READ WATER

Delighted to receive my contributor's copy of an intriguing and timely anthology, READ WATER edited by Hari Alluri, Garrett Bryant and Amanda Fuller. I'm grateful, not just for their inclusions of my 2 poems "The Great Grief" and "Witnessed in the Convex Mirror: Anthropocene" but also, for their inclusion of my poetics essay that allows me to posit I became like water a la Bruce Lee. As someone who briefly studied Kali and barely avoided bruising my own shins during its own stick-fighting, I am amused to invoke the martial arts. Anyway, thanks to the poets and I recommend checking it out HERE. I include Table of Contents below -- also grateful to be in such fine company:

ZOOM-ING THE HAY(NA)KU!

I was blessed this weekend to be a guest poet on a webinar series put together by Dr. Jeannie Celestial and sponsored by Balay Kreative. The above image is from the lovely maganda magazine who generously hailed my presence on Instagram. At the webinar, I presented and encouraged the writing of hay(na)ku. I was so pleased--and awed--at how everyone seemed a natural in the form! Many in the audience apparently were teachers and so I don't know how much related to how they easily took up the form (certainly, it was a means for me, too, to encourage hay(na)ku as a teaching tool, having been used in classes and workshops from the elementary to the college levels).

Anyway, I wanted to share some of the hay(na)ku written during the series. The first is a "haybun" (combination of prose and a hay(na)ku) that I wrote on their prompt "My mountain is ___." I then transformed the meditation into a single hay(na)ku tercet:

MOUNTAIN

My mountain may be where I’ve built a house: Galatea in St. Helena, California. “Galatea,” “St. Helena,” “California”—none of these names are accurate, for my mountain is really the land of its original people, the Wappo. And what the Wappo may have called my mountain that is not mine is unknown. But I find comfort in this not-knowing. Because my true mountain comes from the time when we humans form our gods—that time known as childhood. As a child, I grew up on a mountain in Baguio City, Philippines. I know that mountain no longer exists as it was snuffed out of its existence by pollution and overpopulation. Where once stood pine trees are now houses on top of each other to cover every inch of its once natural slope. Galatea, California, Baguio—it’s irrelevant now. All of my mountains share the same crumbling profile of Loss.

I turned my prose meditation into this hay(na)ku:

Mountains

Become valleys

Lost in memory

I was not privy to the participants' meditations but I did see some of their mountain-related hay(na)ku and want to share this written by Vex Kaztro as it so pleased me:

My mountain does

not climb

me

Vex Kaztro is a natural at the form! Here's another one she wrote:

mud,

make me

a hardened vessel 

Another participant, Camille Santana, also wrote a mountain-related hay(na)ku:

Mountain,

Bare feet—

I am here 

I think they're all fabulous. May the hay(na)ku come to be as natural to them and their communities as breath itself.

It is a delight to share with all of them a copy of my bilingual (English/Spanish) hay(na)ku collection with translator Rebeka Lembo: ONE, TWO, THREE!

PAGPAG CONVERSATION NOW ON YOUTUBE!

NOW ON YOUTUBE:

“In The Dictator’s Aftermath: Conversation and Book Launch for PAGPAG: The Dictator's Aftermath in the Diaspora by Eileen R. Tabios”

These excerpts don’t do justice to what everyone shared. It gets more immense—darker and deeper, too—amidst—or despite—the laughter. The conversation is timely, wide-ranging and I invite you to watch this video. I wrote the book but it’s not about me; it’s on Empire, memory, colonialism and its postness, fascism and the use of humor to take it down, race, history, the frailties of the human condition, indigeneity, the flux of language, Brecht, Bahktin & Benjamin, and then hunger on too many levels, and so on and so much more. AND we name the names of those “salvaged.” Some excerpts:

As we grapple with ways to fight media repression and the Anti-Terror Bill in the Philippines, Eileen Tabios presents us with PAGPAG. … the book is a joy to read because it makes us laugh, for if there is one thing I remember about being an activist during Martial Law, …it is that we used laughter. We mocked those in power, and drawing from Mikhail Bakhtin’s discussion of the carnivalesque, this laughter was necessary in the “de-crowning” of the dictator. Moreover, the book also reminded me of family and friends who managed to joke even during dark times, of political work made lighter by shared laughter, and how, amidst fear of detention, we made up funny songs…

—Joi Barrios

The many definitions of “pagpag” includes how Ferdinand Marcos’ son asked Cambridge Analytica to “rebrand” his family’s image… to [visual pagpag] of slapping one’s cheeks to prevent one from becoming numb to all the murders. “In the Bible, Jesus says ‘if any place will not welcome you or listen to you, leave that place and *shake the dust off* your feet as a testimony against them’.”

