S-s-s-scandalous! Plus, Booksigning @ the NaFFAA Conference

At the PAWA launch, Marie Romero told us about a woman at the recent Manila International Book Fair who picked up a copy of Angelica’s Daughters, scanned the cover, read the words “a dugtungan novel,” and then dismissed the book (with a flare of her nostrils, no doubt!) as “sexual.” Silly, funny woman! Our book is kinda sexy, for sure, but not “sexual” (wow—this blog is going to get so many Google hits now…). The photograph on the cover was actually shot at the Vigeland Museum and Park in Oslo, Norway, by our own intrepid world-traveler, Cecilia Brainard. The artist is Gustave Vigeland, who designed all of the 700+ sculptures at this famous institution.

But what I meant to say when I started this post is that the tireless Linda Nietes of Philippine Expressions Bookshop is setting up a Filipiniana Book Exhibit during the NaFFAA Empowerment Conference to be held this weekend in Burlingame. You will find me there (along with others, but I’m not sure who. Linda, if you’re reading this, perhaps you can share the names?) during the Author Booksigning from 5:00 – 7:15. I am secretly hoping that a few potential book buyers will be as scandalized by the cover as the woman at the Manila International Book Fair, as it will provide me with the perfect opening for a little chitchat about the book.

Before I sign off, I want to wish Cecilia and Nadine buena suerte as they tap away at their keyboards for the remainder of NaNoWriMo. Nadine reports that there is also some sort of follow-up event?—Something like NaNoReWriMo? I think that’s hilarious…

Thanks for reading! Check back soon!

~ Veronica

Report from the PAWA Book Launch

We’re so grateful to PAWA and Arkipelago Books for launching Angelica’s Daughters with an excellent event held yesterday at the Bayanihan Community Center in San Francisco. It was memorable for many reasons, not the least of which were the twenty-five or so delightful, engaged, and interesting people in the audience. The evening started with refreshments, and Cecilia and I enjoyed mingling with folks including Penelope Flores, Joi Barrios, Tony Robles (who also served as videographer), the young and lovely Hidalgo sisters (3 of them!), and others.

Cecilia Brainard, Penelope Flores, Carmen Domingo-Kirk, Veronica Montes

PAWA President Edwin Lozada was, as always, a gracious host and charming emcee:

PAWA President Edwin Lozada and Cecilia Brainard

We were truly, truly honored to share the reading space with emerging writers Cyndi Vasallo and Yael Villafranca. Cyndi read her short story, “More American,”—a quietly beautiful and moving piece—which was recently published in TAYO Literary Magazine. If you aren’t able to read it in print, it will be available online next year. I’ll be sure to link to it then. Cyndi has an MFA from USF, and she’s revising a story collection which was “born” at VONA last summer. I can’t wait to read more of her work.

Cyndi Vasallo and Yael Villafranca

Ah, the vivacity of youth: Yael Villafranca (a VONA and Kundiman alum)  made me smile every time I looked at her. After announcing that she has the “heart of a marshmallow” and writes poetry because she’s a “frustrated filmmaker,” she convincingly backed up her argument by reading a suite of poems in which she spoke in the voice of characters inspired by Filipino soap operas. How can you not adore this person? She attended the event with Ed Mabasa, a playwright who is currently working on a radio play for Bindlestiff Studio:

Yael Villafranca and Ed Mabasa

Cecilia and I batted last (you’ll forgive the baseball analogy; we were, after all, in the home of the newly minted 2010 World Series Champion San Francisco Gi-gan-tes! Woot!). Cecilia began by talking about the genesis of our group, why we decided to tackle a novel together, and how we reacted to that first rejection (I blogged about it last month). She even printed out the rejection, which I was stunned to see was FIVE single-spaced pages! We can laugh about it now, of course, and the audience laughed right along with us.

We then did a little back and forth reading, with Cecilia presenting a letter from the historical line of the story and I reading from early on in the modern-day narrative. Then I shared a little bit about our process of working together, i.e. how we decided what order we would write in, how we dealt with feeling proprietary about our characters, how we settled disputes, edited, etc. I also mentioned that we all uploaded photos to help inspire the writing, and that many of these were vintage Filipiniana and were a large part of the reason our novel has a historic bent.

