Sunday, January 19, 2025

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. 

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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 21st 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.

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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.

 

At that age, I obviously didn’t know yet how to write words (this made my first book an “asemic” poetry book; an asemic poem doesn’t rely on words). But what that story affirms for me is that I contained an impetus early on to look at the world and then be able to articulate what I was seeing. I became a writer because I wanted to see as clearly as I could. But to see, for me, is not just about what’s seen but understanding the significance of what’s sighted. Writing—the articulation—helps me understand what I saw and/or am seeing.

            To articulate is to make something more understandable. There’s a lot about this world that baffles me—many things occur that seem to be illogical. For example, I don’t fully understand the high tolerance Filipinos have for political leaders who take advantage of them—the topic of one of my first major papers that I wrote as a political science major at Barnard College (that paper introduced me to the downsides of tribe mentality and utang na loob). Writing about such matters with the attendant focus, research, and mental meditations over the subject improves my understanding, even in cases in which my full comprehension is not achieved.

Relatedly, as a writer, I came to improve my writing and analytical ability by looking at how others and, specifically, other writers, approach their topics. Thus, I also became a writer through reading. As a professional writer, I first was a journalist but I recall that when I focused on poetry in my mid-30s, I went to a local bookstore and read through their entire poetry shelves. I was inspired by a poet who said he read at least five poetry books a week when he began writing poems and tried to do the same. To this day, I remain a prolific reader—I read as much as 200-500 books a year covering a variety of topics. I consider reading to be a writer’s professional obligation.

            Because my impetus to write is rooted in seeing, the visual is a strong inspiration (relatedly, as an adult, I became an art collector). Not surprisingly then, I surround myself with books in part because I love the look of full bookshelves. I will never trade the physical library for e-books because e-books don’t offer me the advantage of a library as an environment. As a child growing up in Baguio City—I immigrated to the United States at age 10—I lived in a house whose living room proudly presented a series of laden bookshelves. I often return in memory to the sight of the Brittanica Encyclopedia on those bookshelves. I continue to love images of books, and believe this is partly why I privilege books to shorter literary forms that need to be compiled with other writings before they can make up a book—for example, I privilege poetry books over individual poems (I believe forming a collection of poems is another layer to the poetry project not necessarily present in the writing of individual poems). That’s why I write and publish as many books as I can—to date, my authored and edited books total nearly 100; as a publisher, I’ve released many other books by other writers.

Indeed, for two decades since moving to my current residence in Napa Valley, California, I lived in a home that contained a two-story library. We built this home from scratch and this was the only house element I requested. That library, and other areas in my residence, contained 15,516 books.  I know the specific number from an insurance-related appraisal because, sadly, my residence was damaged by the 2020 Glass Fire that devastated two counties in Northern California.

 

 

It's worth emphasizing that my book collection spanned a variety of subjects because I believe a creative writer should learn about as many subjects as possible. One never knows what will be relevant for writing. Through reading, I learn to avoid cliches, observe which literary strategies may or may not be effective, create metaphors I otherwise would not know to create, and identify new interests for possible future writings.  In poetry, for example, though science is a weak spot for me, learning about black holes allowed me to use their resonant facets in several poems, such as how they are so dense their gravity prevents anything—even light!—f rom escaping. Good creative writers don’t just rely on imagination. Writers, too, must rely on knowledge, and seek to maximize such.

Part of my book collection, before it was fire-damaged, was a significant miniature book collection. In the U.S., a “miniature book” is considered to be a book no larger than three inches in height, width, and depth. Before the fire, my miniature books had totaled about 3,000 books, which is significant since I’d been collecting them for only two to three years; I was well on my way towards my goal of achieving the Guinness World Record for most miniature books owned by a private collector. Naturally, I’ve also authored four miniature books: a selection from my larger book The In(ter)vention of the Hay(na)ku; the essay collection Kapwa’s Novels; a poetry collection Political Love, and a book-length short story, What Counts. Three of these miniature books were published by two of the leading miniature book publishers today, Booksby Press and Tony Firman.

I believe miniature books—and other miniature objects—relate to the worldview that caused me to become a writer (in addition to being gigil cute!). When you hold a miniature in the palm of your hand, you can feel a sense of control—at least, physically—over what is cupped within your palm. That sense of control—even if it’s an illusion—implies you can determine the fate of the miniature; this positionality is the opposite of the human status within our vast universe. Humans literally and symbolically are but dust motes within a world that no human can know fully. I’m not entirely sure why, but I personally am irritated at knowing that I will never attain full knowledge of this world we inhabit—my writing, too, is a scratch at this itch.

 


 

A book, miniature or not, represents the best part of humanity by being a search for, as well as manifestation of, understanding, philosophy, and creativity. I appreciate how the book results proactively from thinking because somebody, the author, didn’t just exist but took a considering look at one’s environment before writing down the significance of what the author saw/sees. After writing, the book then allows the writer to share with others in not just illumination but community.

~

The Novelist

To date, for most of my writing life I’ve written as a poet. What’s not known by many who know me for writing poems is that I began—or tried to begin—my creative writing life as a novelist.

            During my last corporate job, I spent the last two years coming home from the Swiss bank where I worked as a Vice President to trade my business suit for sweats and spend the nights working on the so-called “Great American Novel.” I resigned to be a full-time writer when I was able to append “The End” to that manuscript of (yawn) a murder mystery set in—what else?—a bank. It required two years to finish my first completed first draft of a novel.

