, politics, Robert Greene, wisdom
- Do not build fortresses to protect yourself. Isolation is dangerous.
— Law # 18 of The 48 Laws of Power
Redwood City Public Library Author Series, Fall 2018
August 16, 2018 at 12:12 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Lists, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, short story collections, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Asian American Writers, book lists, discoveries, Events, fiction, novel, Readings, Redwood City
Fireplace Room, Downtown Library, Redwood City
The first reading of the series was Holocaust Survivor, Public Speaker and Memoirist Sylvia Ruth Gutmann, reading from her book A Life Rebuilt: The Remarkable Transformation of a War Orphan. It was held two nights ago, in the Fireplace Room of the Main Library, and self is most happy to report the reading was a resounding success: a sizeable audience packed the room. High Fives to Sylvia Ruth Gutman for kicking off the series on such an auspicious note!
The second reading is a Women Authors Panel featuring self, Lillian Howan and Veronica Montes. Saturday, Sept. 8, 2:30 p.m., at the Fireplace Room of the Downtown Library. Self is a long-time Redwood City resident, and she’s so pleased to be reading with two of her favorite writers!
Veronica Montes’s first book, Benedicta Takes Wing and Other Stories (Philippine American Literary House, 2018), is a sparkling collection of stories about Filipino Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Lillian Howan’s first novel, The Charm Buyers (University of Hawai’i Press, 2017) is an extraordinary and powerful love story, set in Tahiti during the last years of French nuclear testing in the Pacific, in the 1990s.
About self: She’s published three collections of short stories (Ginseng and Other Tales From Manila, Mayor of the Roses, and The Lost Language) and a novella, Jenalyn (Vagabondage Press), that was a finalist for the 2014 Saboteur Award. She has stories published or forthcoming in Quarterly West, Bellingham Review, Crab Orchard Review, Juked, and Prairie Schooner.
Books will be available for purchase and signing.
The last event in the series is a reading by Vanessa Garcia, reading from See You at the 7: Stories from the Bay Area’s Last Original Mile House. The 7 Mile House in Brisbane is the only Bay Area mile house operating at its original location. Garcia will read on Sept. 26, 7 p.m., in the Downtown Library Community Room.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Poetry Sunday: Luisa A. Igloria
August 5, 2018 at 6:05 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Filipino poetry, Filipino Writers, Links, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Sundays, Women Writers)
Tags: Asian American Writers, Just published, literary awards, poetry, praise
Cascade
What I want is immediacy, the nub
of the moment processed without doubt
into my side, the tremor that comes
sometimes before sight, before taste
or touch. Whatever might be lost, don’t
take that away from me: stars pouring
out of the firmament, not ever holding
back the flood over my small ladle.
— included in the collection The Buddha Wonders If She Is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing, 2018)
Luisa A. Igloria is a poet, a creative writing professor (Old Dominion University), a 2014 winner of the May Swenson Prize and, most recently, the 2018 winner of the Center for Book Arts’ Letterpress Chapbook Competition.
Cost of Paper, vol. 5 (published by 1888 Center, Orange, CA)
August 5, 2018 at 4:12 am (anthologies, Artists and Writers, Books, Conversations, Filipino Writers, Links, Personal Bookshelf, Publishers, Recommended, short story collections, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: dystopia, fantasy, Just published, Literary Magazines, Saturday, short story, space fantasy
Sadly, both the AWP2019 panel proposals self was included in were rejected. One was a mixed-genre panel, the brainchild of Philadelphia poet Anne-Adele Wight. The other was a Quarterly West panel on experimental fiction.
Nevertheless, self still has much to celebrate. Such as, her story This Is End being in The Cost of Paper, vol. 5 (It’s the last story in the anthology). The anthology’s editor was Julianne Berokoff.
Self just had another story picked up for the Winter 2018 issue of Prairie Schooner, due out this December. And the two stories couldn’t be more different: the one in The Cost of Paper is space fantasy, the Prairie Schooner story is straight-up realism.
This Is End is the third story in a cycle about a boy named Dragon, a missing girl named Her, a teacher named Fire Lizard, a bully named Big, the bully’s friend Drinker, and a new student named Knot.
Dragon saw Big knock Her out cold (in the middle of a class, why). Her never came back to class, but sometimes Dragon thinks he sees her waving to him from a window of an abandoned space station called the Kobayashi Maru. Ever since then, he’s been itching for revenge.
Big doesn’t show up to class one day, Knot asks Dragon:
“Is it true? Tumor he had?”
We spot-check each other for tumors. We’re so afraid of it.
“Ecchymosis?” Knot persists.
Here’s a link to 1888 Center’s Bookstore.
Stay tuned.
amreading: Filipino short story writer Gilda Cordero-Fernando
July 29, 2018 at 7:45 pm (anthologies, Artists and Writers, Books, Filipino Writers, Lists, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, short story collections, Sundays, Women Writers)
Tags: book lists, Ateneo, The Philippines
from “Hothouse” :
Tia Dolor has been around the world several times, but towns and cities — Nikko and Capri and Copenhagen — all look alike to her: the same buildings, the same churches, the same automobiles. In fact, she is hard put to tell one country from another except from what they sell in the shops. And she has something to bring home for everybody — no one is ever forgotten — her suitcases are cleaned out of everything she has brought home including some that she went away with. And if you expect her somehow to look more chic (a new hairdo, a new suit) you are sorely disappointed: she minces down the ramp wearing the squirrel coat from Hong Kong and her black lizard skin wedgies.
Filipino (Prose) Literature in English, A Few Recommended Titles from the Golden Age:
- The Distance to Andromeda and Other Stories, by Gregorio C. Brillantes
- A Season of Grace, by N. V. M. Gonzalez
- Children of the Ash-Covered Loam and Other Stories, by N. V. M. Gonzalez
- The Bamboo Dancers, a novel by N. V. M. Gonzalez
- Now and At the Hour and Other Stories, by Aida L. Rivera
- Brother, My Brother: Stories, by Bienvenido Santos
- You Lovely People, by Bienvenido Santos
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
