This Feature presents readers sharing some love about the talent of Filipino writers and artists. We welcome your participation. This section is for readers. You don't have to write "like a professional," "like a critic," "like an intellectual," "like a well-rounded reader," etc. Just write honestly about how you were moved. Live writers and artists (let alone the dead) don't get to hear enough from others who engage with their works (some may not even know all who comprise their audience). To know someone read their stories and poems or appreciated their artistry is to receive a gift. Just share from your heart. It will be more than enough. DEADLINE: Nov 15, 2025 for Issue #20. Duplications of authors/artists and more than one testimonial are fine.
Mangozine's Issue #19 Presents
Ava Avila on Monica Macansantos
Eileen Tabios on Linda Ty-Casper
E. San Juan, Jr. on Jason DeParle
Ava Avila on Nathan Go
Eileen Tabios on Eric Tinsay Valles
Ava Avila on H. Arlo Nimmo
Ava Avila on Monica Macansantos
Following the sudden passing of her poet father, Monica Macansantos embarks on a journey back to the Philippines, seeking solace and understanding in her homeland. At the heart of her book, Returning to My Father's Kitchen, is a daughter's attempt to hold on to her father's memory through the food he loved to cook, the values he passed down, the language he treasured, and the home they shared in a changing country.
Each essay is special. Even when unpacking happy and painful moments, Macansantos writes with clarity and compassion. One of my favorite essays in the book is "Becoming A Writer: The Silences We Write Against" where she reflects on the disenfranchisement of Filipino voices in mainstream literature and the personal barriers writers must overcome to assert their narratives. As someone who is passionate about sharing books by Filipino authors, this deeply resonates with me. I think about my writer friends in Mindanao who continue to tell their stories in their own languages and in their own terms.
This book is both a personal memoir and a call to action for greater inclusivity, kindness, and the recognition of diverse voices in literature. I highly recommend this!
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Eileen Tabios on Linda Ty-Casper
My two top take-aways from reading Linda Ty-Casper's memoir, LIVES REMEMBERED (PALH, 2025), make me fall in love with this writer far afar.
First, I appreciate her turn from a law career to be a writer of historical novels because she discovered books at one of Harvard’s libraries that misrepresented Philippine history, including calling the Philippine American War an “insurrection.” She decided to write an essay to refute the errors. But in doing so, she also discovered that most of those books had never even been checked out. So she decided then “to write a historical novel which might have more staying power/life outside the shelf.” She thought she would write just one but ended up writing several, and it’s notable that her novels have been read widely and reprinted, showing that she achieved her goal.
Second—but, truthfully, this is actually my top take-away—Linda Ty-Casper was in her early nineties when she finished writing and released this memoir. It's a time, as she discusses in her last chapter, to look back at her life. I believe she gives us all a lesson when she mentions her regrets to include the inability "to sustain kindness." In discussing this, she recalls being in a store buying ham and seeing an old man ask the server "for the piece of ham left on the knife she used to slice pieces for Dad" and "who left quickly [when the server] shook her head. I could have given him for what I got for Dad."
The life-long reverberation of being unkind or missing an opportunity to be kind—especially when a person is not really unkind—resonates and I can see how that can be a source of regret that one can find unforgettable. As described in her book, the incident seemed like something one might not even notice and quickly forget. But because of what it exemplified as regards kindness, it remains a haunting.
Linda Ty-Casper’s memoir, then, is not just a readable account on history but our humanity.
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E. San Juan, Jr. on Jason DeParle
One of the most illuminative narratives of how OFWs adapt, resist and resign themselves to their situation is Jason DeParle’s A Good Provider is One Who Leaves. The title comes from the mother of the Portagana family who praises her siblings for working abroad. Survival requires travel to distant sources of subsistence and endurance of horrific adversities. DeParle traces the trajectory of two generations in which sacrifice and stoic accomodation define their ordeals in the Middle East, Singapore, Taiwan, Canada, the U.S. and cruise ships. While other accounts (for example, Montebon and Juvida) describe other schemes of survival and compromise, deParle focuses on the power of kinship networks, especially affective maternal ties, that substitute for ethnic or national ethos in keeping extended families together. However, DeParle and others either marginalize or neutralize colonial-racial-gender determinants in chronicling migrant difficulties. We are led to assume that this pattern of migration is the sure-fire formula for keeping souls and bodies together wherever OFW find themselves.
(Note. This is excerpted from RECOGNIZING.APOLINARIO.MABINI: Inquiries into the Struggle for Justice and Sovereignty by E. San Juan, Jr. (University of the Philippines Press, 2024)
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Ava Avila on Nathan Go
Nathan Go was born and raised in Southern Philippines. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Program, his fiction has appeared in Ploughshares and the Bare Life Review, among others. He is a senior lecturer of creative writing at UP Mindanao and author of the novel Forgiving Imelda Marcos (Picador/MacMillan, 2024).
