GERONIMO TAGATAC

My publisher Vibal, the other contributors of How I Became a Writer 2, and I are deeply saddened at the passing of Geronimo Tagatac on September 23, 2026. This was a shock to me. As editor of the anthology How I Became a Writer 2, I was trying (these past days) to reach Geronimo to send a copy of the book, which includes his personal essay about his journey to becoming a writer. I share this in my blog, as a way of honoring Geronimo. I did not have the chance to meet him, but we had brief conversations via email. I asked him about his trips to other places, seeking his travel advice at time, just admiring his photographs on other occasions. I had also read his writings online, which I admired, and which is why I included in the collection of writers that I edited.  May he rest in peace.

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Geronimo Tagatac’s father was from Ilocos Norte. His mother was a Russian Jew. Geronimo has been a Special Forces soldier, a legislative consultant, a dishwasher, cook, folksinger, computer system planner, a modern and jazz dancer and a roofer. His short fiction has appeared in Writers Forum, The Northwest Review, Alternatives Magazine, Orion Magazine, The Clackamas Literary Review and The Chautauqua Literary Review. He’s received fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts and Fishtrap. “Summer of the Aswang,” received the 2017 Timberline Award for short fiction. His first book of short fiction, The Weight of the Sun, was a 2007 Oregon Literary Arts finalist.
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A TWISTED PATH TO BECOMING A WRITER

COPYRIGHT 2026 BY GERONIMO TAGATAC 

 

THERE HAVE BEEN MANY STRANDS to my life that have gone in so many directions. They eventually converged to make me a writer.

            I grew up surrounded by stories. My earliest memories are of the stories my father told of his boyhood in Baay, a lakeside place in Ilocos Norte, and of his ship’s journey as a nineteen-year-old to America. One night, as my father and I stood at the edge of a field and looked up at the stars, he told me about when the ship put in at Hong Kong, and he said that he couldn’t tell where the city lights ended and the star-filled sky began. He told me the story of the bamboo grove at the edge of his family’s village where, on some still nights, the bamboo bent as though pushed by a strong wind. It was where, during the Japanese occupation, Filipino guerillas had slaughtered a Japanese army patrol and dumped their bodies.

 

There were the stories my Cajun stepmother told of growing up along the bayous around Happy Jack, Louisiana where, as a girl she was sent to keep the crows off the corn with a black snake whip. She remembered the night when everyone in and around Happy Jack stood waiting beside the train tracks for hours just to watch a train carrying Governor Huey Long pass by.

I spent much of my childhood and teens on farms, where my father tilled, planted, and harvested other men’s land with other Filipino farmworkers whose stories and songs were always there and they stayed with me.  One man played the mandolin and sang songs of romantic longing and lost love. They spoke of their youths and the nights spent at taxi dance halls where they bought tickets to dance with the young women who worked at those places, and of the parking lot fights over one or another over the woman’s favors. They talked about fights with white men who hated the sight of a Filipino. “When they see a knife they step back fast,” one of them said to me in his accented English. I would later write, “The Center of the World” and “Stretched Toward Him Like a Dark Wake,” based on what I heard and experienced in those days.

We didn’t read in our home other than the occasional magazine. We couldn’t afford books. My father hadn’t gone beyond grade school. My mother wouldn’t learn to read until she was in her sixties. My grammar school education focused on reading, writing, and arithmetic. The basics. We didn’t read for pleasure. 

When school let out in the summers I worked in the nearby orchards or in the fields picking prunes and apricots, thinning lettuce plants and weeding long rows of vegetable starts with a short-handled hoe. They were hot days with the silence broken only by the sound of my hoe breaking the soil, or the fruit being tossed into my tin bucket. The work was too hard for much talking even when there was someone with whom to talk. Work was at the center of our lives, and it was something you were expected to do full time after high school, or sooner if the eighth grade marked the end of your education.  I dreamed of a different life. I couldn’t have explained why.

My draft notice arrived in August of 1963. At that time, most Filipino draftees were put into the navy to serve as cooks or mess boys, essentially officers’ servants aboard naval ships. That was the last thing I wanted. I walked down to the nearest recruiting office and asked what my choices were. The recruiting sergeant smiled and replied that I could choose my MOS (Military Occupation Specialty) or duty station (Germany was a favorite for most recruits). Having been raised on heroic World War II movies I chose airborne infantry. At Fort Ord, I went through basic and advanced infantry training. At a chance encounter with the Special Forces recruiting sergeant at the enlisted men’s club, he talked me into taking the Special Forces exam which I passed. My story, “Waiting for Orders” was based on my training experiences, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. It was the story of a young man eagerly waiting to be sent to war whose perspective is suddenly changed by a lethal incident on a country road.

 I went to Vietnam in the summer of 1965 as the demolition specialist on a twelve-man A-Team, on Phu Quoc Island. Our job was to train, advise, and lead irregular forces on combat patrols, in cooperation with a Vietnamese Special Forces team against NLF guerilla forces also known as the Viet Cong. There were periods of everyday work, fortifying the camp, training men on the firing range, and things that go on when you’re not in the field. It was then, in the slack hours that I began to read the novels by John Barth, J.R Tolkien, and others that a friend sent me from the States. There were the patrols, where one might go for days and nights and nothing would happen. Sometimes the bush would erupt into sudden encounters and firefights, ending with casualties, the dead and the wounded who had to be carried out or evacuated by helicopter. A week before my tour in-country ended, I volunteered to go out on a heliborne mission with the Mike Force to see if we could flush out a large VC unit. We were essentially bait. But nothing came of it. Much later, I’d use that experience to write, “The Weight of the Sun,” the title piece of a short story collection.

