Sentence of the Day: Mia Tijam

• And before you think that I’m delusional, let me tell you how I met the dragon. — from “Waiting for Agua de Mayo,” Story # 2 in Mia Tijam’s collection, Flowers for Thursday

About Mia Tijam:

Mia Tijam is acknowledged as one of the editors who have advanced Philippine Speculative Fiction and its writers, co-editing with Charles S. Tan the “Philippine Speculative Fiction Sampler”. Her work has been published in venues like Philippines Free Press, Expanded Horizons, Bewildering Stories; and anthologized like in Best of Philippine Speculative Fiction 2005-2010, The Farthest Shore: Fantasy Fiction from the Philippines, BRAVURA: An Anthology of 21^st Century Philippine Fiction, and In Certain Seasons: Mothers Write in the Time of COVID. Her debut short fiction collection “Flowers for Thursday” was a Finalist in the  40^th Philippine National Book Awards.

 

Calling All Peninsula (South Bay) Writers!

The Palo Alto Weekly’s 37th annual short story contest closes May 10.

Word Limit: $2500

Each writer must submit only one story.

Read the complete guidelines here.

Remember When?

Remember when the least-posturing leader the Free World has ever known took out the world’s #1 Most Wanted Criminal? OK, self might say: Was that when Biden had covid and took out — ?

No, though that comes close. She’s talking about Obama taking out Osama, an event so top-secret no one even knew about it until it was over (No one except for a civilian live-tweeting from Abbotabad).

Since that momentous event, details cling to self’s memory: the fact that the SEAL team were given Ambien (or Benadryl) before taking off for the mission and some of them were NODDING OFF in the helicopter. The fact that one of the team had a sex-change operation.

Remember the photograph in the Situation Room with everyone staring intently at a screen, and there’s Hillary and there’s even our currrent Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, standing at the very edge of the picture, watching from the door?

The event was so momentous, self even wrote a short story about it, and called her story The Walker, after the code name the Americans gave Osama, because even before they knew for sure it was him, they identified a tall figure taking daily walks around a walled compound in Abbotabad. (PS: That story, in case anyone cares to read, was published Oct. 2021 in Issue # 25 of — self just loves the name of the journal, so apt considering the nature of the story! — The Museum of Americana. AND for all you budding writers out there, the editor is fantastic. Submit here!)

Well, here’s that event again, in the opening paragraph of Chapter 4 of Amy B. Zegart’s (fascinating) Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence.

This was it. Decision time. On April 28, 2011, President Obama gathered his top foreign policy advisors in the White House Situation Room. After months of meetings so secret that not even the secretary of homeland security or the FBI Director knew about them, Obama was about to make one of the most consequential decisions of his presidency: whether to green-light a Navy SEAL team raid to capture or kill a man the CIA believed might be Osama bin Laden.

— Chapter 4: Intelligence Basics, Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence

Still Reading A GIRL GOES INTO THE FOREST

Just a quick note to say self has found the second heartbreaking story of this collection (the first was Smoke, Must, Dust) and it’s Your Spree in Paris.

It’s taking her a while to get through My Father and His Beautiful Slim Brunettes because it feels like a regular short story — it’s longer, but it also has backstory.

She feels the following passage resonates because she’s reading it in Bacolod, where for endless childhood summer she did nothing but read, whether it was Manong Freddie’s gargantuan comic book collection (How bereft she was to find one summer that his comic books were gone!) or her Tita Tancing’s vast Mills & Boon collection:

The pleasure of sprawling on the living room floor alone reading, undisturbed. Not needing to go anywhere. Of course it didn’t last.

“Fortune Tellers in Williamsburg” — Story # 3 in SAFE PLACES

Thank you, University of Massachusetts Press for publishing this book, self is enjoying it sooooo much!

My friend Farhad called me last year because he was sick from headaches and vomit, and no one knew what was wrong. No doctor could cure him. I read his leaves and I said, “Farhad, you will die in seven months if you do not stop eating so much lamb.”