We closed with three more excerpts, and then took quite a few questions from the audience. People were curious about how we tackled the editing process after the initial rejection; if we incorporated any of the suggestions; the use of the epistolary form; how we researched the historical aspects, etc. etc. Finally, Cecilia brought some copies of Growing Up Filipino with her to raffle off, and that was done with much hilarity and fanfare.

Then it was time for more mingling and book signing. I was so pleased to meet a family of four who were on their way to pick up the patriarch’s visa for a trip to India, saw the sign through the Balikbayan Community Center Window, and came inside. They had two teenage daughters and said it was their first experience being exposed to Filipino/Fil-Am literature. Not only did they win a copy of Growing Up Filipino, they also purchased Angelica’s Daughters and chatted with me for quite a bit. I then sent them over to Arkipelago Books, where they spoke some more with owner Marie Romero and—no doubt—purchased more books. Yes!

I’m super happy to report that Arkipelago sold out of books, but Marie is expecting more soon. And I see she’s added an online purchase option to her site, which makes things especially easy.

Thanks for reading! Check back soon!

~ Veronica

Also Joining Us on Saturday…

…are two emerging writers:

Yael Villafranca is a Kundiman fellow, VONA fellow, and a student at USF
Cyndi Vasallo is a VONA fellow and a USF alum

We’re very excited! Do come out and support these young guns, as well as us old folks. Even as I type, Cecilia is on her way north. She’ll be visiting a high school classroom at Galileo Academy of Science & Technology to discuss her now classic novel, When The Rainbow Goddess Wept. Kind of cool, don’t you think, that the book is part of the high school curriculum, and a bunch of teenagers are prepared to engage with her? I love that.

Here’s the where, what, and time, once again:

When: Saturday, November 6, 2010, 5:30 – 7:00
Where: Bayanihan Community Center, 1010 Mission St., San Francisco
What:: Cecilia Brainard, Veronica Montes, Yael Villafranca, Cyndi Vasallo, book signing, and light refreshments

Thanks for reading! Check back soon!

~ Veronica

Angelica’s Daughters – Bay Area Launch

Multiple thank yous to the excellent and ever-supportive PAWA for hosting the Bay Area book launch of Angelica’s Daughters.

Cecilia is venturing north to be here, which is super exciting—it’s been several years since I’ve seen her in person! I’m personally hoping to meet more of the many Bay Area contributors to Cecilia’s Growing Up Filipino I and II and Contemporary Fiction by Filipino Americans anthologies. Do come out, all you locals! We’d love to say hello.

When: Saturday, November 6, 2010, 5:30 – 7:00
Where: Bayanihan Community Center, 1010 Mission St., San Francisco
What: Reading (Cecilia and Veronica), book signing, and light refreshments

And bonus: Arkipelago Books is also located in the Bayanihan Community Center, so you can shop for those hard-to-find Filipino and Fil-Am titles before or after (um, not during, ‘kay?) the event! Hope to see you there.

Thanks for reading! Check back soon!

~ Veronica

An Afternoon Tea with Gawad Kalinga

Angelica’s Daughters co-author Cecilia Brainard was honored this weekend at an afternoon tea hosted by Gawad Kalinga, a Philippine-based organization committed to building communities that put an end to poverty. Cecilia was in good company: the other honorees were Chef Cecilia De Castro, and authors May Respicio Koerner, Carina Monica Montoya, Myrna De La Paz, Marjorie Light, and Ludy Ongkeko.

Linda Nietes’ Philippine Expressions Bookshop ensured that the authors’ books were available at this lovely event.

Holding books left to right: Mae Respecio Koerner, Myrna De La Paz, Linda Nietes, Carina Monica Montoya, Cecilia Brainard

You can read more (and see more pictures!) at Cecilia’s blog.

Thanks for reading! Check back soon!