Since my last banking day was a June 30, I thought I’d take the summer off from work—I was exhausted from a finance career that required longer hours than the stereotyped 9 to 5. I thought to return to the novel in the fall. Meanwhile, to recover from my finance career, I thought I’d write in a shorter form than the novel and thought of poems.

            At that point, I hadn’t paid much attention to poetry; the only youthful involvement I recall with poetry was some elementary school activity of memorizing long poems for a competition that I did not win. So that post-banking summer, I learned poetry from scratch by reading almost all the poetry collections in my neighborhood’s Barnes & Noble bookstore ((I didn’t yet know that B&N’s offerings were limited in both quantity and aesthetics because I was starting from scratch). While reading, I also wrote poems. As a result of that immersion, after summer ended and I was supposed to return to my novel, I realized that poetry was the form I’d been looking for as a writer. I had felt something pure about words from keeping company with poems—pure in the sense that words bear certain characteristics that create their own nature versus the utilitarian purpose(s) for which humans used them. I felt a deep urge to know words more fully than as the communications medium required by journalism (my first career) or financial research papers.

            That hot New York summer, thus, turned my primary focus away from fiction to poetry. But behind the scenes of successfully publishing many books of poetry, with my first collection, Beyond Life Sentences, receiving the Philippines’ National Book Award for Poetry, I never forgot my desire to write a novel. But while I decried my first novel that I wrote as a banker, I came to realize over three decades of effort that it is extremely difficult to accomplish a completed first draft of a novel. I later would learn that only 3%—three percent!—of writers who begin a novel actually finish the novel. I did become a published short story writer, but what’s not known is how several of my short stories began as chapters from never-finished novel attempts.

            Then I entered my fifties. One of my goals was to not end up on my deathbed wondering “What if ____?” about anything. I looked ahead and affirmed: I did not want to die with that question, “What if I had written a novel?” I looked inward and questioned myself: Have I done all that I could to write a novel? I’ve tried and tried—perhaps five novel attempts, if I recall correctly. But is that all the effort I could muster? Have I done all that I could to write a novel?

            I answered myself with an “I don’t know.” The challenge of the novel, especially as a long-form genre, is that you can’t know if you’ll succeed ahead of the process of doing it. So in late 2015, I determined to do something I’d never done: have a New Year’s Resolution for the next year. My 2016 resolution was to work everyday on a novel—one could “work” on it by simply writing one word instead of a thousand, research a topic versus actually writing, spend one minute on it versus an hour or two, and so on. But the key was to work on the novel everyday. And to put extra pressure on myself to persevere, I decided to post on my daily achievement everyday on Facebook—I would shame myself in meeting my daily goal to avoid posting, Uh, Sorry Folks—I did nothing on the novel today…

            Working on the novel, even briefly, ended up being my key to success. December 31, 2016 brought with it my first completed draft of a novel in two decades since that awful murder mystery tale set in a bank. With hindsight, it was that daily attentiveness that made all the difference for me. Writing even just one word accomplished the same thing as a thousand words—it kept me mentally and psychologically living within the novel’s world. Without inhabiting that fictional world-in-progress, I would not have been able to continue imagining what existed in that world that was parallel to my reality. In my best working days, that novel’s world was as real and even more real than the world of my reality.

That completed first draft became my first published novel, DOVELION: A Fairy Tale For Our Times. Because its form is also experimental—every section begins with the phrase “Once upon a time…”—it was released by what I consider to be its dream publisher, an arts house press, AC Books, published by artist-poet Holly Crawford. In fact, Holly solicited the manuscript from me as a result of reading my daily Facebook posts about writing it! Three years after its release, KALAPATINGLEON, a Filipino translation by Danton Remoto would be published in the Philippines by University of Santo Tomas Publishing House.

 


         

            Since writing DOVELION, I’ve managed to complete three other first drafts of a novel. One evolved into a hybrid novel/poetry book entitled Collateral Damage and another became a trunk novel, Clandestine DNA. A “trunk novel” is a novel the author relegates to the files (or trunk, in the old days) for not being good enough (yet) to look for publication. But a third novel became The Balikbayan Artist which was released in 2024 by Penguin Random House SEA. But all of these novels, whether published or not, were necessary exercises for me as a novelist. Writing is like most other things—one improves with practice.

            For many years, I had not criticized myself for not being able to pull off a novel. Poetry is also a jealous Muse and I’m not sure I would have accomplished what I’d done in poetry without as focused and committed practice I’d given to it. But I also did operate under a delusion I want to correct now: I thought that I had to mature or learn more about life in order to pull off the novel. Writing novels have taught me that one can never be sufficiently prepared to write a novel. Just go ahead and do it! Because the revelation that only successful novelists can know is that if you persevere long enough, at some point the writing takes over the novelist’s hand and the book will veer off into directions for which the novelist could not have planned. Here, you must trust the process—a trust that might be more difficult for a long form. But trust the process. And just write.

            There are many types of muses in creating art and literature. But I believe that for any form of creative writing, the process itself is the final Muse.         Had I known this much earlier in my life, I would have become a novelist much sooner than in my fifties. The novel mostly requires perseverance. But while I suspect I came late to the novel, I did get there. My arrival to the form wasn’t too late as would be defined by death. I am relieved I won’t be questioning “What if…” to myself at my deathbed. Belatedly but ultimately, as regards being a novelist, I Became, Am Here.

 



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