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Cecilia Manguerra Brainard

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Author Cecilia Brainard Talk University of Santo Tomas CCWLS

December 18, 2021 by admin Leave a Comment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4Y0aSYxs3Q

Fil­ipino Fil­Am Author Cecil­ia Manguer­ra Brainard gives a talk for the Uni­ver­si­ty of San­to Tomas Cen­ter for Cre­ative Writ­ing and Lit­er­ary Stud­ies. This is part of their UST Inter­na­tion­al Writ­ers and Schol­ars Series.

This same video can be viewed in the Face­book site of UST Cen­ter for Cre­ative Writ­ing and Lit­er­ary Studies:

https://fb.watch/9ZIg1qMcNg/

Fol­low­ing is the tran­script of Cecil­i­a’s talk:

Cel­e­brat­ing Writ­ing and My Select­ed Short Stories

For the Inter­na­tion­al Authors Series of UST Cen­ter for Cre­ative Writ­ing and Lit­er­ary Studies

by Cecil­ia Manguer­ra Brainard, copy­right by Cecil­ia Brainard

Thanks to Pro­fes­sors Jing Hidal­go Pan­to­ja. Ralph Semi­no-Galan, Jack Wigley and all at the UST Cen­ter for Cre­ative Writ­ing and Lit­er­ary Stud­ies for invit­ing me to give this talk. I am hon­ored and grate­ful to you for includ­ing me in your lit­er­ary family.

This talk gives me the oppor­tu­ni­ty to cel­e­brate my book, Select­ed Short Sto­ries, which was recent­ly released by the Uni­ver­si­ty of San­to Tomas Pub­lish­ing House and PALH. The book col­lects 39 of what I think are my strongest and most inter­est­ing short fiction.

The book is divid­ed into three parts: Part 1 includes sto­ries set in my myth­i­cal place, Ubec; Part 2 has sto­ries from oth­er parts of the Philip­pines; and Part 3, many of which are more recent sto­ries, are set in oth­er parts of the world, includ­ing the US, Mex­i­co, France, India, Peru.

To give you an idea of my writ­ing, I’d like to share a short read­ing from Part 2 of my Select­ed Short Sto­ries, a sto­ry enti­tled “Romeo.” The piece recalls the pup­py that I bought in Escol­ta, when I was in col­lege. My niece and I saw a man hold­ing out pup­pies for sale, and on a whim I bought one and named it Romeo. This sto­ry is about that beloved dog, but it’s also about my moth­er, and it’s also about the Mar­cos years in Mani­la. I’m read­ing from the last part of the sto­ry. (Read from “Romeo” from SELECTED SHORT STORIES BY CECILIA MANGUERRA BRAINARD)

That was from the sto­ry “Romeo”:

Ralph and Jack sent me ques­tions – thank you for these –and I will start by respond­ing to Ralph’s first question:

1. Which writ­ers, Fil­ipino and for­eign, have influ­enced your fic­tion­al writ­ing the most in terms of the­mat­ic con­cerns and lit­er­ary style?

When I was learn­ing the craft of writ­ing sto­ries, I read the clas­sics, some of which I had read in col­lege, and which I reread with inter­est. I want­ed to learn how the writ­ers put their sto­ries togeth­er, how they cre­at­ed inter­est­ing and fleshed-out char­ac­ters. I observed how they han­dled dia­logue, plot, set­ting, and oth­er ele­ments of fic­tion writ­ing. I not­ed their ele­gant lan­guage, how they strung words and phras­es togeth­er. I won­dered how an art­ful writer and one who wrote sim­ply could be equal­ly effective.

Aside from look­ing to these writ­ers for tips on how to write bet­ter, I was try­ing to find an answer to an impor­tant ques­tion: What is writer’s voice? How was it that Gra­ham Greene’s work could not be mis­tak­en as the work by Gabriel Gar­cia Mar­quez, for example?

There is a bit of back­ground relat­ed to this ques­tion of Voice.