—Father Albert Alejo

Pagpag-making, in this sense, for all its contradictory significations, like Eileen’s skillful reworking of painful and grievous memories of the Marcos regime into stories of alternative meaning, delight, and pleasure, may be seen as gesturing toward that kind of capacity for beauty and life-making in the direst of circumstances—I would say perhaps a skill those of us still ensconced in the comfort of our privilege could well learn from.

—S. Lily Mendoza

I teach “Race and Humor” at Stonybrook. The theory of humor that I love to share with students is the theory of inversion, the reversal of power. We laugh when the cruelties of the world are exposed. We laugh when the powerful are made fun of, and they’re taken down by joke … in this case by a story. Fascists hate humor because humor threatens their order, the order that they want which is that they’re on top. Humor brings them down to the level of the people.

—Nerissa Balce

…[PAGPAG] gives us a glimpse of not only of where we came up short, but also why today too many lessons are learned the hard way. In one of Pagpag's pieces, Eileen Tabios points in the story “A Ghost Haunting” to one of several reasons why many are wrestling with a deep sense of unarticulated anomie: "The optimism in my memory is a taste of rust, jarring against what I observed the country had become. The optimism is an ache that will not go away. It is a ghost haunting." // She is describing the Philippines but it can just as well be the United States. Or Brazil. Or India. Think of the fireflies reminding us of the rubble of institutions crumbling from the combined force of neglect and official venality.

—Renato Redentor Constantino

I only decided last year to collect the stories into a book after observing the human rights atrocities caused by Duterte’s regime. I thought then that even as my stories are fiction, my book PAGPAG might serve to remind how actions have such prolonged effects. The book’s idea of presenting fictionalized children of anti-Marcos activists, now grown-up and coping with their legacies, is also a metaphorical call for bettering our actions as actions do become legacies and can have impact for generations afterward.

—Eileen R. Tabios

Information about the Book Launch Participants available HERE.

MAKING THE NOVEL ADDS NEW CATEGORY!

A writer asked if I would turn MAKING THE NOVEL into a print book. I said, "Perhaps, but I have to see how the project goes and we’re still in its early days." I do appreciate the enthusiasm underlying the question, of course!  But because it’s still in its early days, I’m also still refining the project concept and, today, decided to add a fourth category (the asterisked one below) so that the project would be comprised of

EXCERPTS THAT HAD BEEN DELETED FROM PUBLISHED NOVELS

EXCERPTS FROM UNPUBLISHED or IN-PROGRESS NOVELS

EXCERPTS DELETED WHILE WRITING UNPUBLISHED or IN-PROGRESS NOVELS*

EXCERPTS FROM FAILED NOVELS

MAKING THE NOVEL is really intended to reveal more about the arduity of working in this long form. I initially thought that EXCERPTS FROM UNPUBLISHED NOVELS would encompass the new category of EXCERPTS DELETED WHILE WRITING UNPUBLISHED NOVELS. But my own experience indicates this is not the case, that is, while writing my first draft I also cut out excerpts even before the first draft was finished. So I decided to create a category for those deleted excerpts too.

So if you are writing/have written an unpublished novel, and you’ve already cut out some parts of that, this category is for you. Please share! I don’t want this project to be about my work so I’m limiting my participation but an example for this category could be a prologue I’d written for my first novel which I later deleted (as I decided the novel didn’t require a prologue).

Please continue spreading the word about this project. As a published novelist recently emailed, “I don’t think people realize just how much a story changes even after acquisition from a publisher.” And of course the story changed a lot more even before said acquisition. I think it’s helpful to make the process as transparent as possible.

