Writing Workshop with Author Cecilia Brainard at the Carlos Bulosan Book Club

 

Join Author Cecilia Brainard on Saturday April 19, 2025, California time for a two-hour Creative Writing Workshop at 2 pm. This workshop is in-person and virtual, join at 1:45 p.m, PST.

 

Please register at

RSCP link: https://bit.ly/RSVPforCBBCEvents

 

The two-hour workshop will look at the fundamentals of creative writing, including character, conflict, plot, and there will in-class exercises, all in a fun and supportive environment. Join us!

 

BIO:

Cecilia Manguerra Brainard is the author and editor of over 22 books. She has written three novels: When the Rainbow Goddess Wept, Magdalena, and The Newspaper Widow. Her recent books include Fundamentals of Creative Writing, Revised and Expanded Edition, and Growing Up Filipino 3: New Stories for Young Adults.

She has received several awards, including an Outstanding Individual Award from her birthplace of Cebu Philippines, a California Arts Council Fellowship, a Brody Arts Fund, several travel grants from the US Embassy, the 40th National Book Award and the Cirilo F. Bautista Prize.

She has taught at UCLA, USC, the California State Summer School for the Arts, the Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension and she continues to lecture and perform in literary arts venues and universities.

Her official website is https://ceciliabrainard.com

 

Tags: Filipino novelist, Filipino writer, Filipino author, Philippine literature

How I Became a Writer - Tony Perez - Filipino FilAm Series #7

 

From Cecilia Brainard: I am happy to report that VIBAL PUBLISHING HOUSE will publish HOW I BECAME A WRITER: ESSAYS BY FILIPINO AND FILIPINO AMERICAN WRITERS.  The anthology collects 22 personal essays.  The Manila launch will be on June 7, 2025. Book signings are scheduled in Cebu starting on May 24, 2025 at Lost Books Bookshop.

I am proud to share Tony Perez's Essay on HOW I BECAME A WRITER. All articles and photos are copyrighted by the individual authors. All rights reserved. Cecilia Brainard has permission from the authors to use their materials here.  

TONY PEREZ was born in San Fernando, Pampanga in 1951 and then moved with his family to Cubao, Quezon City at the age of five to commence and complete his education at the Ateneo de Manila University. He holds an A.B. degree in Communications; an M.A. candidacy in Clinical Psychology; and, from Maryhill School of Theology, a master’s degree in Religious Studies. He worked as Cultural Affairs Specialist at the Public Affairs Office of the Embassy of the U.S.A. for 36 years.

Mr. Perez is the author of the Cubao book series, two major trilogies in Filipino drama: Tatlong Paglalakbay (Bombita, Biyaheng Timog, and Sa North Diversion Road); and Indakan Ng Mga Puso (Oktubre, Noong Tayo’y Nagmamahalan Pa; Nobyembre, Noong Akala Ko’y Mahal Kita, and Saan Ba Tayo Ihahatid Ng Disyembre?). He established the Spirit Questors, a group of young, psychic volunteers, in 1996 and has written a series of volumes on magic and spiritism.

Mr. Perez has worked in graphite, Conte crayon, pen and ink, oil pastels, and chalk pastels, but now paints exclusively in oil. His current, major work is a 40-painting project for Maryhill School of Theology. He has held individual art exhibits at Hiraya Gallery, the Thomas Jefferson Cultural Center, mag_net gallery, National Book Store Pasong Tamo for the Thomasites Centennial in the Philippines, the Saturday Art Group, Sining Kamalig Gallery, a fiber art exhibit in the upper hallway of the Cultural Center of the Philippines, and a retrospective in the lobby of the Little Theater of the Cultural Center of the Philippines.

Mr. Perez is a recipient of the 100 Artists of the Philippine Centennial award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 2000, and a recipient of the Dangal ng Wika award from the Filipino Language Commission in 2022.

Although he retired in 2015 and since then no longer updates his curriculum vitae, he continues to write trilogies of full-length plays and novels.

 

 

HOW I BECAME A WRITER

When people ask me why or how I became a writer, I ask myself why and how I became anything at all. I’d always wanted to believe it was a matter of free will, choice, taste, and sophistication, but, having studied Clinical Psychology, I learned that we are molded by personifications of the superego in our childhood--parents, teachers, authority figures, older siblings, and role models among them. I recall that my grade school teachers complimented me for my writing and my drawing, and that made me feel that I had something special going for me.

I was born into a middle-class family in 1951. My father was a colonel of the Armed Forces of the Philippines who fought in Korea toward the end of WWII. My mother, like many women of that period, chose to be a housewife and raise a family devoid of the many traumas of war.