When I start­ed writ­ing sto­ries, I didn’t have a strong han­dle on Voice. Even though I could cre­ate sto­ries, they had a some­what gener­ic feel to them, so much so that once I was told by a work shop­per that my work could have been writ­ten by a grad­u­ate from Sacred Heart Col­lege in New York — a cri­tique that stunned me since I was born and raised in the Philip­pines. I had to stop and think about the problem.

Once I had pin­point­ed that my Voice was off, I stud­ied the fine writ­ers to see how they con­veyed their own writ­ing voic­es. I also observed how these writ­ers han­dled style, lan­guage, char­ac­ter and char­ac­ter devel­op­ment, con­flict, plot, and all the nuances that go into fic­tion writing.

My best teach­ers on “Writer’s Voice” were the once whose works I read in trans­lat­ed Eng­lish: Gus­tave Flaubert, Gabriel Gar­cia Mar­quez, and Fyo­dor Dos­to­evksy. Think of this: their works were orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten in anoth­er lan­guage. I read the Eng­lish trans­la­tion of their works, and yet, I knew I was read­ing work by a French, or Russ­ian, or Latin Amer­i­can. I was able to pick out their unique writ­ing voic­es. I could tell I was read­ing Flaubert and not Dos­to­evsky, for instance.

How did they accom­plish that? It had to do with their set­ting, with the char­ac­ters that were authen­tic to those par­tic­u­lar places, their con­flicts, their cul­ture, their val­ues. I always felt some pres­ence of the writ­ers right there on the page, and so I could not con­fuse work by Mar­quez with work by anoth­er writer.

My teacher for dia­logue was Gra­ham Greene. If you want to learn how to write good dia­logue, read Greene and note that his dia­logue nev­er shal­low. Every sen­tence uttered reveals some­thing about the char­ac­ter speaking.

Gus­tave Flaubert taught me how to cre­ate and devel­op char­ac­ters. If you think about it, Madame Bovary could have been a cheap romance nov­el, but it’s a clas­sic. How did Flaubert accom­plish that? By cre­at­ing com­plex and mem­o­rable characters.

There is anoth­er thing that Flaubert taught me about char­ac­ters. Some­times char­ac­ters you are cre­at­ing are very sim­i­lar, like see­ing white on white, a writer (Flaubert) had said. So the fic­tion writer’s job is to dif­fer­en­ti­ate the col­ors some­how. In oth­er words the writer has to dig deep to be able to dif­fer­en­ti­ate one char­ac­ter dif­fer­ent from another.

 

Cecil­ia and Lina

Still anoth­er writer who influ­enced me was our writer Lina Espina Moore. She rein­forced my ideas about Voice. Lina’s sto­ries had a dis­tinct Cebuano flavor.

She was Cebua­na like me and she had nov­els and short sto­ries writ­ten in Eng­lish and Bisaya. I remem­ber her telling me that she used to dash off sto­ries for pub­li­ca­tion to help pay for the school tuition fees of nephews and nieces that she helped sup­port. She used to give me advice such as: “Write like you talk.” Well, it’s not exact­ly that way for me, but I under­stood what she meant; she meant, don’t be ma-arte. Don’t be pre­ten­tious; just write like you talk.

I also reread Jose Rizal, not just as a study for the Fil­ipino Voice but to see how he han­dled the his­tor­i­cal aspect of his nov­els. He wrote about char­ac­ters whose lives were shaped by his­tor­i­cal events. Rizal’s char­ac­ters had inter­nal as well as exter­nal con­flicts to deal with; I could see that his char­ac­ters had to react to the his­tor­i­cal events that’s ongo­ing, that in fact, their lives were shaped by these his­tor­i­cal events.

Anoth­er impor­tant influ­ence on my writ­ing were our Philip­pine epics. Here in Cal­i­for­nia, the folk­lorist Her­minia Menez cre­at­ed a Folk­lore Study group asso­ci­at­ed with UCLA. I had read Homer in col­lege, but had no idea that we had our own Philip­pine epics. We worked on translit­er­at­ed man­u­scripts, which were actu­al­ly dif­fi­cult to read, but I was enchant­ed to learn about our own gods and god­dess, of our riv­er of the dead, some­thing like the riv­er Styx. Lam-ang, Agyu, Tuwaang, Mey­buyan — these epic heroes found their way into my first nov­el, When the Rain­bow God­dess Wept.