Here is an example of how not to judge a book by its cover. In this case, its title. Given my disdain of the Marcos’ persistent denial of human rights violations during the dictatorship, I would not pick up this book despite it being a work of fiction. But thanks to @bernicillin ‘s Rappler review, I gave the novel a second look. Suffice to say, I enjoyed reading it and was quite surprised by the ending!
Forgiving Imelda Marco begins as a letter from Lito, a father who is mortally sick, to his estranged son, a journalist in America. He promises a scoop: the story of a secret meeting between Imelda Marcos and Corazon Aquino years ago. Lito was once Corazon’s personal driver and her only companion on the trip from Manila to Baguio to meet Imelda. Throughout the long drive, Lito’s loyalty to his employer is pitted against his own moral uncertainty about Corazon’s desire to forgive Imelda.
“With all due respect, what makes you think you have the right to forgive Imelda Marcos?”
The plot is interesting and imaginative. Go is able to navigate an alternative history that examines the personal and national grief. Alone and dying in a hospital, Lito’s letters soon wanders into his past: his neglectful father; his struggles with poverty; and ultimately his separation from his own son. As a reader, I was left pondering about the meaning and possibility of forgiveness. Who exactly is entitled to forgive? In a most unexpected and brilliant way, the author concludes the story.
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Eileen Tabios on Eric Tinsay Valles
Eric Tinsay Valles has released a bilingual English-Spanish poetry collection, After the Fall / Despues de la Caida with Spanish translator Maria Del Castillo Sucerquia. Valles’ collection thoughtfully considers the aftermaths of a wide variety of tragedies such as natural disasters, wars, financial crises, bomb explosions in public venues like nightclubs, religious rites gone awry, the collateral damage from former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drug lords, the collapse of the World Trade Center during 9-1-1, and the harsh realities of migration. He observes in the last two lines of “War of the worlds at Cochrane Lodge,”
Their hearts are not of stone so they break down:
They’ve never had soft pillows in Cochrane Lodge II.
Cochrane Lodge II is a foreign migrant workers’ dormitory in Singapore. This compassionate poem begins with describing how the migrant workers are sequestered due to Covid. But as the above ending indicates, even before Covid, life has always been hard.
But Eric Tinsay Valles’ collection also rationalizes—preserves?—hope: “Flower in the Water” reminds how a bomb victim would not just recover but complete an Ironman competition.
Poetry, too, remains persistent with After the Fall’s very existence encouraging perseverance through poems like “Canticle for Three Young Poets.” The poem refers to British poets Gurney, Rosenberg and Owen who fought in World War I and reminds, “words are broken but perfume the air, / Radiant like red poppies in a vase.”
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Ava Avila on H. Arlo Nimmo
In the mid-1960s, H. Arlo Nimmo conducted two years of anthropological field research in southern Philippines among the nomadic boat-dwelling Sama Dilaut. Part memoir, part ethnography but mostly fiction, A Very Far Place is inspired by some of the people, places, and events Nimmo encountered during those years.
I haven’t been to the province but Nimmo wrote about a Tawi-Tawi that is quite different from the current media portrayal. The southern islands in his stories are pristine and unspoiled, a paradise before internal conflicts overwhelmed them.
Unlike those who take brief visits to the islands and make misleading accounts, Nimmo learned the language of Sama Dilaut and participated in their lives. He ceased being a stranger and this is evident in his writings. While the names of places, characters, and events are largely fictitious, as a reader, I can tell that the stories are true to the culture and geography of Tawi-Tawi in the 1960s. Stories include a Filipino man seeking beauty and comfort denied him in Manila; the tragic ill-fated voyage of a young family; a Jewish woman and a German man who carry their mutual enmity to the other side of the world; a teenage couple divided by their families’ feud; and a strange house on a river filled with dead animals.
I liked all the stories. They are funny, heartbreaking, scary, hopeful, best of all, non-judgmental. Looking forward to reading Nimmo’s other titles.
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Leny Strobel on Eileen R. Tabios
NVM Gonzalez, National Artist of the Philippines for Literature, once told me: Leny, for what you want to do, there is no language. Learn how to paint, dance, and sing instead!
This morning, I told myself: I can also praise those who can…!
So I am writing this in praise of The Balikbayan Artist (2024: Penguin Random House SEA), the second published novel of the poet/writer Eileen Tabios. The first novel, DoveLion (2021: AC Books), and this new novel echo a refrain of the author’s foray into the mythic realm of Kapwa — this cosmic worldview of Filipinos that is embedded in the materiality of its indigenous cultures even though seemingly overcome and subsumed under the perceived and assumed power of corrupt dictators and the minions of modern/colonial bureaucracies.
That’s more or less what I said in the blurb which ended up on the cover of the book: “The novel breaks out of the confines of the modern/colonial frame and returns us to the wondrous world of myth-making. This is how Story becomes Medicine.”
Eileen Tabios’ poetry, novels, essays, have been my companions on this Kapwa journey. The first essay I wrote about her poetry decades ago was about how she taught me how not to be afraid of Poetry. How not to be afraid.
[GO TO THIS LINK for more of Leny’s thoughts on The Balikbayan Artist]
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