TO DO
Weekend in Mendocino: Clouds lower, spit rain. The meadows on the headlands are green like Ireland’s. No flowers yet, it’s still early in the year.
Out there, where the surf meets the cliffs, lives a Kraken.
When Will She Finish This (From a Year Ago)
November 6, 2019 at 5:00 pm (Filipino Writers, Places, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Mendocino, short story, speculative fiction, supernatural, work-in-progress, writing process
Still Work-in-Progress
August 11, 2019 at 9:09 pm (Explorers, Filipino Writers, Sundays, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: fantasy, horror, short story, work-in-progress
- Pitt was the first to board. He was always the first. Whether that made him brave or foolhardy was hard to say.
— The Rorqual, p. 5
Why Always Ice?
August 11, 2019 at 6:15 pm (Artists and Writers, Filipino Writers, Sundays, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: fantasy, fiction, horror, short story, work-in-progress
Excerpt, work-in-progress
Genre: Fantasy/Horror
Status: 52 pp.
Working Title: The Rorqual
It began with the discovery of a ship, sailing languidly along the ice-clotted harbor. It seemed meandering, yet sure of purpose. It drifted toward shore, riding high in the water.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
“The Son of My Father”: Story # 20 in Carlos Bulosan’s THE LAUGHTER OF MY FATHER
July 24, 2019 at 8:31 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Conversations, Family, Filipino Writers, Personal Bookshelf, short story collections)
Tags: Carlos Bulosan, humor, short story, The Philippines
Make no mistake, this father of the narrator’s, to whom Bulosan dedicates 25 (memoir-ish) short stories, would be no one’s idea of a good father. He drinks, he gambles, he sleeps with the neighbor’s wife, he gives the family home to a Mexican beauty he has a crush on. But here we are.
Bulosan treats all his father’s foibles with such affection and humor. HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE, BULOSAN MUST BE A SAINT.
From The Son of My Father:
“You are a tragedy, Simeon!” they said.
It was true. Father was a tragedy. My brother Osong was not his spitting image at all. Osong was tall and fair of complexion. His bones were sharp and the hair on his legs was thick and long. He spoke several languages and dialects. He did not drink anything that had alcohol. He smoked American cigars and cigarettes.
Father was small and dark. His bones were soft and the only hair he had was on his head. And it was nothing to brag about, either. He could not read or write.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Rosario Ferré: Her Island
July 5, 2019 at 12:13 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Filipino Writers, Personal Bookshelf, Places, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: essay, Latin American writers, memories, Puerto Rican writers, Rosario Ferré, short story, summer, The Philippines, translation
Self is reading the last piece in Ferré’s book, On Destiny, Language, and Translation. As self has explained elsewhere, she decided to start this re-read with the last piece and work her way front. Nothing can match the genius of the title story, The Youngest Doll, which begins the collection, and self would rather work her way up to the good stuff.
She must have forgotten (honestly, it’s been at least two decades since she’s read Rosario Ferré) or mebbe it didn’t strike her as significant at the time, but Ferré is from Puerto Rico, and her primary subject is the class divisions between landowners and share workers, on an island where the main crop is sugar.
Self knows quite a bit about sugar, because that is her family’s crop, too. Maybe that is why she found Ferré. Yes, she found her.
It’s not as if Ferré is the easiest Latin American writer to read. Before getting to Ferré, self read Clarice Lispector, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Rosario Castellanos, Octavio Paz, Jorge Amado. But when she found Ferré, there was instant engagement.
To read is to engage, but when self found Ferré, she didn’t just engage, she engaged fiercely.
On to Ferré’s essay. She unpacks the process of translating her own novel, Maldito Amor, from Spanish to English.