~ Veronica

In The Manila Times

I just found this column from The Manila Times:

THE “DUGTUNGAN” WRITING EXERCISE
by LIBAY LINSANGAN CANTOR
Sunday, 17 October 2010

Is there such a thing as a collaborative writing procedure?

In the Philippine literary circles, yes, there is, and we call it dugtungan, meaning one writer writes one part of the story, passes it on to another writer who will continue the next part of the story, and will pass it again to another writer, and so on. Each writer can be free in his/her collaboration, and that’s what makes the work fresh and exciting.

I first heard of this dugtungan style during my stints as a creative writing workshop fellow. To while away time, my poet co-fellows would entertain us by starting a renga, the old Japanese tradition of shared writing, much like the Filipino dugtungan. They will write one line, pass the paper to another fellow, until we had the paper full of combined thoughts.

But more than just an exercise, the dugtungan is a kind of literary collaboration among writers. Perhaps it’s not usual to hear of authors co-writing stuff with other authors since we are more used to the fact that literary writers write alone, and produce their own individual works. Plus individual authors get recognition because of their individual works, of course.

Other writing disciplines such as film and television scriptwriting employ collaborative writing more than literary writing since the finished products of those industries are different compared to literary outputs. But yes, it is still possible to produce quality work from such literary collaborations, as the renga has attested, as well as the dugtungan. Filipino writers in the early 1900s used this technique to produce novels, and now, contemporary writers have, once again, employed the technique to create a new novel.

I’m talking about the latest book by Anvil Publishing entitled Angelica’s Daughters, authored by five distinguished women—Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, Erma Cuizon, Susan Evangelista, Veronica Montes and Nadine Sarreal. The book was launched at the Manila International Book Fair last month.

The novel has an interesting premise; it is basically a historical romance telling the story of two women from different eras (past and present), in the process characterizing their families’ tales and their own romantic tales. I just got a copy and I’m eager to read it, given the kind of interesting work these women writers could come up with.

The idea for the dugtungan actually stemmed from an online creative writing workshop which Brainard started in the early 2000s. The informal and encouraging atmosphere of that workshop was meant to inspire participants to write something new (based on a weekly writing prompt) and have fellow writers comment on these early drafts. Some of these drafts were eventually developed until they were published in different anthologies. The earlier participants of that workshop actually produced a dugtungan short story entitled New Tricks which was anthologized in Milfrores Publishing’s 2007 anthology Sawi: Funny Essays, Stories and Poems on All Kinds of Heartbreaks. That story was the product of the dugtungan efforts of Brainard, Montes, Sarreal and Evangelista, plus Noelle de Jesus and yours truly.

Congratulations to these authors and here’s hoping that more of these literary collaborations would be produced in the future.

Many thanks to Libay for featuring Angelica’s Daughters in her column.

Thanks for reading! Check back soon!

~ Veronica

Report from Eastwind Books in Berkeley

Thanks very much to Ms. Barbara Jane Reyes for inviting me to read with her and the wonderful Maiana Minahal at Eastwind Books in Berkeley last Saturday. I have long admired the talented Ms. B.J. not only for her work (if you do not yet have a copy of her new book, Diwata, what in the world are you waiting for?), but for her generosity of time and spirit when it comes to helping others promote their work; spreading the news about opportunities, resources, and new publications; connecting writers; and just being awesome, basically. Here are the three of us, post-event:

I’ve read at Eastwind Books many times now, and I continue to be grateful and astonished that 1) they still—in this age of Amazon and corporate chains—exist and 2) their support of Asian and Asian-American writers is as steadfast as ever. Does it cost more to purchase a book at Eastwind? Yes, it does. If you can, should you purchase it anyways? Yes. Yes. Please, yes.