My parents and my siblings were occasional readers, but no one except myself became a writer and a painter. They would nonetheless eventually become supportive audiences of my plays and art exhibits. My mother and sisters, however, were into needlework—sewing, crochet, cross-stitching, and knitting—and I later dabbled in sewing and knitting myself; the results are on my blog at <https://tonyperezphilippinesenchantedknits.blogspot.com/>.

I seriously tried, and feel that I have not yet succeeded, to elevate knitting from the level of craft to the level of art, which entailed, among other things, developing stitches that would allow my works to NOT look like knitting, and I know that I have yet to get there.

 

Years later I would adopt two boys who added two daughters-in-law and five grandchildren to my family. All of them grew up surrounded by art and books on art and literature, but, like my parents and siblings, none of them became interested in writing nor in painting. My maternal aunts used to tell me that, in San Fernando, Pampanga where I was born, my heart stopped beating when I was one year old, and that I was rushed to hospital and revived. Three psychics later informed me that I was/am a walk-in soul with a purpose. I have always wondered if that was true.

After I graduated from university and long before I retired, everyone thought that I was a full-time teacher and Spirit Questor. They believed that all I did was teach and then go on Spirit Quests. They had no idea that I was part-time teaching and Questing, on Saturdays only, and that, during the week, I was actually holding, for 36 long years, a full-time job that offered lifetime annuity. Now that I am finally retired, they are surprised to know that I am what I always really wanted to be: a full-time writer and artist with a monthly pension for life.

Sadly, this is not how all writers and artists and researchers on the paranormal end up. Most of them spend their youth seeking to be writers only or artists only or paranormal researchers only. When it is time for them to retire, they suddenly realize that they have no adequate source of income and that they don’t know what hit them, because they never prepared for retirement as young writers and young artists and young paranormal researchers. They become bewildered by their own poverty. When they get sick, they beg others to help them.

I can never refer to my development as a writer without referring to my development as a painter. I realized, early on, that the two go hand in hand. To this day I observe that writers who cannot draw or paint well, really do not write well, and that painters who cannot write well, really do not paint well--they cannot even articulate their own works for their gallery exhibits. Such writers and such painters continue to extol their works as “self-expression.” forgetting that self-expression as an excuse for writing and for painting should have been left behind in their K-12 classrooms.

Through my days at university, I have always been fascinated by the fact that certain, verbal descriptions cannot be adequately illustrated, and that certain, visual images cannot be properly described in words, but that both writing and painting were the completion of series of ideas. It occurred to me that this apparent dissonance actually had its uses, and that, in a manner of speaking, one could paint a novel and write a painting. These two dimensions of writing and painting—the interface between the verbal and the visual, and the concept of writing and painting as series of ideas—became the foundation for the first workshops in creative writing I conducted.

 

Years later I felt that those were not enough. I investigated the dimension of emotion and its psychology. I saw, both in fiction and in drama, that it is the emotions that actually tell us the stories. I incorporated emotional truth exercises in my workshops—a fearsome challenge to the faint-hearted. One particular batch of students was simultaneously enrolled in a disaster and survival course that required them to accomplish all kinds of challenging feats, and the students claimed that it was more terrifying to go through emotional truth exercises than to jump from a tall building onto a trampoline. It was quite interesting that the writers who were emotionally dishonest with themselves produced the most mediocre works. I explored different emotions and mixed them like paint colors, going beyond primaries to secondaries and on to tertiaries. It was a joy to witness characters come to life as complex human beings because of their complex emotions.

I couldn’t stop there, and arrived at the doorstep of the fourth dimension of writing and painting, which is that we write what we dream, we dream what we write, we paint what we dream, and we dream what we paint. It seemed urgent, therefore, to be able to teach writers to remember and record dreams, interpret them, and develop them into stories and pictures. 

While studying and analyzing dreams--not only my own but also the dreams of others—the concept of “dream cities” came to the surface. I taught my students to map out the most frequent locales of their dreams on drawing paper, including gray areas that remained in shadow, representing the Unconscious. They came up with houses, schools, restaurants, train stations, seaside resorts, churches, and cemeteries, even if they hadn’t actually been to those particular places in real life. I theorized that one’s “dream map” could even be set side by side with the “dream maps” of others, especially if those others were persons who were close to or connected to the dreamer in some kind of psychological, emotional, or symbiotic way. I informed my students that, in such instances, it is possible for them to visit one another’s “dream cities” as long as their “dream maps” could be set side by side. I started testing this theory by means of hypnotism and a series of regression exercises, but these were dreaded by many workshops participants, who described the exercises as being too intense. By this time I’d already been conducting workshops in the Philippines, in Australia, and in Singapore.