Learn­ing about our Philip­pine epics also deep­ened my sense of iden­ti­ty. It gave me a greater under­stand of who I was/am; and it ground­ed me to know I came from ancient peo­ple who had their own sto­ries of gods and god­dess­es, and mag­ic, and flight from oppres­sion, and so on.

Ralph’s next ques­tion is :

2. How auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal are the char­ac­ters and the plots in your short sto­ries, espe­cial­ly the ones set in Ubec/Cebu, your hometown?

The first answer that pops up in my head is: No, my sto­ries are not auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal at all. I make a dis­tinc­tion between mem­oir and fiction.

The truth is that many of my char­ac­ters have been inspired by char­ac­ters and events from Cebu where I grew up in and which I vis­it reg­u­lar­ly until the pan­dem­ic broke.

I have to give you a back­ground about my myth­i­cal place, Ubec. When I began writ­ing sto­ries, I used char­ac­ters and real life sit­u­a­tions from the Cebu on my youth. But I had such a dif­fi­cult writ­ing because I com­pelled to tell the truth. One day when I was doo­dling. I reversed C‑E-B‑U into U‑B-E‑C. I stared at those let­ters on the piece of paper and fell in love with how it looked and how it sound­ed. I knew then that Ubec would be my myth­i­cal set­ting for my sto­ries. I should point out that this myth­i­cal set­ting may be some­thing like Cebu, but I’ve changed it enough so Ubec is not Cebu.

When I stum­bled upon Ubec, my writ­ing opened up.

Sud­den­ly I could trans­form the real per­son said to have horns, into the sen­su­al wid­ow Agusti­na in one of the first short sto­ries, “Woman with Horns”.

Our cook Meng­gay became Lay­dan in my first nov­el. The girl that I had been, con­tributed to the char­ac­ters of Reme­dios and Yvonne and Gem­ma in my stories.

You will note that I refer to the trans­for­ma­tion of the real-live char­ac­ters I had known and writ­ten about. When I am work­ing on fic­tion­al char­ac­ters, even if inspired by peo­ple I knew, I flesh them out to find out what makes them tick, what is unique about them, what their deep­est con­flicts are. By the time I get done with them, they are no longer the per­son who had inspired me. Some aspects are retained, but they have been mold­ed or fic­tion­al­ized in order for me to be able to write their stories.

There is anoth­er thing I want to men­tion about char­ac­ters in my sto­ries. While I some­times cre­ate char­ac­ters inspired by peo­ple whom I find inter­est­ing, there are occa­sions when these fic­tion­al char­ac­ters come to me. They are not based on any one I know or imagine.

For instance, when I was writ­ing “Woman with Horns”, specif­i­cal­ly the funer­al scene of the mayor’s wife, I saw the fol­low­ing in my imag­i­na­tion. Here I quote: “Near the hearse, an old man rid­ing a horse stopped them. He was dressed in a rev­o­lu­tion­ary uni­form with medals hang­ing on his chest, and a gun in his right hand which he fired once. Gasp­ing, the mourn­ers stopped still. The old man ordered the men to open the cas­ket. He got off his horse, bent over the cas­ket and plant­ed a kiss on the corpse’s lips. Then he got back on his horse and gal­loped off.”

After fin­ish­ing “Woman with Horns”, I became obsessed with who this old man was. I won­dered about him: you were a sol­dier and you had tak­en great risk to present your­self at the funer­al of this woman dur­ing wartime. Clear­ly, you had loved the Mayor’s wife. As I tried to fig­ure out who he was and what his con­flicts and moti­va­tions were, I dis­cov­ered his sto­ry – his point of great­est stress – and I was able to write “The Black Man in the For­est”. Many peo­ple have told me this is one of the best of my short stories.

