Angelica’s Daughters – Forthcoming From Anvil

I’ve been staring at the screen for a full 20 minutes now, paralyzed by the unfounded notion that the first post on a new blog carries more import than any other. Where did I get this idea? I just checked to see what I wrote for the first post of my personal blog, which I’ve kept alive (sometimes just barely, but nevertheless) for 7 years. Here’s what it says:

“To blog or not to blog,” was the question. “Blog”—apparently—is the answer.

Okay, I clearly did not get the first-post-is-super-important idea from my own blog. I think I’ll just start at the start:

Angelica’s Daughters is a dugtungan novel co-authored by Filipina writers Cecilia Brainard, Erma Cuizon, Susan Evangelista, Veronica Montes (that’s me), and Nadine Sarreal. Novelist Brian Ascalon Roley (American Son) was kind enough to pen a blurb for our book. He does a terrific job explaining what a dugtungan novel is, so I’ll take the easy route and simply quote him:

“Part of the pleasure of reading Angelica’s Daughters, the engrossing new collaborative novel by five established Filipina writers, is seeing how deftly the authors deal with the challenge of writing in this resurrected literary form. A dugtungan is a genre of Tagalog novel popular early in the 20th century, in which each writer creates a chapter and hands it off to the next, who writes another chapter without direction. The result, in this case, is an ensemble performance that contains something of the exhilaration of theatrical improv. One watches these accomplished authors inventively weave a historical romance, creating gripping heroines and turns of plot, crossing decades and national boundaries, tapping into cultural roots of the Philippines, Spain and America. Reading Angelica’s Daughters is a gripping experience. ~ Brian Ascalon Roley, Author of American Son (W.W. Norton)

I recently said that though I am happy that our dugtungan experiment resulted in a finished, publishable product, what means the most to me is that we five writers worked together in the true spirit of bayanihan. It will be a challenge for the five of us—far-flung as we are—to publicize the book. Cecilia Brainard lives in Santa Monica, CA; Erma Cuizon in Manila; Susan Evangelista on Palawan; I am in the San Francisco Bay Area; and Nadine Sarreal can be found sometimes in Manila and sometimes in Singapore. My hope, though, is that this blog can keep interested readers in-the-loop on upcoming readings and events, as well as share some of the experiences we had while creating the novel together. Who knows? Maybe we can inspire other groups to keep the dugtungan tradition alive.

Thanks for reading. Check back soon!

~ Veronica