Hypnotism and regression led me deeper into the artist’s psyche, and I held one-to-one sessions with interested writers on past-life regression. Moving back in time to past lives involved traveling through Carl Gustav Jung’s Collective Unconscious. Interestingly, such forays allowed the participants to write and paint from the points of view of previous lifetimes and karma. The exercises allowed them to create works from the points of view of persons they’d been in the past, such as men, women, murderers, murder victims, persons of different ethnic backgrounds, and so on. All they had to do was surf through the inner Internet of Memory.

And all to what end? Not only to become a well-rounded writer and painter, but to become a well-rounded person as well, harnessing all five dimensions into their everyday lives.

To summarize, these are the five dimensions of creative work I discovered on my journey through writing and painting:

1) The interface between the verbal and the visual

2) Writing and painting as complete series of ideas

3) The psychology of emotion

4) The incorporation of dreams and dream messages in one’s work

5) The use of hypnotism and regression to revisit previous lifetimes and look at the world, once again, through different perspectives

6) Integrating all five dimensions to live life not merely as a writer and as a painter but also as an individuated human being

As to the last three dimensions, I developed two, two-week workshop syllabi before I retired in 2015: From Dreams to Drama (for TheatreWorks Singapore) and From Drawing to Drama, from Paintings to Plays.

Today, when students and workshop participants ask me for tips to successful writing, I give them only one, which is to develop their powers of observation. A person with weak powers of observation should not even attempt writing or painting, for the works produced will have, to begin with, the marked absence of originality. I have a blog for the Spirit Questors that contains exercises on strengthening powers of observation, and they can be useful to both writers and painters as well, at 

<https://tonyperezphilippinescyberspacebook19.blogspot.com/>. 

 

I also have loose notes and exercises on writing and drawing in another blog. 

Tony Perez's Writing from The Heart, at 

.http://tonyperezphilippinescyberspacebook18.blogspot.com/.

https://tonyperezphilippinescyberspacebook19.blogspot.com/

READ ALSO:

How I Became a Writer Series

Ian Rosales Casocot 

Caroline S. Hau

 Paulino Lim, Jr 

Tony Perez

Eileen R. Tabios

John Jack G. Wigley

Hope Sabanpan Yu

AND MORE from Cecilia's blog:

Writing Workshop with Author Cecilia Brainard April 19, 2025

 Author Cecilia Brainard Interview by Read Pinoy Philippine National Book Development Board

Cecilia Brainard Talks About Her Novel The Newspaper Widow and More - video link  

A Book Fair to Remember (And Get Ready For), by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, Positively Filipino 

Philippine Folktale - Los Siete Pecados, by Filomena Alesna Cuenco 

An Afternoon with Exploding Galaxies, with Carlos Bulosan Book Club, PALH

Carlos Roxas Interview of Cecilia Brainard re Frankfurt Book Fair 

Cecilia Brainard's Travel Report of Frankfurt Book Fair 2024

 Tags: Filipino authors, Filipino writers, Filipino books, Filipino literature

Author Cecilia Brainard Interview by Read Pinoy Philippine National Book Development Board

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojtjwCDLfxM

 

Filipina novelist, Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, is interviewed by Read Pinoy of the Philippine National Book Development Board on March 19, 2025. Brainard talks about Filipino and FilAm authors away from the Philippines - what they write about, difficulties they face. Brainard talks about why she has chosen to write about Filipino themes in her novels and fiction.

Interviewers were Lowell Alojado and Catherine Orda.  Cecilia thanks them and  Marian Louise Abio of NBDB.

The above YouTube link excerpts 19 minutes of the show with her interview.  

tags: #readpinoysaradyopilipinas  

 

Update! STEP INTO OUR KITCHENS -- Collection of Recipes and Essays by St. Theresa's College Philippine Graduates

 

UPDATE Re my cookbook project, STEP INTO OUR KITCHENS: THERESIAN RECIPES AND TALES -- I am happy to say that VIBAL PUBLISHING will be publishing this cook book. The Manila book launch will be on June 7, 2025. Book signings are scheduled in Cebu starting May 24, 2025 at Lost Books Bookshop.  

I am sharing the blurb that Ige Ramos wrote for this book that collects recipes and personal essays by graduates of St. Theresa's College in the Philippines.