In a nut­shell, “The Black Man in the For­est” is the sto­ry of a hard­ened Fil­ipino gen­er­al who while retreat­ing with his men away from the Amer­i­can mil­i­tary in 1901 dur­ing the Philip­pine-Amer­i­can War, encoun­ters and kills a Black Amer­i­can sol­dier. This event leads to his char­ac­ter change where he soft­ens and becomes humanized.

Anoth­er char­ac­ter who just popped into my imag­i­na­tion was the young man in the sto­ry “Casa Boni­ta.” He was a young man who becomes obsessed with a beau­ti­ful wife of a wealthy man. His obses­sion leads him to com­mit­ting mur­der­er. While I was work­ing on the sto­ry, there was this mur­der­er talk­ing in my head, which I found rather creepy. For­tu­nate­ly he went away after the sto­ry was written.

I dis­cov­ered I could even write from the point of view of a dog, Romeo. In fact, I can write about any char­ac­ter as long as I’m inter­est­ed in that char­ac­ter, fas­ci­nat­ed enough so that the char­ac­ter inhab­its my mind as I try to fig­ure out he or she real­ly is and what his or her sto­ries is.

3. How impor­tant is the set­ting (Ubec/Cebu, Vigan, and Aca­pul­co) to your narratives?

To me set­ting is very impor­tant in sto­ry­telling. Set­ting is where my char­ac­ters live and walk around in. It is where some­thing hap­pens to them exter­nal­ly as well as inter­nal­ly. My char­ac­ters’ set­tings influ­ence their char­ac­ters and their development.

If there is World War Two hap­pen­ing in Ubec/Cebu, my char­ac­ters have to respond. They have to phys­i­cal­ly move in that place; they have to make deci­sions based on the events. In the case of When the Rain­bow God­dess Wept, my char­ac­ters evac­u­at­ed (ni-bak­wit) to Min­danao. The men had to fight; the women had to live sim­ply; they lit­tle girl has to turn to the ancient epics to make sense out of the hor­rors of war.

The young girl in the sto­ry “Vigan”, moves in with her grandmother’s place after her moth­er is wid­owed. Her being in Vigan is an impor­tant part of her sto­ry. Her iso­la­tion in Vigan, the antiq­ui­ty of the place, her access to the mangkuku­lam Sylvia, are impor­tant aspects of the sto­ry. Her sto­ry would be entire­ly dif­fer­ent if she had lived in Cal­i­for­nia for instance instead of Vigan.

Like­wise the set­ting of Aca­pul­co in the sto­ry “Aca­pul­co at Sun­set” is an inte­gral part of the sto­ry. We have a Fil­ip­ina wife and moth­er dur­ing the time of the galleon trade, liv­ing in Aca­pul­co, far away from her first home of Intra­muros and her past, which she yearns for, and her only link to this past is the galleon. The sto­ry could not be set else­where. And her char­ac­ter and her devel­op­ment would be dif­fer­ent if Maria Soledad (the char­ac­ter in Aca­pul­co at Sun­set) lived elsewhere.

I want to add some­thing about my sto­ries that relate to char­ac­ter and setting.

When I first start­ed writ­ing sto­ries, I used Cebu/Ubec pri­mar­i­ly as my set­ting because this was famil­iar to me, and because I want­ed to explore it fur­ther in my imag­i­na­tion. I lat­er I wrote sto­ries set in Mani­la, Vigan, Cal­i­for­nia, Spain, Peru, India, France … any­where in fact. What was impor­tant to me was that I was inter­est­ed in the char­ac­ters and situation.

This ends part 1 of my talk.

PART 2

This is part 2 of my talk.

I will now answer Jack Wigley’s ques­tions – hi, Jack, thanks for the questions:

His first ques­tion is:

1. You’ve writ­ten at least three nov­els and three short sto­ry col­lec­tions. What was eas­i­er to write, a nov­el or a short sto­ry col­lec­tion? What are the chal­lenges of writ­ing a nov­el? A short sto­ry collection?