Maiana started us off yesterday with poems from her book Legend Sandayo, which was inspired by a Filipino legend that is—according to Leny Strobel’s introduction—remembered today only in fragments. Maiana presents readers with a retelling about Sondayo, who in the original version of the story is a village woman and warrior whose husband is stolen away by the wind goddess. Sandayo battles the wind goddess for several days and finally emerges victorious, husband in tow. Sometimes it is the poet who speaks, sometimes the husband, sometimes Sandayo herself. I love the way Maiana read this poem; the rhythm was beautiful (read it out loud yourself!):

poem for sondayo

sometimes i think
i want to say
you a honeysuckle smell
on a hot day/ n
you the sculpture come from
a wet bar of clay/ n
you a new love letter
every day of the week!/ n
you a song song sondayo
i got to keep singing
can’t help but be singing

n then again
i think
you more
you a operatic orchestration
a movement in the key of “a”
a symphonic suite of arias that start
sondayo
sondayo
sondayo

you the pure pool of water
cool rain leaves
you low rumbling thunder
rolling along the sea
you strong for speakin/ n
i want to say
you living breathing dancing singing
you flame fire earth
you a song song sondayo
i got to sing

See? Gorgeous. Maiana also read from a memoir-in-progress. Though we share space in Marianne Villanueva and Virginia Cerenio’s anthology, Going Home to a Landscape, Maiana and I somehow managed to not meet while doing readings for that book, so I was extra pleased to make her acquaintance this weekend. Oh—and here’s another thing I love about Maiana’s book. Look at the size of it, here! It’s the white book in front; the ultimate in portable poetry:

I went next, and I was super surprised when I maneuvered around the podium, turned around, and saw that we had a capacity crowd. Mostly students, from the look of it, and soooo quiet. I had been trying to figure out exactly what to read and in the end, I hope I chose well. I started off by confessing that I’d had to call my Dad that morning just to make sure I was pronouncing “dugtungan” correctly. I introduced my (sadly) absent co-authors and shared this definition that one of them had found:

dugtungan: to add, expand, build on. In a cultural context this has become an event, an activity, a contest in which stories are told with successive participants adding a paragraph, a sentence, or even a specified number of words, until one by one, the writers falter and drop out.

I described the novel as a story about a modern-day Filipina-American, Tess, who finds solace in the life of one of her foremothers (Angelica) who has, until this point, maintained a mythical standing within the family. Tess has the opportunity to move beyond the myth and discover the realities of Angelica’s difficult life via letters and journal entries. I read a few pages from the beginning of the book that I felt were a good introduction to both main characters:

When Tess was a ponytailed girl in Manila sitting at the foot of Lola Josefina’s chair, she was treated to tales about budding romances between houseboys and young maids fresh from the province; about schoolchildren caught spying on the secret lives of nuns; about the hardship of life during the war. And while she listened, fascinated, to all of these stories (often while sucking absentmindedly on a li hing mui), it was the ones about Angelica she loved the most. She committed every detail to memory and believed every word. It seemed completely plausible, for example, that not just one but several of Angelica’s suitors had entered the priesthood after her firm (though never cruel) rejections.

Tess and her family left Manila for Chicago when she was nine years old so that her father, an architect, could follow a job lead that never actually materialized. After a single winter in that windiest of cities, they re-settled in California. It only took a few years before Tess, like her American counterparts, began to display a jaded personality and lost her tendency to believe in the fantastical. By the time she became a teenager, the stories about Angelica seemed like fairytales Lola Josefina had invented to ward off the boredom of sweltering, rainy-season afternoons. “She received hundreds of marriage proposals,” Lola had said, clucking her tongue. “And a botanist named a species of blood-red orchid after her when he caught sight of her walking with a market basket hanging from the crook of her elbow.”

In college, Tess’ attitude towards her foremother depended entirely on the state of her personal life at any given moment. When in love (or what she believed to be love), she thought of Angelica as an ideal romantic heroine. When distraught, she became annoyed at Angelica’s sway over the hearts and minds of everyone around her. Had some wealthy fool in Davao truly commissioned ornate buildings to honor her beauty? Was there really a hospital wing filled with women who’d gone mad with jealousy at the sight of her?

There were long stretches of time in her life—at the beginning of her marriage, for example—when she had thought very little about Angelica. But now, with Tonio’s private phone calls and weekend disappearances, Angelica was as much on her mind, and in her imagination, as she had been all those years ago in Manila. Tess often spent evenings alone while Tonio was God-knows-where, conjuring up an image of Angelica and trying to tease the facts from the maze of fiction surrounding the woman. But she could never be sure what was real, what could be depended on. In the end, Tess thought, we choose to believe what we want to believe. Especially when what we want to believe in is love.