"Step Into Our Kitchens: Theresian Recipes and Tales is not just a cookbook; it's a time capsule of cherished family recipes and stories passed down through generations. As you explore these pages, you'll discover more than just ingredients and cooking method—you'll uncover the love, laughter, and traditions that have shaped a Theresian family's Philippine Food Historian culinary heritage. For those with a Theresian grandmother, mother, aunt, wife, or sister, let these recipes serve as a bridge to the past, a connection to your roots, and a reminder to savor the flavors of your family history for many years to come. This is a true culinary masterpiece that captures the heart and soul of Theresian values. ~ Ige Ramos

 

The photo shown is Chef Pam Relampagos one of the contributors to this food book.

Tags: Filipino cookbook, Philippine cookbook, cook book, food book, St. Theresa's College, ICM Sisters, Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary 

How I Became a Writer -- Eileen R. Tabios - Filipino FilAm Series #6

From Cecilia Brainard: I am proud to share Eileen R. Tabios's Essay on HOW I BECAME A WRITER -- A POET, THEN NOVELIST. All articles and photos are copyrighted by the individual authors. All rights reserved. Cecilia Brainard and PALH have permission from the authors to use their materials. 

***

Eileen R. Tabios has released books of poetry, fiction, essays, art, and experimental prose from publishers in 11 countries and cyberspace. Recent releases include the novel The Balikbayan Artist; an art monograph Drawing Six Directions; a poetry collection Because I Love You, I Become War; an autobiography, The Inventor; and a flash fiction collection (in collaboration with harry k stammer), Getting To One. Other recent books include a first novel DoveLion: A Fairy Tale for Our Times which was subsequently translated by Danton Remoto into Filipino as KalapatingLeon and two French books, PRISES (Double Take) (trans. Fanny Garin) and La Vie erotique de l’art (trans. Samuel Rochery.  

Her body of work includes invention of the hay(na)ku, a 21^st century diasporic poetic form; the MDR Poetry Generator that can create poems totaling theoretical infinity; the “Flooid” poetry form that’s rooted in a good deed; the monobon poetry form based on the monostich; and a first poetry book, Beyond Life Sentences, which received the Philippines’ National Book Award for Poetry. She’s also edited or conceptualized 16 anthologies that involved hundreds of writers worldwide. Translated into 13 languages, her literary output has received recognition through awards, grants and residencies. More information is at https://eileenrtabios.

*** 

HOW I BECAME A WRITER --- A POET, THEN NOVELIST

The Poet

From my mother, I know the story of my first book. I was about two or three years old. It bore no title. It was created by my toddler-self folding a piece of paper to emulate a book’s pages. The first page bore a green Crayola scrawl at the bottom of the page. The second page bore a yellow Crayola circle at the top right corner of the page. The third page bore a brown Crayola scrawl at the bottom of the page. The “text” of its three pages might be interpreted as follows:

The grass is green.

The sun is out shining.

The sun burnt the grass.

 

How I Became a Writer - Hope Sabanpan Yu - Filipino FilAm Series #5

From Cecilia Brainard: I am proud to share Dr. Hope Sabanpan Yu's Essay on HOW I BECAME A WRITER. All articles and photos are copyrighted by the individual authors. All rights reserved. Cecilia Brainard and PALH have permission from the authors to use their materials. 

 ***

Dr. Hope Sabanpan Yu is a professor of comparative literature at the University of San Carlos where she also serves as the Director of the Cebuano Studies Center. She is the Commissioner for the Cebuano language of the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (KWF) and also of the Cultural Historical Affairs Commission of Cebu City (CHAC). She is a member several writers organizations: the Women in Literary Arts, Inc. - Cebu (WILA), Bathalan-ong Halad sa Dagang (BATHALAD), Mamugnaong Anak sa Dagang (MAD) and the translators' group Inotherwords Incorporated (IOW). She is a poet, fictionist, essayist and critic who works part-time in translation.

Her study Women's Common Destiny: Maternal Representations in the Serialized Cebuano Fiction of Hilda Montaire and Austregelina Espina-Moore (2009) was awarded the prestigious Lourdes Lontok-Cruz Award for research excellence in 2010. Her other scholarly works are:

 --Bridging Cultures: The Migrant Philippine Woman in the Works of Jessica Hagedorn, Fatima Lim-Wilson and Sophia Romero (2011),

--Institutionalizing Motherhood (2011)

--The Controlling Mother (2014) and The Other(ed) Woman: Critical Essays (2014) published by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts,

--This Thing of Darkness: Female Shapeshifters in Philippine and Japanese Literature (2018), -----Nature and its Persuasions: Critical Essays (2021), 

--A Comprehensive Compilation of Extant Cebuano Music with Transcription and Analysis (2022) and Mas Masaya sa Entablado: Ang Siste ng mga Piling Dula ni Piux Kabahar (2022).

