Magkwento: The Philippine Anglophone Literature List

Thanks to the amazing vision and dedicated work of Alden Sajor Wood, a PhD candidate in English and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine where he is completing a dissertation on Filipino and Filipino diasporic literatures, I’m honored and thrilled to be included in Magkwento: The Philippine Anglophone Literature List.

This invaluable resource is a comprehensive and inspiring directory to a growing list of literary luminaries. Please treat yourself and share the love with students, colleagues, and your favorite readers & writers.

September 11, 2016

Interview with Jee Yoon Lee’s “Writing Like an Asian”

Most days I feel like a mess, other days I know I’m an educator, a wife, a mom, a hiker, a home cook and gardener, but I love the days when I can call myself a “Writer” and thanks to Melissa Sipin, I got a chance to escape the imposter syndrome and discuss some of my greatest loves and life’s passions. Professor Jee Yoon Lee, who teaches at the Georgetown University Writing Program, has created an incredibly comprehensive website featuring Asian/American writers and artists with “Writing Like An Asian.” The scope is astonishingly wide and the interviews are deep, such as Q&A’s with Sipin, Barbara Jane Reyes, Marianne Villaneuva, David Mura, and the list goes on and on.

Here’s a taste:

Every word I write is summoned by my mixed race heritage, and the hundreds if not thousands of miles my grandparents traveled from the Philippines and from Mexico to make a life for them selves and for our family here in the States. I feel in some sense I am re-telling the same story, the origin of our mixed ancestry. How opposing forces from different parts of the world came together to make new.

Read the entire interview here.

Peep out my interview and please share with lovers of lit to spread the word on “Writing Like An Asian.”

September 24, 2013September 24, 2013

Please spread the word and mark your calendars: 19 October, 3-4pm “Writing Our Way Home: Shaping Tradition, History and Culture”

Excited to be a part of this upcoming October weekend event. Yours truly will be moderating the panel “Writing Our Way Home: Shaping Tradition, History and Culture” with Luisa Igloria, Jon Pineda, Lysley Tenorio. Hope to see you there! For more info, click here.

Filipino American International Book Festival (Filbookfest 2)

Likhâ ng Lahi. Writing Our Way Home: Shaping Tradition, History and Culture

October 18–20, 2013 • San Francisco Public Library, Main Branch • 100 Larkin Street, San Francisco, CA 94102

January 29, 2013

Excerpt on the Re-Cap of Mills College Workshop: Geography as the Body

From Ruelle Electrique’s “Geography as the Body & Inherited Landscapes: A Shamefully Overdue Re-cap on the Mills College Workshop, November 18, 2012”:

Absolutely and positively late in re-capping but still here it is, an overview of the Mills workshop that your salonniere was invited to as a guest speaker hosted and organized by the gracious and talented writer and publisher melissa r. sipin , sponsored by ANAKBAYAN East Bay, TAYO Literary Magazine, Philippine American Writers & Artists and Mills College. The Political Content & Engagement Writing Workshop was a series of five free writing workshops where participants from all age ranges and from across the Bay Area also performed at a reading gala and had their work published in the “i am ND” anthology…

…When it came time for writing, yours truly created prompts to play with ideas on memory and/or cultural amnesia regarding native land, family, culture and tradition. The students wrote about body and space, concerning their hometowns of Vallejo, Toulumne, Los Angeles, and my neck of the woods, Paradise Hills in East County San Diego. The slides below are from the presentation on “Love & Labour: Geography and the Body” where writers explored their childhood neighborhoods and were challenged to describe their homes as a lover or an old friend.

Read the entire excerpt here.

December 5, 2012

Excerpt on Lysley Tenorio’s Reading at San Francisco Philippine Consulate

On Wednesday November 28, after a wet and windy day, yours truly had the pleasure and honor of introducing my grad school mentor and thesis advisor fiction writer and Professor Lysley Tenorio, who’s new book, Monstress, a short story collection, was recently published by Ecco. Organized by PAWA Inc and hosted by the San Francisco Philippine Consulate, the literary event was started off with a welcome from the Consul General.

The introduction went something like this:

A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, Lysley Tenorio has received a Whiting Writer’s

Award, fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Zoetrope: All-Story, Ploughshares, Manoa, The Chicago Tribune, and The Best New American Voices along with Pushcart Prize anthologies.

His latest book, Monstress published by Ecco/HarperCollins was reviewed in the New York Times where ANDREW HAIG MARTIN called his collection “a refreshingly off-kilter approach to the lives of Filipinos in America.”

Katy Waldman from SLATE.com wrote “it is the unassuming pitch of these stories that makes them so exquisitely deadly.”

And Dan Lopez in Lambda Literary described the collection saying: Hard lives and hard choices take center stage in Monstress, but this is no bleak landscape that Tenorio limns. Woven throughout the collection is a wry narrative of ambition. These characters whether they are gay or straight, American or Filipino, all share an abiding desire to succeed, their shared identity of otherness paradoxically empowering as it appears to disenfranchise. In that sense, they belong to a larger project of outsider fiction.”

To read more about the event, click here.

November 1, 2012November 1, 2012

Please share the news and mark your calendars: PAWA Event with Lysley Tenorio, Wednesday, November 28, 6:30pm

[For immediate release. Contact PAWA pawa@pawainc.com]

Save the date, and please help spread the word!

Please join PAWA as we present Lysley Tenorio, author of the critically acclaimed Monstress. Writer and educator Rashaan Alexis Meneses will moderate.

When: Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Doors open at 5:30 pm | Event begins at 6:00 pm
Where: The Philippine Consulate
447 Sutter Street San Francisco, CA 94108

Arkipelago Books will handle book sales.