The short answer is that a nov­el is far more dif­fi­cult to write than a short sto­ry col­lec­tion. Writ­ing a nov­el is a huge task, a major com­mit­ment that can take years. I am refer­ring to char­ac­ter-dri­ven sto­ries here. It can take three, four, five, six, even twen­ty years for some peo­ple to fin­ish their nov­els. And some­times, one can spend all that time writ­ing a nov­el, only to dis­cov­er it’s unpublishable.

A short sto­ry col­lec­tion can be attacked bit by bit. I nev­er real­ly set out to write a short sto­ry col­lec­tion. I write one short sto­ry at a time, as the sto­ries enter my head, and when I have a dozen or more, then I con­sid­er col­lect­ing them into a book.

Some peo­ple say short sto­ry writ­ing is run­ning a sprint, while writ­ing a nov­el is doing a marathon. This is true.

Some­times I can fin­ish the draft of a short sto­ry in one sit­ting. But one rarely just dash­es off a novel.

For me the chal­lenge to write a nov­el came about after my first short sto­ry col­lec­tion was pub­lished. I felt I could write short sto­ries with some ease and I want­ed to prove to myself that I could write some­thing long that was coher­ent. So I start­ed writ­ing When the Rain­bow God­dess Wept, orig­i­nal­ly known as Song of Yvonne.

It took sev­er­al years to write this nov­el. I do not write for­mu­la, so in many ways, the process of writ­ing a nov­el is hit and miss. It’s a con­stant explo­ration in my head as to what the real sto­ry is.

So in the case of When the Rain­bow God­dess Wept: The very first draft was about the time of my life in Cebu when I was around nine years old. That draft was filled with mem­o­ries of my moth­er and me vis­it­ing her best friend who had a niece who was my own best friend – all gen­er­al­ly pleas­ant mem­o­ries of my child­hood, and ter­ri­bly bor­ing. Noth­ing hap­pened. There was no con­flict, no drama.

I put aside the man­u­script and was depressed for a while, but then one day we watched the movie, Hope and Glo­ry, about a lit­tle boy in Lon­don dur­ing World War Two. Some­thing clicked in my head: there was a con­nec­tion between that sto­ry and mine.

I looked at my orig­i­nal draft and dis­cov­ered that my char­ac­ters had been giv­ing me broad hints as to what their sto­ry was about. They always talked about the past, about the War, and what had hap­pened to them. “Do you remem­ber when so-and-so was killed by the Japan­ese in Mindanao?”

I remem­bered think­ing: Oh my God. This is want­i­ng to be a War Story.

And I became fright­ened because there is a writ­ing rule: Write about what you know. I was born after the War; what did I know about it?

But still I could see that the char­ac­ters were demand­ing that their real sto­ries be told.

Final­ly, I metaphor­i­cal­ly rolled up my sleeves and began. And if it was going to be a War Sto­ry, well then, so-be-it.

I had to make changes. I had to put my char­ac­ters back in time, in 1941 and I stopped being me, but became Yvonne. I began right when the War broke. And like mag­ic, the nov­el moved, and the pages and chap­ters flowed.

 

My oth­er two nov­els were just as dif­fi­cult to write. The process always felt slop­py but also magical.

The first draft of the nov­el Mag­dale­na was slow and bor­ing, even I would get sleepy read­ing it. I decid­ed to turn the chap­ters into short sto­ries if I could. I was doing that, clean­ing up a chap­ter, cut­ting out what was unnec­es­sary, get­ting to the core of things, when I I had an epiphany – the nov­el want­ed that for­mat. It want­ed those frag­ment­ed pieces in the book! So once again, I fol­lowed the sto­ry and put togeth­er the book, which is non-lin­ear and con­fus­es some read­ers but which is beloved by aca­d­e­mics and poets.

Same thing with the third nov­el. For this one, I joined the online NaNoW­riMo, nov­el writ­ing pro­gram, where­in you write an aver­age of 1,667 words a day with the goal of com­plet­ing 50,000 words in a month. What hap­pens, if you want to meet the dead­line is you stop think­ing about the plot and so on, and just mad­ly try to reach the word count.

