Collected and Edited by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard
ISBN978-971–97-1010–3 — (Vibal Foundation 2025), softcover, 192 pages, with full color photos, order from Vibal Shop, Lazada
For rights inquiries, please contact cbrainard@gmail.com. Portuguese (Brazil) rights have sold.
Read also Vibal Foundation Launches Two Cecilia Brainard Books
Praise and Description of the book:
How I Became a Writer: Essays by Filipino and Filipino American Writers offers intimate, fine-grained accounts in the making of what constitutes contemporary Philippine literature, provided by a remarkable set of Filipino writers in the Philippines and abroad, It is a book to be treasured. ~ Resil B. Mojares, Philippine National Artist in Literature.
A most engaging collection of essays from among our best writers today! Recollections, reflections on their personal journeys on the road to becoming writers, these essays dig into their heavy “bag of memories”—as children, listening to storytellers in the family; in school, discovering old and new worlds and people in books, and growing in their passion for reading. Writing becomes inevitable, even as for one writer it is neither “accidental nor entirely deliberate”, but more serendipitous. Formal writing programs for some, learning from “hands-on experience” for others help to hone their craft, but there had already been the idea that would become the desire to write. That one could also “earn a living” through writing was to have the best of both worlds. Even as some of these writers give us detailed accounts of their poetics, Writing remains a lifelong adventure for all. ~ Thelma E. Arambulo, Writer, Literary Studies Scholar, Former UP Chair of the Dept. of English and Comparative Literature
How somebody becomes a writer is a curious thing: “Never,” at first, for Merlie Alunan, “a writing nook” for Caroline Hau, “as a record” for Elmer Omar Pizo, “as a piece of lined yellow paper” for Hope Sabanpan Yu. The writers assembled for this series have generously shared how it all began for them, and all leading to the realization of a writer’s life. Cecilia Brainard, whose gift of bringing people together has proven our reward, offers us a rare invitation to look inside how writers from Linda Ty-Casper to Butch Dalisay have found their words and their courage, and what, in so many words, makes the beginnings of a meaningful life in writing. ~ Mara Coson, Publisher of Exploding Galaxies
Introduction by Lynn M. Grow, Ph.D.
All 22 of the authors in this collection are established and well-respected. Demographically they are diverse—in age, sex, gender, race, ethnicity, education, and family circumstances—but they converge in terms of the seriousness of their work as artists. To achieve what they have requires “a gift,” as Manguerra Brainard notes in her essay, but it also demands the courage to persevere in spite of various obstacles, starting with the writer’s proclivity. “I never wished to be a writer” Alunan emphatically states. Then, to conclude her essay, she explains this apparent anomaly: “But life said, you must. And so I did.”
For other writers, the obstacles have been external. The most dramatic example is recounted in Bascos Pizo’s piece. Visually it stands out because of its short, poem-like lines. These are not a stylistic whim, however. They are a product of the writing therapy recommended by his neurologist to recover short-term memory loss—the result of a head-on bus crash—and to heal from the abuse he suffered at home growing up and as a field worker in Saudi Arabia. As if these occurrences were not enough adversity, his family was impoverished. For Casocot, writing is also therapeutic, but not physically: “autobiography was the name of my own stories—barely disguised attempts to fictionalize my wanderings into my psyche … in the early mornings of my Tokyo days … Writing took my thoughts away from crippling homesickness, and became the final exorcism of an intense love affair that consumed me.”
Salud’s external impulsion is “to put into words sociopolitical realities in the guise of fiction … fiction becomes the raw material used to retell … tragedies which would not have seen the light of day had it not been for the freedom to shape characters and caricatures through fiction … why I became a writer: the truth needs to told.” So it does for Linda Ty-Casper as well, in her case initially to refute the distorted and erroneous accounts of the Philippines in Harvard University’s Widener Library and subsequently to expose the evil of the Marcos administration. She elevates literature to the level of “a sacred text” because “We should write about the lives that will pass out of memory, if no one writes about them … The hope is for us not to forget how bravely many have fought for our country against overwhelming odds.”
For other writers, the impulsion to write is internal—or at least it begins that way. For Hope Sabanpan Yu, her grandfather’s stories created an aesthetic rush: “His voice was a deep river, flowing with wisdom and wonder, carrying foxes and herons and cunning caliphs and bewitched sultans.” Later, a young man gave her a poem he had written. It was to her “a cascade of words that spoke of time bringing a gift from the stars subtly given … Responding to that poem was like prying open a locked door, and on the other side lay the boundless terrain of poetry.”