 

HOW I BECAME A WRITER

Hope Sabanpan Yu

THE FAINT SWEETNESS of the ylang-ylang filled the night air. In the main bedroom, the soft creak of a wooden chair and the shuffle of slippers on the wooden floor told me my grandfather was settling in with a book. My siblings and I would gather at his feet -- wide-eyed, leaning closer as the world around us dissolved and gave way to the exciting world of talking animals in Aesop's Fables or to the labyrinthine imagination of the 1001 Arabian Nights. His voice was a deep river, flowing with wisdom and wonder, carrying foxes and herons and cunning caliphs and bewitched sultans. The stories twisted and turned, teaching lessons I barely grasped but felt in my soul, where words held power, every sentence could hold a whole universe.

 

It was through these nights that I learned the manner of stories: how a fable unfolded, each one deliberate and purposeful, how a tale could be both mirror and lamp. In those quiet and enchanted moments, the seeds of storytelling were planted deep within me, although I did not realize it yet.

 

By day, the world was a canvas of motion and discovery. Elementary school was an affair of textbooks with penciled-in answers, classrooms that smelled faintly of chalk and floor wax, and the occasional quizzes, each with its items of studied possibilities. Reading became a shared ritual where a cluster of classmates exchanged notes on memorable reads, whispering about a mysterious character or the surprise of a plot twist in the Nancy Drew series. We devoured tales of animals that spoke, courageous heroes, and distant worlds. In grade four, I had a teacher who loved to tell stories in the mid-afternoon from Philippine mythology, and my imagination ran wild with characters like the engkanto, the duwende, and the kapre which gave us goosebumps. But even then, stories felt like something more than just entertainment. They were companions, guides, a language I was slowly learning to speak. And yet, I did not write then. Words were still something I absorbed, their enormity pulling me in but never quite pushing me outward to create. Until several years later in high school, that is, with an unexpected present.

At a corner grocery store close to where I lived, I made friends with someone I occasionally ran into each time I bought a chocolate bar or ice cream cone. We just started with smiles and hellos. I sort of had a crush on him. He was an engineer, ten years older than I was. Though I learned that he had a girlfriend, I still fell for him and looked out for him when I failed to find him at the store.

One day he gave me a piece of lined yellow paper. On it was a poem, scrawled in a neat script — a cascade of words that spoke of time bringing a gift from the stars subtly given. It was simple yet profound, and it unsettled something in me. What does one do with a poem gifted to them? The act of receiving it felt incomplete, as though the poem was less a gift and more of a beckoning. So, I wrote back but never gave it to him. The lines felt clumsy at first, the words that stumbled and fell, rhymes that clanged rather than sang. But something about the process felt alchemical. I could take a blank page and, with the pen, fill it with echoes of my thoughts, my dreams, my questions. Responding to that poem was like prying open a locked door, and on the other side lay the boundless terrain of poetry. I wandered through its fields, scribbling at every turn. The more I wrote, the more I realized the words I was chasing were not always my own. They were fragments of my grandfather’s voice, of stories shared in school, of rhythms I had absorbed from the books and the air around me. 

And then poetry, too, began to shift. The compactness of a verse was not always enough for the worlds I wanted to explore. The imagery and emotion I had honed began to stretch outward, finding form in characters, in dialogue, in the tangled arcs of short stories. It was terrifying at first. Where poems were distilled lightning, short stories were sprawling storms with thunderheads to navigate and sudden downpours to endure. But they also offered something new: the chance to inhabit other lives, to construct worlds from scratch, to play god with words.

 

University marked the next turning point in my writing. As features and literary editor of the school organ, The New Builder, I began writing short stories in earnest. One of them, titled “Once in a Lifetime,” found its way into print, a quiet but profound affirmation of my efforts. Still, studies consumed much of my time, and writing became an occasional indulgence, with scraps of poetry that rarely found their way into publication but were filed religiously along with others.

It wasn’t until I entered a contest and my poem “Ibabaw sa Kakahuyan” was selected and published in a newspaper that I thought, perhaps, I had the makings of a writer. And this was certainty solidified when I joined my first writers' workshop, the Cornelio Faigao Memorial Writers' Workshop, after having been rejected the previous year with a submission for poetry. I submitted a story titled “The Driver’s Daughter” and it was there, amid the critique and camaraderie that I began to see writing as more than a solitary pursuit. Soon other workshops followed, scattered across the country, each one widening my understanding of the literary world and amazing me with the richness of the other fellows’ writings and the brilliance with which the seasoned writers critiqued the works.

