Summer Reading: “Faith, Love, Time, and Dr. Lazaro”

Last night, while The Man and self were having dinner in front of the TV, we heard on the news that a second Bay Area resident has died from the A(H1N1) virus, this one a middle-aged man who had no prior history of susceptibility.  And yet, here we are, still going about, still watching movies, still driving here and there, and the news makes no difference.

Only, it is difficult to sleep.

Dearest Mum is wherever she is, self doesn’t bother to call anymore.

On self’s lap is a big, heavy book, with the story “Faith, Love, Time and Dr. Lazaro.”  The author is Greg C. Brillantes.  He, like self, like self’s father, like her three brothers and husband, was an Atenista.

The story is about a doctor in some un-named provincial town (There is mention of a San Miguel Bridge —  where would that be?).  The doctor has to make a night call, so his teen-aged son offers to drive.  And while they are driving, the doctor thinks of “light-years, black space, infinite distances; in the unmeasured universe, man’s life flared briefly and was gone, traceless in the void.”

Self thinks these are extremely heavy thoughts.

And no wonder.  A few paragraphs on, an image comes to the doctor’s mind:  “slashed wrists, part of the future dead in a boarding house room,” the doctor’s other son.

Brillantes writes:  “Sorrow lay in ambush among the years.”

What. a. beautiful. sentence.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

Going Back: “God’s Will”

This is a story from self’s first book, Ginseng and Other Tales From Manila. This morning, after son and Rebecca had left for the city, self was in a contemplative mood. Alone in the house (hubby had taken the dogs for a walk), self began riffling through her first book, which Margarita Donnelly at Calyx published, thereby saving self’s life, almost twenty years ago. (When self types that, she has to stop dead. Time is indeed a river. Self was in her 20s when she wrote this story. No one in her family had yet died.)

Without further ado, an excerpt from “God’s Will” :

I hear my father again. His room is on the other side of this wall, his bed pressed up against it so I can tell from the creaking of the bed springs when he is having a bad night.

My wife Teresa and I lie awake in the darkness, listening. Neither of us speaks. No matter how tired we are, we always wake at the slightest sound. Tonight my father is weeping.

I get up and go into my father’s room. He is sitting up in bed, saying over and over, “I’m afraid.” I take him in my arms. I tell him to stop. But he will not stop. So then I try to shame him: “Is this how a del Pilar behaves?” All his life he was formal and dignified, and even though my mother said he was lazy and not a good provider, at least he had his pride.

*  *  *

In what can only be called a coincidence of monumental proportions, self (just a few minutes ago) happened to stumble across a post that poet Barbara Jane Reyes wrote two months ago (March 2009), because she’d just finished reading Ginseng and Other Tales From Manila.  Self is so moved!  Waaah!  Barb, you’ve reduced self to a mass of quivering jello!  Self links to it here.

Charles Tan: “A Retrospective on Diseases for Sale”

What puzzled many experts were the vectors the company used to transmit its products. Upon confirming your order, you would wake up the next day, infected with the disease. There was no need to check your mailbox for any packages. Diseases for Sale had a money-back guarantee on its efficiency. This immediate and inexplicable transportation baffled governments who were hoping to earn income from transportation taxes. Savvy industrialists similarly wondered how they could duplicate the same delivery model for their own businesses. The less innocent failed in their attempts to divine the company’s secret method of delivery, and this is arguably why Diseases for Sale lasted until the 22nd century, outliving its copycats and derivatives which only succeeded in reverse-engineering its earlier commodities but not its services. The most popular theory was that the email confirming your purchase orded included an encrypted psychosomatic code, which activated various proteins in the human body that replicated the effects of the disease you ordered.

from Charles Tan’s “A Retrospective on Diseases for Sale,” in Philippine Speculative Fiction, vol. IV, edited by Dean Francis Alfar and Nikki Alfar. Read the complete story here.

Charles A. Tan is the co-editor of the Philippine Speculative Fiction Sampler and his fiction has appeared in publications such as The Digest of Philippine Genre Stories and Philippine Speculative Fiction. He has conducted interviews for The Nebula Awards and The Shirley Jackson Awards, as well as for online magazines such as SF Crowsnest and SFScope. He is a regular contributor to sites like SFF Audio and Game Cryer. You can visit his blog, Bibliophile Stalker, where he posts book reviews, interviews, and essays.

Oh, George Saunders

You broke self’s heart, especially with your story “The Wavemaker Falters” (from the collection CivilWarLand in Bad Decline), which was the last thing self read before falling asleep (and sleeping for the next seven hours —  yahay!):  your touching story of the husband who lies in wait behind a soda machine while the love of his life emerges from a manager’s office “looking flushed and happy.”  But even better was what happened afterwards, when your narrator confronted his wife and she said she was “going to continue no matter what,” and he then ran away to somewhere he could look at “starving pronghorns” coming down from the hills to “lick salt from the headstones” of a cemetery.  And the ending literally, literally had self crying and cheering simultaneously.