I also wanted to share a little bit from the historical narrative, which we present almost entirely in an epistolary fashion, so I read one of Angelica’s letters that describes the beginning of her journey to Cebu in search of her lover. And that was that.

Barbara Jane wrapped up the afternoon with poems from her new book, Diwata. A diwata is a mythic creature—a nymph or fairy, perhaps, but another definition for the word is “muse,” and of course it’s the one B.J. likes best. Many of the pieces are prose poems, and they are so rich, so…I don’t know…the only word I can think of is “world-creating,” and that’s not even a word. Jewels, each and every one:

Aswang

I am the dark-hued bitch; see how wide my maw, my bloodmoon eyes,
And by daylight, see the tangles and knots of my riverine hair.
I am the bad daughter, the freedom fighter, the shaper of death masks.
I am the snake, I am the crone; I am caretaker of these ancient trees.
I am the winged tik-tik, tik-tik, tik-tik, tik-tik; I am close,
And from under the floorboards, the grunting black pig,
Cool in the dirt, mushrooms between my toes, I wait.
I am the encroaching wilderness, the bowels of these mountains.
I am the opposite of your blessed womb, I am your inverted mirror.
Guard your unborn children, burn me with your seed and salt,
Upend me, bend my body, cleave me beyond function. Blame me.

Certainly Barbara Jean and Maiana’s work was complementary, and I like to think that because Angelica, too, is shrouded in myth, this helped our book fit in nicely with the afternoon’s poetry. And now…I need to move away from the keyboard for awhile!

Thanks for reading! Check back soon!

~ Veronica

On Rejection. Or Also: Failing Better

A non-writer once asked me what the big deal is about rejection. Why so sensitive? Why gnash your teeth? I can see the point, of course: rejection is part of everyday life, so why waste energy lending it more credence than it deserves? Right. Got it. But…easier said than done. When your creative works is rejected, it can feel like:

~ you’ve overheard someone describe your precious, newborn child as “Hideous. Absolutely hideous.”
~ a punch to the solar plexus, a ninja star to the eye.
~ you are the mayor, school board, sheriff, and sole resident of Loser Town.
~ nobody loves you, everybody hates you: why not just eat dirt?

That’s how we felt, at least, when we first submitted Angelica’s Daughters and it was returned with the world’s biggest REJECT stamp. The manuscript was given to a reader employed by the publishing house, and we were gifted with said reader’s blunt appraisal. His/her response was, to be fair, extremely long and detailed. Or perhaps I should say excruciatingly long and detailed. Here is one of the least painful bits to quote:

It is this reader’s belief that the other members of the clan in every generation should have been given space to tell their stories and ways of dealing with passion in order to claim the right and honor of being called Angelica’s daughters. As it is, at the novel’s end, no one of them deserved to be called such—despite the haste and happy dispatch with which they were made to be so by a deus ex machinistic act of the nebulous god-narrator. Only Tess, in fact, was in a position to go for an “Angelica glory…”

At other times, the reader refers to one character’s “cheap religious baggage,” describes another’s characterization as going on “interminably until late in the novel where it has become wearyingly monotonous and produces an unintended ironic effect,” and in a knockout punch at the very end of the critique says, “The real story still has to begin.”

When this assessment first landed in our inboxes, it was so difficult to read, and even harder to process. In fact, it was a few months before our group could even consider diving back in for what was sure to be almost a complete overhaul of the story. But overhaul we did, and two years later (hey, it’s hard to coordinate 5 different writers who live in multiple time zones!) we re-submitted with a much better result.

So, the next time you receive an especially humiliating rejection, go ahead and throw yourself a failure fete (get it? it’s a “pity party” with better music and top-shelf alcohol!). But after nursing your hangover, crawl back to your notebook or your laptop or whatever and follow Samuel Beckett’s advice: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Thanks for reading! Check back soon!