The title of the novel “is also the title of a very famous danza written by Juan Morelli Campos, Puerto Rico’s most gifted composer in the nineteenth century, which describes in its verses the paradisiacal existence of the island’s bourgeoisie of the time . . . I decided to change the title altogether in my translation of the novel, substituting the much more specific Sweet Diamond Dust. The new title refers to the sugar produced by the De Lavalle family, but it also touches on the dangers of a sugar which, like diamond dust, poisons those who sweeten their lives with it.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
“A Good Wife and Mother”: Rosario Ferré
June 29, 2019 at 4:41 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Memoirs, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Relatives, short story collections, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: essay, inspiration, Latin American writers, Rosario Ferré, Saturdays, short story, writing process
The day of my debut as a writer, I sat at my typewriter for a long time, mulling over these thoughts. Inevitably, writing my first story meant taking my first step toward Heaven or Hell, and that made me vacillate between a state of euphoria and depression. It was as if I were about to be born, peering timidly through the doors of Limbo. If my voice rings false or my will fails me, I said to myself, all my sacrifices will have been in vain. I will foolishly have given up the protection which, despite its disadvantages, at least allowed me to be a good wife and mother, and I will justly have fallen from the frying pan into the fire.
Recommended Reading: Rosario Ferré’s short story, The Youngest Doll, from the collection of the same name
Opening Sentence of the Day: Yiyun Li
April 13, 2019 at 11:43 pm (Artists and Writers, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: Asian American Writers, Saturday, short story, The New Yorker
- Once upon a time, I was addicted to a salon.
— First Line, All Will Be Well, in the 11 March 2019 New Yorker
CHARLIE CHAN IS DEAD, Vol. 1
February 5, 2019 at 8:56 pm (anthologies, Artists and Writers, Books, Family, Filipino Writers, Memoirs, Publishers, Relatives, short story collections, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Asian American Writers, grief, illness, Mayor of the Roses, medicine, memoir, memories, Miami University Press, short story, teaching, writing process
For the workshop this weekend, re-reading some old stories to show different ways of writing memoir. In particular, thinking of a story called Lenox Hill, December 1991, which Jessica Hagedorn included in the anthology Charlie Chan is Dead.
When Jessica contacted self to solicit a piece, self had nothing, nothing, nothing.
Her sister had died just the month before. She did keep a diary, though.
The diary became the story. The first story in what later become a cycle of grief stories: Mayor of the Roses (Miami University Press)
For a while, a course called Ethics in Medicine, taught at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, included the story in their syllabus.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Work-in-Progress: Speculative Fiction
January 16, 2019 at 1:09 am (Conversations, Filipino Writers, Food and Drink, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: humor, short story, speculative fiction, work-in-progress
Self found this unfinished story in one of her old computer files.
An angel is roomies with a struggling college student. “He” is the angel.
He sat down and picked up an apple from a bowl on the kitchen table. “I’m hungry. Feed me.”
“You took an apple,” I said.
“Not enough,” he said. “A gammon joint. With apple and whiskey sauce.”
This is a very demanding angel!
lol
lol
lol
Stay tuned.
Excerpt: First Causes (Quarterly West # 89)
January 3, 2019 at 5:38 pm (Artists and Writers, Conversations, Filipino Writers, Publishers, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Asian American Writers, experimental, Literary Magazines, science fiction, short story, writing process
Yesterday, someone on Twitter posted a question to the Asian American writing community: share your 2018 achievements. Self’s response began with: “I am an experimental science fiction writer.” Which she’s sure had people scratching their heads.
To explain what she meant by “experimental science fiction writer”, here’s an excerpt from a story that Quarterly West published in Issue #89. The story takes place in a classroom of the future. The narrator is a boy named Dragon who is NOT a dragon. The professor, who really IS turning into a lizard, is named Fire Lizard. The other characters are Drinker, Knot, and Big. Big’s just gone missing.
Drinker says, low, “Big passed.”
I answer: “Fucker. Big’s not Big. He’s Big XXX. Mark it.” I slash three quick XXX’s across my screen. Knot looks to the side quickly, then glances down.
“The All-Powerful, the Everlasting,” I start to sing, lowly.
Drinker shudders, pulls slightly out of his seat.
“You!” Fire Lizard screams, pointing at Drinker. “What’s your issue?”
“Obscure,” Drinker mutters.
Fire Lizard’s eyes seem to bug out of his head. “Who remembers rain?” he shouts. “Last rain? Who remembers?”
I hold up my hand. “Ghost of,” I say. “243 days since.”
Self would like to take this opportunity to express her gratitude to Quarterly West for taking a chance and accepting this story. It’s wild, it’s crazy, it’s not easy to understand. But did she ever have fun writing it.
Stay tuned.