In the end I had 50,000 words of, not a nov­el, but mish-mash. But, I had some­thing to work on. That is where my third nov­el The News­pa­per Wid­ow came from. But it took sev­er­al drafts and sev­er­al years to get the work done.

So, yes, I have to say that writ­ing a nov­el is far more dif­fi­cult than writ­ing short sto­ries or putting togeth­er a short sto­ry collection.

 

2. You have pub­lished your first book, “Woman with Horns and Oth­er Sto­ries” in 1987, when you were already approach­ing 40 (sor­ry for reveal­ing your age). Is it wise for a writer to pub­lish his/her work when he/she is already at a “ripe” age? What are the advantages/challenges of this?

Jack’s ques­tion assumes that when one gets old­er, one might pro­duce stronger works.

I am not sure that age has very much to do with good writ­ing – and here I refer to char­ac­ter-dri­ven sto­ries. One needs to be clever at writ­ing, at craft­ing sto­ries, AND more impor­tant­ly, one needs good sto­ries to tell. The first part – being good at craft­ing sto­ries is part gift and part learn­ing – one can improve one’s writ­ing skills. The sec­ond part – hav­ing good sto­ries is depen­dent on how well a per­son can read the human heart. This sounds like a cliché, but it’s true. The strength of fic­tion is depen­dent on the com­plex­i­ty of the char­ac­ters; a shal­low writer will tend to cre­ate shal­low char­ac­ters; a writer with depth, matu­ri­ty, empa­thy has a bet­ter shot at cre­at­ing deep mem­o­rable characters.

I like to point out that Madame Bovary by Flaubert could have been a cheap romance nov­el, but for the com­plex char­ac­ters Flaubert created.

I did not plan to hold off my writ­ing career until I was old­er. My life, like my nov­els, seems to be non-lin­ear. That is, it’s a bit unplanned, or more pre­cise­ly, I would plan one thing, then end up doing some­thing else.

After high school, I want­ed to be a civ­il engi­neer like my father. From St. Theresa’s Col­lege, I went to Engi­neer­ing school at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the Philip­pines, where my father had once been a pro­fes­sor. My father would have been embar­rassed when I almost flunked Math. I quick­ly trans­ferred to Mary­knoll to take up what seemed the eas­i­est major, Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Arts. After grad­u­at­ing my Mary­knoll, I went on to UCLA to take up Film Mak­ing, but dis­cov­ered that mak­ing movies is a ter­ri­bly expen­sive and col­lab­o­ra­tive effort. Mean­time, I became a wife and moth­er, and all these explain why it wasn’t until the chil­dren were in school when I had the time and inter­est to take up fic­tion writ­ing with some seriousness.

I don’t think there are any advan­tages in wait­ing to get pub­lished until one is old­er. If you can get your won­der­ful nov­el done when you are 23 (as Car­son McCullers did when she com­plet­ed her first nov­el, The Heart Is a Lone­ly Hunter) — then do it. Don’t wait.

 

3. Why do you write? Whom do you write for?

Your ques­tion about why I write is profound.

Why indeed do I write, strug­gle with the cre­ation, deal with the dif­fi­cul­ties of get­ting the work pub­lished? So, why do I write?

To try and address that ques­tion, I have to go back to when I start­ed writ­ing. I remem­ber when I was nine and my father died, and in my child­hood grief and miss­ing him so much, I decid­ed to write him let­ters. Let­ter writ­ing was pop­u­lar then, and we kept nice sta­tionery, which I used, although. I have no record of those let­ters now. But I remem­ber mak­ing it a point to update him of my young life. That was when I start­ed writing.

A few years lat­er, when I was already a teenag­er and in high school, my sis­ter gave me real­ly pret­ty pink lock and key diary, and I fell in love with writ­ing in that diary, which I still have by the way. I tried to write poet­ry and had some flow­ery writ­ing in there. Most of my writ­ings were whiny and dra­mat­ic and writ­ten in pre­ten­tious style, but I got hooked, and con­tin­ued my diary writing.