 

Still, life has its own stories to tell, and for a time, mine shifted. I continued to write occasionally, but married life became a priority. My vehicle for storytelling became the bedtime tales I spun for my little daughter – when I was not reading from my own copy of Aesop’s Fables; stories conjured up from my imagination and populated with creatures from Philippine mythology like the tikbalang, aswang, and the manananggal. When I found myself free in the afternoons and wove a story, my daughter’s wondrous eyes reflected back the magic I had first discovered as a child. Then I moved on to writing children’s stories that took on issues with the environment. The fairy child that lives in the trees whose skin is brown. She’s small but fierce, her laughter the sound of leaves rustling in the wind. But her world is shrinking, as tree after tree is felled to the sound of saws cutting through, the earth trembling under the clearing taking place. She is a child of the forest, and her home is vanishing. When she meets two schoolboys one late afternoon, she is able to tell them about her plight and together, they learn that to protect the fairy’s home is to save something irreplaceable.

 

And then there’s the boy who swims in the sea. Born with webbed hands and feet, he is a curiosity, a child the villagers whisper about. But in the water, he’s a marvel, moving like a fish, speaking to dolphins and fish in a language only they understand. The coral reefs are his playground, his sanctuary, until the day he learns of how the other fishermen in his village earn their keep – through dynamite fishing. He cannot stop the fishermen alone, but he can show his village what harm dynamite can lead to aside from the life underwater and the wonder that is being destroyed.

 

This was one of the best times of my life as spinning these tales seemed effortless to do – a child sees the world without the armor we grownups wear, and feel its weight with unfiltered intensity. But the child also carries an immense capacity for hope, for action, for dreaming a world better than the one I’ve inherited. That’s why the brown fairy child exists, why the boy with webbed feet swims through my imagination. They’re sort of a bridge between the magic of a story and the sharp edges of reality.

 

In time, my husband and I ventured into business, a new chapter that demanded its own kind of creativity and diligence. Writing faded to the background, surfacing only in fleeting moments, with a scribbled line now and then, an idea tucked away for later. It wasn’t until after an operation to remove a twisted ovarian cyst that I found myself in a rare stillness, a period of rest that became a period of reckoning. It was then, in the quiet hours of recovery, that I realized what I had always known deep down: I wanted to become a writer.

 

The decision was met with contestation from family members who saw no future in it. “There’s no money in creative writing,” they said. “Writers starve.” They urged me to stick to business, to the pragmatic path we had built together. But something in me refused to yield. Against their doubts, I applied to a Master’s program abroad but opted out at the last minute from choosing the creative writing path. When I was accepted, the practical side of me—the one that had run a business, balanced budgets, and calculated risks—found a compromise. I chose to pursue the research track, reasoning that research funds could support my creative endeavors. In this way, I wove together the practical and the poetic, the pragmatic and the passionate, carving out a path that was uniquely my own.

 

While pursuing my graduate studies in Literature, I continued writing creatively. During the hectic demands of academic life, I continued to write poems, small bursts of reflection and longing. These poems became a collection under the title Paglaum/Hope, a testament to the resilience I had found in words. Later, I published another collection; one that spoke to my views as a woman and my experiences navigating the shifting roles life had given me. In total, I authored four poetry collections, each one a chapter in the unfolding narrative of my creative life.

 

At the same time, academic writing began to take root. Papers written to fulfill class requirements grew into published articles, and the mandate to contribute to scholarly discourse subtly shaped my approach to writing. I seriously began presenting papers at conferences, stepping into the world of academic inquiry with the same curiosity that had first drawn me to storytelling. By the time I entered a doctorate program, I was weaving between academic and creative writing, letting each inform and enrich the other.

Academic writing begins with the seed of a question. For me, it is often one that burrows its way into my thoughts and refuses to leave, like a bone that needs to be chewed on. That first question revolved around Philippine-American women writers, their lives, their words, their diasporic narratives. What happens when these women, fractured by history and geography, write their way toward belonging? What truths do they uncover in the gaps of continents, in the hyphens of their identities?

The joy begins in the chase, combing through databases, chasing the flicker of a citation that might lead me somewhere significant. I read through articles, pulling at threads that dangle enticingly from paragraphs, noting phrases that glimmer with possibility. Following each thread is like a treasure hunt in the library: shelves of books with call numbers become coordinates on a map where the connection can continue. I feel like an explorer with each article in a book from the shelves feeling like a step closer to something even more profound, something hidden waiting to be uncovered to complete the story I speculate can be told. There is exhilaration in the company of scholars, whether dead or alive, whose works have gone ahead of my own; in poring over a study and finding lines that sing with recognition.