The only thing self didn’t like was the title, for she wishes it could have been simply “The Wavemaker” instead of “The Wavemaker Falters.”

The other stories (“Isabelle” and “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline”) have been pretty funny, too, and now self is reading something with a 400-pound narrator.  Naturally the story begins with an episode of epic humiliation  (Did self just write that?  Episode and Epic?  And to think she never thought she was much good at onomatopeia!)

Page 52:

Up in the sky are wild clouds that make me think of Tahiti and courageous sailors on big sinking wooden ships.  Meanwhile here’s me, a grown man with a joystick-burn on his thumb.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

Unbelievable!

Today was just unbelievable, dear blog readers!  After hubby mosied off to the office (Self slept at 2, reading a most fascinating article in Vanity Fair written by William Langewiesche, about the recent hijacking of a French cruise ship by Somali pirates, months before the incident with the Maersk ship —  and very riveting it is, too, perhaps self will blog about it later on!), self had barely settled down to read when —  she was struck by lightning!

No, she had a thought.  And this thought was so remarkable that it caused her to take one more look at a story she’d been tweaking for years, a story triggered by a

Breaking News!

The Lost Language, self’s new story collection (which includes “The Hand,” which won the Juked Fiction Prize in 2007), will be published in the Philippines by Anvil Press.

It means a lot, a lot, a lot to self, that she be published in her home country.  Thank you, oh estimable Karina Bolasco!   You made self’s day!

Stay tuned, dear blog readers!

The Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest

The Kenyon Review will begin accepting submissions for the second annual Kenyon Review Short Fiction Prize on February 1, 2009. The contest is open to all writers under 30 years of age. Submissions must be 1,200 words or less to qualify for the contest. Richard Ford will be the final judge.

The contest winner will be receive a full scholarship to attend the 2009 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, June 20-27, in beautiful Gambier, Ohio. In addition, the winning story will be published in a special section in the Winter 2010 issue of The Kenyon Review.

Submissions will be accepted beginning February 1, 2009, and concluding February 28, 2009. Entries must be submitted through the Review’s website, where an entry form will be available. Find the full contest guidelines here.

Kanlaon’s First Book Salon: Featuring Tania Hershman, author of THE WHITE ROAD AND OTHER STORIES

For the past few months, Tania Hershman, founder and editor of the great literary website, The Short Review, has been doing a “virtual book tour,” visiting blogs around the world in conjunction with the launch of her first book, The White Road and Other Stories.  Self was deeply honored that she chose Kanlaon as one of her stops.  For the past day, self has been conducting  an illuminating conversation with Tania (who lives in Jerusalem, so there’s a bit of a time difference there!)  Below are my questions and her answers.  Enjoy!

What attracts you to the short story form, and would you ever consider writing a novel?

I love the short story, for me a great story story is like a punch in the gut, it leaves you winded, reeling. It imprints itself on you not in spite of being short but because of its brevity. A novel can’t do what a short story does, and nor should it. I don’t believe in comparing short stories and novels any more than I would compare a poem and a film script. Yes, they are all made up of written words, but they are so different in form, in aspiration. I may write a novel, I may write a poem, or a screenplay. I can’t say now. It depends on the story and what the story demands.

Self-publishing is a huge industry now; Robert Frost’s first collection was self-published, as were a number of other poets and writers now in the ‘literary canon.’ Do you think this is the way a young, emerging writer should go?

To be honest, I don’t know much about self-publishing, who is doing it and where. We began a few months ago accepting self-published collections for review on The Short Review, understanding that in the current climate it is incredibly hard for a short story writer to find a publisher, but we also have several criteria, one of which is that some of the stories have been previously published. In other words, someone other than the writer has read them. I was very fortunate in finding a wonderful and dynamic independent  publisher, Salt,  who offered me a book deal, and there will always be the prestige associated with being paid (even a very small amount!) to publish a book rather than paying out the money yourself. I would advise a young emerging writer to send out his or her stories individually, to build up a “writing resume”, to spread their words, before they consider a collection. Whoever publishes it, a book is a lot of work!

How do you think writers will be affected by the current world-wide recession (in terms of getting emerging writers published, will there be more difficulty?)

Well, it’s never been easy. I don’t know much about economics but there are some who say that the current economic climate might make publishers more adventurous and less reliant on the whims of their sales teams, who knows?!

Has managing The Short Review helped your creativity?

Oh yes, most definitely! I read and read and read short stories, and not only that, I read them very closely when I review a book, and so I see what I love, what I don’t, and, more importantly, why. I have been introduced to so many amazing writers, and seeing what they do and how they do it gives me permission, in a sense, to try new things with my writing, to experiment outside the traditional frameworks.