You know my jour­ney: I went Engi­neer­ing school, then film school, and then became a wife and moth­er, before I start­ed writ­ing sto­ries. There’s the edit­ing and pub­lish­ing too, which are tied in with why I write.

I write for sev­er­al reasons:

First, some­times, the char­ac­ters or sit­u­a­tion will just latch on to my brain and I must explore them and get them down in writ­ing. It is like an obses­sion that I can’t explain.

Sec­ond, some­times, images and feel­ings need to be looked at and sort­ed out – mem­o­ries for instance, and writ­ing helps me do that.

Third, I rec­og­nize that this abil­i­ty to write is a gift from the Cre­ator, and so I plod along.

Fourth, and this is more true for the books I have edit­ed, when I com­pare our Philip­pine or Fil­ipino Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture with West­ern lit­er­a­ture, I can see that there are gaps in ours. It may be less so now, but decades ago, there were obvi­ous gaps to me. That was what got me start­ed edit­ing antholo­gies such as Fic­tion by Fil­ipinos in Amer­i­ca and the more recent two vol­umes of Grow­ing Up Fil­ipino, which I did when I learned that there is a scarci­ty of such books. I am cur­rent­ly work­ing on Grow­ing Up Fil­ipino book 3.

The ques­tion of “whom do you write for” is tricky to answer, because on the one hand I am writ­ing for the Fil­ipino audi­ence because I feel that my sto­ries belong in the Philip­pines. But on the oth­er hand, I am writ­ing in Eng­lish because that is the best way I know how to write and also because I want my work to have a wider audience.

I can­not real­ly imag­ine writ­ing in Cebuano. What are my chances of find­ing a lit­er­ary agent? What are my chances of get­ting my work pub­lished in the US where I reside? It would be too com­pli­cat­ed to have to get the work pub­lished in Cebu, and then have the work trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish to try and catch a wider audience.

The fact also is that I have mas­tered the craft of writ­ing fic­tion in Eng­lish, and to have to relearn doing this in Cebuano would be dif­fi­cult. I will tell you a sto­ry of how, dur­ing one of my vis­its to Cebu after years of exile here in the US dur­ing the Mar­cos years, I was with my nephews and nieces. We were speak­ing Cebuano, and I said some­thing that made every­one pause, then laugh. I used a word that was no longer used. The word had become anti­quat­ed. The liv­ing lan­guage of Cebuano had moved on and I was stuck with words I had used decades ago.

Hav­ing said that, I want to add that I have great admi­ra­tion to those who write in Cebuano or Taga­log. Many years ago, when I was in Spain rep­re­sent­ing PEN USA West, I met some Kur­dish writ­ers, and I was impressed that they pro­duced books in their lan­guage even when they did not have a coun­try. This is very impor­tant work which I admire greatly.

With that I will end this talk.

You can find me in social media and my offi­cial web­site, ceciliabrainard.com.

Thank you once again, Jing, Ralph, Jack, and all of you. Keep safe and best wishes!

#Philip­pinelit­er­a­ture #fil­ipino­lit­er­a­ture #fil­ipino­books #fil­ipinoau­thors #Fil­am­books #pinoyread  #Cebuano­lit­er­a­ture #Cebu­lit

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Welcome!

I am a daugh­ter of the Philip­pines and an adopt­ed daugh­ter of Amer­i­ca. I have also trav­eled to many places so I am also a daugh­ter of the Earth. My expe­ri­ences have found their way into my sto­ries, which try to depict char­ac­ters caught in impor­tant moments in their lives, sit­u­a­tions that force them to act, make deci­sions, change. I try to see the world from my own point of view, not the dom­i­nant West­ern one, thus my inter­est in his­to­ry, cul­ture, and set­ting. But my char­ac­ters car­ry my sto­ries; they are the most impor­tant in my sto­ry-telling. I have to dive deep into them to under­stand their human­i­ty – their good­ness as well as their bad­ness, their beau­ty as well as their ugli­ness. Just like us. Just like each of us. I need to know where they came from, where they are now, so I under­stand where they are going. Just like us.

Please read my full biog­ra­phy here

 

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