 

As the sources accumulated in this laborious process, the synthesis of voices ― mine and those of others, with notes spread around me like a map of stars, the constellations revealed themselves. A writer’s reflection on exile becomes a point of connection to another’s musings on the imposition of English in a foreign land. Themes of food and poetry emerged as anchors, grounding these diverse narratives. As a picture took shape, a new angle on an old discourse, a fresh lens through which to see, I became even more excited. But there were moments of frustration as well; especially with dead ends, the paragraphs that refused to cohere, which as time passed I realized were part of the process, the necessary resistance that sharpened the joy of discovery. When the writing finally flowed, when the ideas stuck in place, it was like the first breath of dawn after a sleepless night.

 

When a draft is finished, I am elated and emptied. The paper now exists outside of me, a fragile thing that carries my thoughts into the world. I imagine it someday in a journal or perhaps in the hands of another scholar, sparking something in them, the way others’ writings have ignited my own curiosity.  The joy of academic writing is at its heart the joy of creation. It is the magic of taking fragments of thought and shaping them into a whole. It is the delight of conversation across time and space, of listening and responding. And it is the hope that, in this weaving of ideas, we might come to understand something new about ourselves, about each other, about the world.

The same can be said of the delight in weaving stories and somehow, with this realization writing was no longer just a response. It became a need, a way of making sense of the chaos both outside and within myself. Writing is the map I use to navigate life’s labyrinth, the mirror in which I search for my reflection.

 

When I think back to those childhood evenings, to my grandfather’s voice reading a fable, I understand what I did not then. He was not just telling us stories; he was passing on a literary inheritance. And when that friend gifted me a poem, he handed me a key to unlock that inheritance. My journey towards becoming a writer meant listening with my whole being ― with my ears, yes, but also with my skin and soul because the story does not always announce itself in words. It can come in the texture of light through a glass window or in the rhythm of waves rushing to the shore. I have many of these things stored like seeds in my pocket. The writing is never perfect; it is but an ever-reaching, straining towards a truth that flickers just beyond my grasp.

 

Embracing this pursuit, chasing the glimmer even as it eludes me, to know that the beauty lies in the trying has been a lifelong endeavor.

 

 READ ALSO:

How I Became a Writer Series

Ian Rosales Casocot 

Caroline S. Hau

 Paulino Lim, Jr 

Tony Perez

Eileen R. Tabios

John Jack G. Wigley

Hope Sabanpan Yu

 

AND MORE from Cecilia's Blog:

Author Cecilia Brainard Interview by Read Pinoy Philippine National Book Development Board

Cecilia Brainard Talks About Her Novel The Newspaper Widow and More - video link  

A Book Fair to Remember (And Get Ready For), by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, Positively Filipino 

Philippine Folktale - L0s Siete Pecados by Filomena Alesna Cuenco

An Afternoon with Exploding Galaxies, with Carlos Bulosan Book Club, PALH

Carlos Roxas Interview of Cecilia Brainard re Frankfurt Book Fair 

Cecilia Brainard's Travel Report of Frankfurt Book Fair 2024

 Tags: Filipino authors, Filipino writers, Filipino books, Filipino literature

 

How I Became a Writer - John Jack G. Wigley - Filipino FilAm Series #4

 

From Cecilia Brainard: I am proud to share Dr. John Jack G. Wigley's Essay on HOW I BECAME A WRITER. All articles and photos are copyrighted by the individual authors. All rights reserved. Cecilia Brainard and PALH have permission from the authors to use their materials. 

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Professor John Jack G. Wigley, Ph.D., is the author of seven books and co-author of a number of textbooks on literature and creative writing. Presently, he is a literature professor at the Faculty of Arts and Letters, a Research Fellow of the UST Research Center for Culture, Arts, and the Humanities (RCCAH), and a Resident Fellow of the Center for Creative Writing and Literary Studies (UST-CCWLS). He was a former Director of the UST Publishing House and Chair of the UST Department of Literature.

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A Writer’s Journey Through Memoir Writing

John Jack G. Wigley

I already have seven books – two memoirs, two books of creative nonfiction, a short story collection, a novel, and a translation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. Some of them have been recognized as outstanding books in local and national book awards. Although I have tried my hand at writing in different genres, I guess I am most remembered for writing memoirs. The first two books I wrote, Falling into the Manhole and Home of the Ashfall, were memoirs. This is my journey of becoming a writer through the writing of memoirs.