For a number of other writers, the urge to write is a combination of the external and the internal. Teodoro “became a writer because I loved listening to stories and I was surrounded by loved ones who loved to tell stories …” He now writes “because I want to document my life as a gay person trying to live a decent and happy life.” This quest’s obstacle has been twofold for Wigley who, as biracial as well as gay, was subjected to opprobrium not limited to classmates and neighbors name-calling him; neighborhood gossip also defamed his mother by characterizing her as a prostitute. On top of all this, he came from a family with little money. Wigley notes that “these ‘structures’ have shaped my experiences and … they have provided me with the ‘voice’ I use in telling my stories … the writing is a way to address these forms of oppression and strategy to emancipate myself. These writings have become my tangible attempts at self-preservation.”
Very much a common denominator for the motivation of the writers in this volume is a love of reading. Jose Dalisay, a refugee from engineering, puts it the most strongly: “Every good writer … begins as a good reader, and I was no exception. I even read books I could barely understand, just so I could imbibe the shapes and sounds of the words.” Tony Perez posits that literary art is inexplicably bound to visual art: “I can never refer to my development as a writer without referring to my development as a painter … To this day I observe that writers who cannot draw or paint well, do not write well, and that painters who cannot write well, really do not paint well … Such writers and such painters continue to extol their works as ‘self-expression,’ forgetting that self-expression as an excuse for writing and painting should be left behind in their K‑12 classrooms.” Although these statements are unlikely to elicit a rousing chorus of assent, the complementary nature of the literary and visual arts is convincingly established in Tabios’ essay, in which she explains that “I became a writer because I wanted to see as clearly as I could. But to see, for me, is not just what’s seen but understanding the significance of what’s sighted. Writing—the articulation—helps me understand what I saw and/or am seeing.”
For all their diversity of approach, the writers in this collection are either Philippine or Filipino American, which for them may raise the issue of what language (s) in which to write. All of them can, of course produce works in English, which the Philippine Constitution recognizes as an official language. But English is not indigenous to the Philippines. It is not even “a borrowed tongue,” as it was frequently termed in past decades. No one asked, “May we borrow English as one of our languages?” It was imposed on the Philippines with the 1898–1903 American military takeover of the country from the fledgling Malolos Republic, a duly constituted government. Filipino is the other constitutionally-recognized language and the national language—but it is largely based on Tagalog, at one time considered the national language, but now classified as regional. A rich vein of expression awaits in the regional languages (now estimated at about 150), which explains why writers like Alunan (Waray Visayan), Teodoro (Kinaray‑a, Higaynon), and Sabanpan Yu (Cebuano) have already done extensive work or published in languages other than Filipino and English.
Collectively, the writers in this volume demonstrate that the Camelot of literature is many-towered; the portcullis is raised for their different paths to the entrance. Some may be winding and “serendipitous,” as Bravo Dutt puts it; others may be more direct and intentional, as the Belgian nuns in St. Theresa’s College made writing for Manguerra Brainard. But if someone inspired to write should wonder, “How step-by-step do I go about writing? What is step one and then what is step two?” And so on. There is no universal formula to fall back on, as there is if someone sets out to compute the roots of a quadratic equation: follow the quadratic formula.
Ty-Casper provides as specific a step-by-step method as is possible: “Short stories … occur to me in first sentences, in the midst of doing something else. If it comes insistently, I … let the sentence lead me. Point of view, conflicts, motivations develop as the story grows …. Bit by bit, the whole is created; characters and events become.” Cassinetto’s take is that “I wrote intuitively” in high school, but in college “I was trained to deconstruct [scientific] journal articles … This process of systematic thinking and writing, of gathering data and making nonlinear associations later proved to be foundational to my craft.” Tabios notes that since “one can never be sufficiently prepared to write a novel,” this genre, at least, does not mandate a layout or even an outline at the outset: “if you persevere long enough, at some point the writing takes over the novelist’s hand and the book will veer off into directions for which the novelist could not have planned. Here, you must trust the process—a trust that might be more difficult for a long form. But trust the process … for any form of creative writing, the process itself is the final Muse.”
Besides the interest a reader may have about why and how celebrated writers became writers, a reader may be fascinated by each of these 21 selections because they are effectively chapters from memoirs, as Wigley reminds us in his essay: “This is my journey of becoming a writer through the writing of memoirs.” The fascination readers have with the people behind success—whether in sports, government, science, business, entertainment, or any other field—fuels an interest in the individuals as humans who have achieved it. A natural curiosity about “What is this person really like?” arises and in turn explains the popularity of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. For any reader experiencing this curiosity about Philippine and Filipino American writers, please read on.
Tags — Philippine authors, Filipino stories, Filipino writers, Philippine literature