About Monstress

Monstress introduces a bold new writer who explores the clash and meld of disparate cultures. In the National Magazine Award-nominated title story, a has-been movie director and his reluctant leading lady travel from Manila to Hollywood for one last chance at stardom, unaware of what they truly stand to lose. In “Felix Starro,” a famous Filipino faith healer and his grandson conduct an illicit business in San Francisco, though each has his own plans for their earnings. And after the Beatles reject an invitation from Imelda Marcos for a Royal Command Performance, an aging bachelor attempts to defend her honor by recruiting his three nephews to attack the group at the Manila International Airport in “Help.”

Lysley Tenorio reveals the lives of people on the outside looking in with rare skill, humor, and deep understanding, in stories framed by tense, fascinating dichotomies—tenderness and power, the fantastical and the realistic, the familiar and the strange. Breathtakingly original, Monstress marks the arrival of a singular new voice in American fiction.

Lysley Tenorio is the author of Monstress (Ecco/HarperCollins). His stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Zoetrope: All-Story, Ploughshares, Manoa, The Chicago Tribune, and The Best New American Voices and Pushcart Prize anthologies. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, he has received a Whiting Writer’s Award, and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at Saint Mary’s College of California, and lives in San Francisco.

Born and raised in the seismically fractured and diverse landscape of California, Rashaan Alexis Meneses earned her MFA from Saint Mary’s College of California’s Creative Writing Program where she was named a 2005-2006 Jacob K. Javits Fellow. Nominated for a Sundress Best of the Net Prize, recent publications include a personal essay in Doveglion Press, short stories in the Australia based literary journal Kurungabaa, UC Riverside’s The Coachella Review, University of North Carolina’s Pembroke Magazine, and the anthology,Growing Up Filipino II: More Stories for Young Adults. She currently teaches as Adjunct Professor for Liberal & Civic Studies at Saint Mary’s College and will be a resident at MacDowell Colony in 2013. Her website is http://rashaanalexismeneses.com.

April 25, 2012

Barbara Jane Reyes Shouts Out on Poetry Foundation’s Harriet the Blog

Poetry Foundation’s Harriet the Blog has the honor and pleasure of hosting a regular online column with poet and professor Barbara Jane Reyes, who’s latest poets speaks truth to power, breaking silence and representation while giving a shout out to Pinay voices, including yours truly.

Do your soul a favor, and check out her words and Pinay works:

Teaching and Writing Pinay Lives and Voices

By Barbara Jane Reyes

As an author, I’ve been very uncomfortable, being expected to “represent” an entire community. Some years back, as a guest speaker in Willie Perdomo‘s VONA workshop, Building the Poetry Manuscript, I was asked by one Pinay student what that felt like, being a Pinay expected to “represent.” I told her I disliked it; though I think my work can be resonant and relevant to a Filipina American experience, it’s my own take on that wildly divergent thing. Moreover, something I’ve known since I was young, something to which my parents can attest, is that I am never the Pinay that people expect Pinays to be.

Read the entire post here.

Maraming salamat Barbara for making community!

April 9, 2012April 9, 2012

Speaking on Love & Labor for Barbara Jane Reyes’ class “Filipina Lives and Voices in Literature” at USF

Thanks to professor and poet Barbara Jane Reyes and the sponsorship of the Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program and Asian Studies Program, I was able to guest lecture for Reyes’ Spring 2012 course “YPSP 195-01/ANST 195-02: Filipina Lives and Voices in Literature” at the University of San Francisco on Tuesday, April 3, 2012. Before my presentation, sixteen savvy students read my short personal essay “Barbie’s Gotta Work,” published in Doveglion. The essay was included in the course’s unit on “Work and Domesticity.”

Reyes recently discussed this very same class and its inception in her recent post on the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet The Blog:

One day, I’d casually asked our program chair whether he was interested in an all Filipina/Pinay (Filipino women) literature course, and he said, yes, draft a syllabus, and we’ll get it approved by the curriculum committee. It was approved. It was quickly filled. This is the first semester I am teaching the course, and I’m still in disbelief. All Pinay Literature. I always think, wow, where was this class when I was young, and when I needed it most. It seems a lot of people have been asking this question too, as I have been asked by more people than I can count, for my syllabus and reading lists. So, in this space, I will be talking a bit about some of the items from my syllabus, in the hopes that it will prompt readers further.

Read entire post here.

For my guest lecture, after giving a brief power point presentation, featuring pictures of my family, my maternal and paternal grandparents at work and at play in their youth, the students asked challenging questions about the superficiality of Barbie and how that was complicated in the essay and what it was like to be a professor of color. Another student broached the gap between generations, wondering how to relate with family members who might not share the same educational experiences. This brought on the idea of exploring the roots that hold us together and the stories family members share no matter where their paths in life take them.

We discussed looking at life and literature through a prism of lenses, much like looking through a kaleidoscope; we can shift the angles. We also talked about family memories that shape who we are. Some of the students shared their own experiences, remembering the work of their mothers, fathers, and grandparents.

Below is a sneak peek at the writing exercise students worked on, sifting through their past and their parents’ and grandparents’ pasts to uncover half-forgotten memories concerning love and labor, two themes that I keep coming back to with my own writing.

Love & Labor Writing Exercise

How do your parents and/or grandparents use their body at work?
How did work define your parents and/or grandparents?
What sense of self and purpose did they find through their labor?
Describe one of your parents or grandparents at work: What is the setting? What are their hands doing? Explain the actions of the body and mind.
How are they interacting with their setting? With other people at work?