 THE BEGINNING   

I developed an early love for literature as a child. While most boys my age would play tumbang preso or shoto or climb guava trees and catch spiders under the scorching heat of the midday sun, I would get the storybook my mother gave me during Christmas, and holler at the young kids, about four or five years old, to come and gather around the wooden staircase of Lolo Jessie. I would borrow my neighbor's kiddie blackboard, ruler, and chalk and read passages from the storybook aloud. I would bang on the board if I saw inattentive kids who seemed uninterested in listening to my retelling of Why the Pineapple Has Many Eyes or Chicken Little. I would ask the kids who said what and what happened to whom in the story. They would answer in unison as I flashed illustrations from the book. I was fascinated by the stories I read to them, totally lost in the world of Pina, the disobedient child, and Chicken Little, the innocent fowl who thought the world was over after an acorn fell on his head.

One day, I thought to myself, I will be writing my own stories.

 

 

How I Became a Writer - Caroline S. Hau - Filipino FilAm Series #3

From Cecilia Brainard: I am proud to share Dr. Caroline S. Hau's Essay on HOW I BECAME A WRITER. All articles and photos are copyrighted by the individual authors. All rights reserved. Cecilia Brainard and PALH have permission from the authors to use their materials here. 

 

Caroline S. Hau was born in Manila and educated at the University of the Philippines-Diliman and Cornell University. Her books include Tiempo Muerto: A Novel, Demigods and Monsters: Stories, and Recuerdos de Patay and Other Stories. She lives in Kyoto.

 

 

How I Became a Writer

Caroline S. Hau

1 

People like myself aren’t supposed to dream of being a writer, let alone become one.

            Asked what course they would like to take up in college, the children of my neighborhood of San Nicolas in the part of Manila known as Chinatown mostly responded with “Commerce.” I myself copped to that once or twice, despite having zero interest in minding the store.

            The long 1970s were a literary desert for the Philippine Chinese. The price paid by Chinese-language newspapers to remain in publication was the abolition of the literary section, the better to avoid having one’s work (mis)interpreted as a critique of current affairs. A moot issue anyway, since I could barely read and write Mandarin Chinese.

Before that, writing was among the childish things one put away. Pioneers of Chinese-Filipino fiction in English like Alexander SyCip and Benito Lim published only a handful of short stories.

           My parents, however, belonged to that rare breed of Chinese Filipinos who were able to pursue full-time careers as artists. It was my mom who supported my decision to major in English instead of a Pre-Med course at the University of the Philippines. (The response I got from others was invariably “English lang?”) 

I met Charlson Ong soon after the EDSA Revolution opened up a democratic space for writers and publishers. Charlson showed that it was possible to write compellingly about being Tsinoy as a Tsinoy (or, better still, “Intsik”, a fraught term Charlson has called for reclaiming). 

Philippine Folktale - Los Siete Pecados, by Filomena Alesna Cuenco

Filomena Alesna Cuenco

Message from Cecilia Brainard: I am happy to feature a retelling by my maternal grandmother Filomena Alesna Cuenco, of a popular folk tale from the Philippines, called Los Siete Pecados, which translates into the Seven Sins.  It is an origin story of seven small islands near Iloilo in the Visayas area of the Philippines.

I came across this folk retelling by my maternal grandmother when I did research about the families of my mother and father and found a wealth of old newsclippings now archived in some libraries. The retelling by my grandmother was originally published in Bag-ong Kusog, January 22, 1932.  This periodical was ran by my great-grandmother Remedios Lopez Cuenco, the widow of Mariano Albao Cuenco. They were the parents of Senator Mariano Jesus Cuenco (my maternal grandfather), Archbishop of Jaro Jose Maria Cuenco, Representative Miguel Cuenco, Remedios Cuenco Borromeo, and other children many of whom died at infancy.  

Mariano Albao had founded the Imprenta Rosario (the printing/publishing press), but when he died, leaving Remedios widowed at the age of 39, she took over the publishing business. Her children helped her run the business. 

From my mother's stories, I had been under the impression that Filomena Alesna Cuenco was quiet and spent most of her time in the kitchen, away from the more bombastic and loud Cuenco clan.  When I came across this folk tale retelling by Filomena, I had to mentally adjust my image of her: she too helped run the Imprenta Rosario.

Filomena's retelling was in deep Visayan;  Alfredo Zanoria translated my grandmother's work into English. Alfredo is a retired Geologist, formerly with the California EPA. 

LOS SIETE PECADOS

A Memorable Tale of Seven Maidens in the Story about the Isles of the Seven Sins

by FILOMENA ALESNA CUENCO

First published in Cebuano in Bag-ong Kusog

 IF WE STUDY THE MAP of the Philippines, we will notice that not far from Guimaras Island and just across Iloilo harbor are seven little islands protruding out of the sea.  These are known as LOS SIETE PECADOS or SEVEN SINS based on a story from the ancient past.