I also reorganized the order of the excerpts to adjust the inclusion of this new category; I think this structure is better for showing the novel’s challenges.

Of course, do let me know if you or others you know may have contributions to these categories. 

MAKING THE NOVEL--EDITION 2

You are invited to see the latest novelists added to MAKING THE NOVEL.

For convenience, I replicate the updated Table of Contents below:

***

The MAKING THE NOVEL project is divided into three parts:

EXCERPTS FROM UNPUBLISHED or IN-PROGRESS NOVELS

EXCERPTS THAT HAD BEEN DELETED FROM PUBLISHED NOVELS

EXCERPTS FROM FAILED NOVELS

We are grateful to the novelists, published and unpublished, for participating. Click on names below to go to the writers' contributions. For convenience, I place an asterisk by each newly-added author's name with each update:

A Project Introduction & Submissions Information
Eileen R. Tabios

EXCERPTS FROM UNPUBLISHED or IN-PROGRESS NOVELS
John Bloomberg-Rissman*
Cecilia Manguerra Brainard
Lynn Crawford
Heather L. Davis
Martha King
Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor*
Monica Macansantos
Mary Mackey (2)*
Sandy McIntosh
Jose Padua
Tony Robles
Linda Ty-Casper*

Forthcoming:
John Bloomberg-Rissman (2).
Timothy Bradford
M. Evelina Galang
Cristina Querrer
More To Come


EXCERPTS THAT HAD BEEN DELETED FROM PUBLISHED NOVELS

Sesshu Foster
Mary Mackey
Reine Arcache Melvin*
Jason Tanamor*

Forthcoming:
Eric Gamalinda
Renee Macalino Rutledge
More To Come

EXCERPTS FROM "FAILED NOVELS" (as defined by their writers)
Ken Edwards
Brian Marley
Eileen R. Tabios
More To Come


ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

**

Submission Information: If you are interested in sharing an excerpt or deleted excerpt from your novel, go HERE for information.
Contact: email Eileen R. Tabios, at nalandaten at gmail dot com

Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you’re doomed. – Ray Bradbury

When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer. – Joyce Carol Oates

The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written. – Italo Calvino

"When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done." — Stephen King

MAKING THE NOVEL!

I'm delighted to announce a new project that's focused on the arduous challenge of writing the novel. I invite you to read, participate (whether, as a novelist, you're published or unpublished), and/or spread the word to novel-lovers and novelists who may be interested in participating. The project is MAKING THE NOVEL. You can see it at its link, but here also is the inaugural release's Table of Contents for convenience:

The MAKING THE NOVEL project is divided into three parts:

EXCERPTS FROM UNPUBLISHED or IN-PROGRESS NOVELS

EXCERPTS THAT HAD BEEN DELETED FROM PUBLISHED NOVELS

EXCERPTS FROM FAILED NOVELS

We are grateful to the novelists, published and unpublished, for participating. Click on names below to go to the writers' contributions:

A Project Introduction & Submissions Information
Eileen R. Tabios

EXCERPTS FROM UNPUBLISHED or IN-PROGRESS NOVELS
Cecilia Manguerra Brainard
Lynn Crawford
Heather L. Davis
Martha King
Monica Macansantos
Sandy McIntosh
Jose Padua
Tony Robles

Forthcoming:
M. Evelina Galang
Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor
Cristina Querrer
More To Come


EXCERPTS THAT HAD BEEN DELETED FROM PUBLISHED NOVELS

Sesshu Foster
Mary Mackey

Forthcoming:
Eric Gamalinda
Reine Arcache Melvin
Renee Macalino Rutledge
More To Come

EXCERPTS FROM "FAILED NOVELS" (as defined by their writers)
Ken Edwards
Brian Marley
Eileen R. Tabios
More To Come


ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

**

Submission Information: If you are interested in sharing an excerpt or deleted excerpt from your novel, go HERE for information.
Contact: email Eileen R. Tabios, at nalandaten at gmail dot com

Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you’re doomed. – Ray Bradbury

When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer. – Joyce Carol Oates

The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written. – Italo Calvino

"When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done." — Stephen King