April 4, 2021 at 5:27 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Links, Personal Bookshelf, Philippine History, Recommended, short story collections, Women Writers)
Tags: Asian American Writers, Filipino writers, history, literary awards, Saturday
More about the theme for April: Bright Squares
Self will attempt to post squares every day through April.
This installment (#4) is all about BRIGHT BOOK COVERS.
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
March 20, 2021 at 4:45 am (Artists and Writers, Filipino Writers, Surprises, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Asian American Writers, fairy tales, fantasy, flash fiction, Fridays, Marianne Villanueva
SPINNING
by Marianne Villanueva
On a certain night, a good woman sat spinning by candlelight, her husband and her children having gone to bed long before. Suddenly, a great tiredness came upon her. She put a hand to her brow and exclaimed “Ah, me.” Just then, the cottage door burst open and a knight came in, bringing with him the dark.
(NOTE: Self used to think this story needed more. It doesn’t. Moral of the story: Anything can happen. Drumroll, Ta-ra! She’s self-publishing her micro. On Friday the 19th of March 2021. Also, it’s copyrighted. Do not re-publish without Acknowledgment)
February 18, 2021 at 7:56 pm (Uncategorized)
Tags: Asian American Writers, COVID Writing, first sentence, happiness, Just published, Literary Magazines, short story, The Philippines, Western Humanities Review, writing process
Self has a story in the latest issue of Western Humanities Review. She based it on a true story about a ferry disaster in the Philippine Sea. And it all began with the first sentence:
I didn’t like the blind woman.
February 17, 2021 at 6:09 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Conversations, Family, Filipino Writers, Food and Drink, Links, Lists, Personal Bookshelf, Publishers, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: Asian American Writers, COVID Reading, Events, Literary Magazines, opportunities, poetry, Readings
Angela Narciso Torres is the author of Blood Orange (Willow Books) and What Happens Is Neither (Four Way Books); and winner of the 2019 Yeats Poetry Prize. Her recent work appears in Poetry, Missouri Review, and PANK.
Angela and two other Four Way Books poets, Andrea Cohen and Rodney Terich, are reading tonight online at an event hosted by Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, NY. Reading starts at 7 p.m. EST (that’s 4 p.m. PST) You can find out more from the Canio’s Books Calendar of Events.
SUNDOWNING (An excerpt)
for my mother, Carmen
The sweetest meat clings to the bone,
my mother says, knifing her steak.
Carmen. Silver spade on my tongue.Mahjong nights, her father and mother gone,
she cried herself to sleep. Blamed in the morning
for her mother’s losing hand. Unlucky tears!The sweetest meat — she begins
at dinner, tearing off a chicken leg.
What will she recall by morning?Named for Our Lady of Mount Carmel,
— from To The Bone, by Angela Narciso Torres (Sundress Publications, 2019)
she pinned brown scapulars under our shirts,
wet stamps that cleaved to our skin.
February 17, 2021 at 12:09 am (anthologies, Artists and Writers, Books, Family, Links, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, short story collections, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Asian American Writers, Events, Readings, short story, short story collections
Nine more days till the Redwood City Library online reading for ms. aligned volume 3! (Thursday, Feb. 25, 5:30 p.m. – 6:45 p.m. PST) Much thanks to the library outreach staff, who gave us the slot and prepared beautiful flyers. And much thanks to series editor Pat Matsueda for coming up with the idea of a series focused on women writing about men.
Super-excited. Register here.
One of the readers on Feb. 25 is Donna Lee Miele. Self has just finished re-reading her fantastic story, “Crocodile Teeth.” From her Contributor Bio in ms. aligned 3:
An excerpt:
I was scared of Edward’s sister. After Edward’s parents got lost looking for work upriver, she took over their grandma’s house like she’d just been waiting for the chance. She bullied Edward, she bullied their grandma, and she even bullied the guys that started hanging around, who offered everything from repairs to the wornout old house to actual money for the chance to date her. They thought she’d be easy because she and Edward were orphans. She didn’t even pretend to be nice to them. She had a look so cold she could make the bag shrivel between your legs.