When I returned home, one of the first novels I read was Romain Gary’s, The Ski Bum. It sounded like an adventurous life as far from the luminous greens and humidity of the wartime Vietnam as I could get. In the winter of 1966, I boarded a Greyhound bus for Aspen with skis, boots poles, and my pocket full of traveler’s checks. I’d never set foot on skis. I found a bed in a dorm room in The Garret, a rundown skier’s hostel and got a job as a short order cook in Pinocchio’s on the breakfast and dinner shifts, which gave me time to learn to ski. It was a cold white world. I spent most of that winter on the slopes or flipping burgers, making pizzas, and coping with what I’d experienced in Vietnam. I became part of the ski bum culture. But I knew that the winter would end, the snow would thin and vanish, and everyone would scatter to survive in other ways. There were those who managed to stay in Aspen, as bartenders and waiters at large hotels, some of them into middle age. 

By then, I was reading Steinbeck, Hemingway, and other writers, and realizing how little of the world I knew despite my wartime experiences. I’d never read more than a dozen good books, been to a live theater performance, the opera, or a ballet performance.  I’d never eaten at a good restaurant. Other than a year in Vietnam and little more than a week in Thailand on R and R, I’d never been in another country. I knew little to nothing about the place from which my father had emigrated in the 1920s.  I needed to go back to school. I needed to learn. My ski bumming time became the basis for a later story, “Last Breath in a Cold, White Place.”

              I decided to study Asian History, partly as a way of reconnecting with the Filipino part of my heritage. But I also wanted to understand the history of the part of the world where I’d spent a year at war. At the same time, I wanted the time to read as much American, English, and Asian literature as possible.  I eventually came to see literature as an inseparable part of history. Often, with the advice of friends and professors, I read everything I could get my hands on. Jose Rizal, Ford Maddox Ford, James Joyce, Yukio Mishima, Herman Melville, Ralph Ellison, and others. It was a literary education that paralleled and sometimes fed into the formal one.  I graduated in 1975 and went on to get an M.A. in history, in 1976.

            In the fall of 1976, I was hired to establish an Asian American Studies program and to teach classes in Asian American History, at Western Washington State College. To prepare for this I put together a bibliographies and class syllabi for Chinese American, Japanese American, and Filipino American courses. All the while I continued to read Anais Nin, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, and others.

            I left Western Washington State after a year to go to graduate school at U.C. Davis after a year, where I studied political science and I focused on Chinese foreign and domestic policies with special attention to the relations between the Chinese Communist Party and the Philippine New People’s Army. By then, I was reading Lu Xun, Lao She, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Tom Wolfe, and anything else I could find.  At the same time, I began taking modern and jazz dance classes to stay in shape. That experience would become the basis for one of my first short stories, “The Dance Class.”  I was still coping with what I didn’t realize was PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The intertwining of grad student life and the inescapable war memories later became the basis of another story, “Back in the World.”

            Eventually I left graduate school to take a job working on the development of international trade and development policy with the California State Assembly Office of Research. I worked there for four years, married the woman I’d met in San Francisco through the dance world, and went to work in that city until 1989, when we moved to Oregon. My work in the offices of state government formed the basis for “Agency,” “You Are Here,” and “The God of Jackals.” 

            Writers had always been a mystery to me.  I thought of them as people possessed of innate abilities that allowed them to see and to write about things in ways that were beyond the rest of us. They were as distant as the white middle class families that lived in the new homes beyond the prune and apricot orchards in the new subdivisions that were going up at San Jose’s edges when I was young. Writers were an aristocracy of the words, sentences, and images that formed the stories, poems, and novels that we read in high school English classes.

In 1989, I enrolled in an evening creative writing class. At the class’s conclusion, the instructor told me that I had a future as a writer if I was willing to do the work. Writing, the serious kind required an apprenticeship as important as that demanded of a doctor, a roofer, a stone mason, or a chef. It was important to read good writing, to learn the roles of tense, point of view, of dialogue, plot, other skills. She taught me that revision was seventy percent of the work. My stories, given voice, began at last to emerge on paper.

            I remember the day my first acceptance letter arrived in the mail. It was for the story called, “Ten Degrees North,” about the suicide of a Vietnam veteran haunted then befriended by the ghost of an NLF guerilla he’d killed. When I read that letter, I felt that my life had re-aligned itself. I’d found what I was meant to do.  More acceptances followed. I haven’t stopped writing since.

How I Became a Writer 1 & 2 are available from Vibal bookshop, Lazada, and in the US, contact palhbooks@gmail.com

 

READ ALSO:

 I Became a Writer by Marra Pl Lanot, from How I Became a Writer 2 

 Writing Amid the Babel of Books by Vicente L. Rafael, from How I Became a Writer 2

Cecilia Brainard at the MIBF26 for Book Launch and Book Signings  

         Perspectives in the Arts and Humatiies Asia - Dr. Charlie Veric Interviws Cecilia Brainard 

Writing Amid the Babel of Books by Vicente L Rafael - included in How I Became a Writer 2

Book Review of How I Became a Writer: Essays by Filipino and Filipino American Writers by Elfren S. Cruz