I kept the manuscript of my novel, “Riverrun,” with me for 25 years because I thought no one would want to read it. Parts of it were published in magazines and literary journals in the Philippines and the United States, but they were published as short stories. I joined the Palanca Award and two of […]
All about me
All About Me” is the title of a short story by Elsa Victoria Martinez, now Coscoluella, which won an award at the Palanca Prize for the Short Story in the 1960s. It is about a young woman, lost and adrift like many young people then and now, about what the future holds. I get messages […]
The world of words
So what are you doing now and will you still leave the country?” someone asked me via email last week. I get tons of email every day, and twice as many through Messenger in my Facebook. That’s why I tell people to send me emails because they stay there. The ones on Messenger get buried, […]
American vignettes
5 December 2020 Philippine Star It was the summer of 2018 and I had just arrived in Los Angeles, California, after two weeks at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Middlebury College, Vermont. I lived with my sister for a week and met some of my friends who lived in LA. That day, Vida and […]
The bleakest Christmas
Philippine Star 12 December 2020 I’ve been home for three months and know that this would be the bleakest Christmas for many Filipinos, perhaps since the Second World War. I see people of all ages begging on the streets, shoppers buying only the most essential items [food and medicines], and I feel the taste of […]
‘Riverrun’ redux
I am continuing the Q and A that the international press has been asking me about my novel, Riverrun, which will be published by Penguin Books South East Asia this month. Q: The novel covers the 60s to the 80s. How much of the Philippine LGBTQ [lesbian, gay, queer, bisexual, transgender and queer] experience has […]
‘Riverrun’ goes global
My novel, ‘Riverrun,’ is now being printed by Penguin South East Asia. Printed copies will be sold in Asia while e-copies will be sold in the rest of the world. I have been fielding questions from the international press about the book. Here are the answers to the flurry of queries, telescoped as an FAQ […]
The foreign student
Being a foreign student in the United Kingdom meant living on the proverbial shoestring. Along with the Malaysian and Singaporean students in Muirhead Hall at the University of Stirling, I went to the supermarket on our first day. I invited them to come along with me so we could make our most important acquisition—our rice […]
English only, please
The Philippines is still the third-largest English-speaking country in the world. But more and more, we have to qualify this statement. Does it mean a deep knowledge of English, or functional English just enough to get by? And what does this statement mean – that there is only one kind of English in the world? […]
How to get happily published
My little room in Kajang, Malaysia, was filled recently by a deluge of emails from people asking me how could they get published. I asked where, in the Philippines or overseas? Nowadays, you could easily publish yourself online, or publish your book by print-on-demand. All you need is a finished manuscript, a platform, and your […]