~ Veronica

Eastwind Books / Berkeley / October 16th

Come out and pick up your copies of these Pinay-authored books!

EASTWIND BOOKS in Berkeley presents an Author Reading Event:

Barbara Jane Reyes, Maiana Minahal and Veronica Montes
presenting Diwata, Legend Sondayo, and Angelica’s Daughters.

October 16, 2010
3:00 pm
Eastwind Books, 2066 University Ave., Berkeley, CA.

Barbara Jane Reyes will be reading Diwata. In her book, Reyes frames her poems between the Book of Genesis creation story, and the Tagalog creation myth of the muse, placing her work somewhere culturally in between both traditions. Also setting the tone for her poems is the death and large shadow cast by her grandfather, a World War II veteran and Bataan Death March survivor, who has passed onto her the responsibility of remembering. Reyes’ voice is grounded in her community’s traditions and histories, despite war and geographical dislocation.

Reyes was born in Manila, Philippines, and received her B.A. in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and her M.F.A. at San Francisco State University. She has taught Creative Writing at Mills College, and Philippine Studies at University of San Francisco. She lives in Oakland where she is co-editor of Doveglion Press.

•••••

Maiana Minahal, will be reading Legend Sondayo, a story that remixes an ancient Filipino myth with queer sensibilities, lyrical precision, and a sense of yearning that is at once specific and universal.

Maiana Minahal, a queer Filipina American poet and teacher, born in Manila, raised in Los Angeles, and currently living in San Francisco. She studied with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program, is a recipient of an Artist Award Grant from the Serpent Source Foundation, and is one of the founding members of the Queer Pin@y Kreatibo collective.

•••••

Veronica Montes will be reading from Angelia’s Daughters, A Dugtungan Novel by Cecilia Brainard, Erma Cuizon, Susan Evangelista, Veronica Montes, Nadine Sarreal. Anvil Publishing, 2010

In Angelica’s Daughters, the secret life of Angelica de los Santos comes into focus via a cache of her personal letters. The misfortunes and victories of their foremother guide the modern-day de los Santos women as they struggle with issues of infidelity, betrayal, and love both lost and found.

Veronica Montes lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has appeared in literary journals including Bamboo Ridge, Prism International, and Achiote Seeds, as well as in several anthologies including Contemporary Fiction by Filipinos in America, Growing Up Filipino, and Going Home to a Landscape: Writings by Filipinas. Her essays have appeared in Filipinas Magazine and online at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

—
Eastwind Books of Berkeley
2066 University Avenue; Berkeley, CA 94704
phone: 510 548-2350 fax: 510 548-3697
http://www.asiabookcenter.com
http://www.facebook.com/eastwind.books

Thanks for reading! Check back soon!

~ Veronica

P.S. Check out the sidebar for ordering information!

Angelica’s Daughters Available Soon in the US

A friend of Nadine’s snapped this photo of the treasures she unearthed at the Manila International Book Fair. Close inspection reveals a copy of…wait for it…Angelica’s Daughters!

photo courtesy of Cindy Karingal

Where do books land, I wonder, once people get them home? I have so many piled next to my bed that they tend to eventually migrate under the bed, where I sometimes lose track of them. When I finally get down on my knees to clear the space, it’s like I just came home from a trip to the bookstore. Speaking of bookstores…people have been asking if Angelica’s Daughters will be available in the States, and the answer is an unequivocal yes!

Linda Nietes of Philippine Expressions Bookshop in Southern California will be carrying it (310-514-9139), as will Cecilia’s own Philippine American Literary House. A few weeks ago I attended a PAWA Arkipelago Reading Series event for Luis Francia’s wonderful (I’m not exaggerating; order a copy right now!) A History of the Philippines: From Indios Bravos to Filipinos. There, I had a chance to speak with Arkipelago Books’ Marie Romero, who said she would be happy to support Angelica’s Daughters by stocking it in her store. We’ll do our best to let you know exactly when the books are available. Meanwhile, make room next to your bed!

Thanks for reading! Check back soon!

~ Veronica