If you were one of those guys, and you tried to come up on her grandma’s veranda, she would stand on its edge, look down on you, and say something like, “Take yourself to the beach and remember me to your family,” meaning Last Beach, though even she wouldn’t say that right out. Last Beach is full of whores of every kind; and every one of them, of course, is someone’s family.
February 6, 2021 at 1:38 am (anthologies, Artists and Writers, Books, Links, Publishers, Recommended, short story collections, Women Writers)
Tags: Asian American Writers, Events, Fridays, Readings, Redwood City, short story
ms aligned 3 is a collaboration between El Léon Literary Arts (Berkeley, CA) and Manoa Books, Hawai’i. More information can be found here.
Upcoming Online Event: Redwood City Library Reading, Thursday, Feb. 25, 5:30 p.m. – 6:45 p.m. Register here.
“Daniel attempted to lead me; I tried to lead him. We struggled. I pushed him on the shoulder; he pushed me back. I kicked him in the shin. Hunching, he grabbed my right hand in both of his and bit me hard.”
— Excerpt from Angela Nishimoto’s “Sex Education: A Tragicomedy, Part II” in ms aligned 3
February 5, 2021 at 9:10 pm (Artists and Writers, Family, Women Writers)
Tags: Asian American Writers, COVID Reading, Fridays, poetry, The New Yorker
To Be a Daughter
And To Have a Daughter(An Excerpt)
can forecast at-odds relationships
— from The New Yorker, 23 March 2020
especially when the mother hazards to write
while keeping the baby safe
from herself as she and the baby wail,
one in the crib, the other on the floor, to wail
with the vacuum cleaner so the daughter
can’t hear mama-drowning, so the new relationship
isn’t all arithmetic and geometry, all right
angles barely connecting. What is left
at dusk, still tender and safe,
February 1, 2021 at 9:51 pm (anthologies, Artists and Writers, Books, Links, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, short story collections, Women Writers)
Tags: Asian American Writers, COVID Reading, Events, Mondays, Readings, short story
My whole life I’ve been a model of responsibility and good sense, and you know what? It’s not a recipe for joy. I follow the rules. I never eat more than half a bowl of rice because I’m diabetic, although lately I allow myself a small bowl of red bean soup, or a tiny piece of cheesecake, no bigger than two fingers. I deserve to live a little, don’t I?
— “Teddy” by Grace Loh Prasad, Ms Aligned 3, edited by Rebecca Thomas
Grace Loh Prasad was born in Taiwan and raised in New Jersey and Hong Kong before settling in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College and is an alumna of the VONA Workshop for writers of color along with residencies at Hedgebrook and the Ragdale Foundation. Her piece, “Unfinished Translation,” is in the new issue of Khora.
Grace will be reading with contributors to Ms Aligned in an on-line event hosted by the Redwood City Library on Thursday, Feb. 25 at 5:30 p.m. – 6:45 p.m.
January 28, 2021 at 4:30 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Dearest Mum, Family, Filipino Writers, Personal Bookshelf, Pianos, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: Asian American Writers, Crab Orchard Review, Just published, literary awards, memories, poetry
from Luisa A. Igloria’s collection Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Crab Orchard Review & Southern Illinois University Press, 2020)
Mother: Three Pictures (An Excerpt)
She is beautiful in that photograph where they are dancing in a
roomful of other couples. She has a beauty mole penciled on her
cheek, slightly to the right of her lip. Her eyebrows are two perfect
arches, her hair a dark beehive. I think there are dots on her dress.
Where is this photograph? I would very much like to have it.
The above, Dearest Mum, when she was a young Filipina pianist in New York City, 1950s.
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
She is beautiful in that photograph where they are dancing in a
January 8, 2021 at 10:25 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Links, Lists, Memoirs, Personal Bookshelf, Publishers, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: Asian American Writers, book lists, Just published, literary awards, novel, reading lists, Small Press
The following do not contain all the long-listed books, only the ones that self thinks she will actually get around to reading in 2021 (and one she has already read, which she highly recommends: The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories, by Caroline Kim). They’re a mix of memoirs, novels, and short story collections.
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Mainly through the lens of a Nikon
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"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference." The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost
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