Sentence of the Day: Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes

Pulled the old switcheroo because she couldn’t endure being terrorized by The Terror, especially since EVERYONE ON THE EXPEDITION DIES. This is not a spoiler since, unless you’ve had your head under a rock, all you have to do is google the main characters and you can learn all about their fates on Wikipedia.

Her current read is Fuentes’ short story collection Are We Ever Our Own.

There were babies born without surnames, and girls who walked unimpeded into the ocean, their white nightgowns floating in the waves.

— “The Burial of Fidelia Armando Cassell”, Story # 2 in Are We Ever Our Own

New Speculative Fiction: “Residents of the Deep” in J Journal NYC

Is there anything as singularly impressive and affecting to the imagination as when, in a perfectly calm tropical sea, under a vertical sun, one is able to look down through a depth of thousands of fathoms of clear water and see on the ocean bottom glimpses of the City and all its strange and wonderful objects?

— “Residents of the Deep” by Marianne Villanueva

Read the whole story here.

AIDS, the Survivors

Last spring . . . I fell in love with an idea, and the idea’s name was Scott. I met him online. Not on a dating site. Not Match.com, or JDate, or Manhunt, not Grindr or Scruff — “Gay Guys Worldwide” ready to hook up with you; what could be more overwhelming? — but a site for long-term survivors of AIDS. Romantic stuff. Survivors, in particular, of the first fifteen years of the global AIDS crisis, 1981 to 1996, from the first reported cases of young gay men dying of pneumonia and a rare form of cancer in New York and California, to the development, release, and marketing of a lifesaving drug regimen, HAART, highly active antiretroviral therapy. Sound technical? It’s small talk on a website for a long-term survivor of HIV/AIDS.

“Humoresque”, story #9 in John weir’s collection, your nostalgia is killing me

Not everyone on the site had HIV, but we were all living with HIV . . . Millions around the world had been transfigured by the losses they had endured before there was an effective treatment for HIV. Millions still had no access to lifesaving drugs. More than five-hundred fifty-thousand people worldwide were dead from AIDS by 1996, and more Americans than had died in Vietnam.

“Humoresque”, story #9 in John weir’s collection, your nostalgia is killing me

Hate WordPress block editing. There was a paragraph break in the quote. Tried and tried to insert one, but finally had to create two separate quotes. Asked for help. Customer Service: “But BOTH quotes are there, what’s the problem?” Me: “The problem is that these are not TWO separate quotes. Both paragraphs are part of the SAME quote.” WordPress: “HUH?” Me: “DUH?” Finally had to end the conversation; we were going in circles. So frustrating.

Is Everyone Addicted to Extremes? Still Story # 6 in YOUR NOSTALGIA IS KILLING ME

Is everyone addicted to extremes? How do people stay married? Surely they reach a compromise between infatuated and withholding. I never thought of Marc as a boyfriend. Boyfriends were people who fled. Marc stuck around. I was his boyfriend; he wasn’t mine.

— John weir’s “katherine mansfield,” in the collection your nostalgia is killing me

Still Story # 6 of John Weir’s YOUR NOSTALGIA IS KILLING ME

Phil, who has a girlfriend, brings the narrator, who has a boyfriend, back to his family’s for Christmas Day (Is it weird that self has not spent Christmas with anyone, not even when son was living in the Bay Area, not since maybe 2014? She can’t even remember what she did last year. Most every year, she manages to be abroad on Thanksgiving and/or Christmas. So probably that’s what she should keep doing, for her sanity). Anyhoo, this part of the story is very funny:

• Throughout dinner, Phil’s stepdad told gay jokes, not the fun kind, and Phil grinned and ignored me. Anybody could tell we were sleeping together because of how we never touched. I was a signifier for what couldn’t be said. Phil’s family was too absorbed in their compulsory heterosexuality to see that they had at least one gay man at the table. Or maybe that was how they noticed change, by pretending it wasn’t there. Maybe they thought fag jokes were what queers liked. I’m addicted to boyfriends with a hostile entourage.

Let me just tell ya, passages like the above had self rolling on the floor.

Stay tuned.