HOW I BECAME A WRITER: ESSAYS BY FILIPINO AND FILIPINO AMERICAN WRITERS edited by CECILIA M. BRAINARD

 MICHAEL CAYLO-BARADI Reviews

How I Became a Writer: Essays by Filipino and Filipino American Writers edited by Cecilia M. Brainard

(Vibal Foundation Inc., 2025)

 

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How I Became a Writer: Essays by Filipino and Filipino American Writers offers an array of writers attempting to distill their evolution on the page, and the world of letters, at large, especially within the Filipino and Filipino American community; most of the essays have the intensity of excerpts, as though extracted from a larger piece of work, such as an autobiography perhaps, or a memoir, substantial enough to encapsulate key moments and benchmarks about each writer’s sense of determination and ambition flowing organically from their pen, while navigating networks, and establishing connections in the guarded and cliquish world of publishing, on both sides of the Pacific. As an assemblage, the essays concatenate into a vista, a literary landscape in the Filipino and Filipino American diaspora, where the climate is sunny, and quite productive, pulsating of gatekeepers and generous mentors, guided by a dialectic of communitarian habits and visions, coterminous with achievements measured by book sale metrics and the crowded calendar of literary success.

 

One of the benchmarks of literary success in the Philippines is winning a Palanca, perhaps the most prestigious and coveted literary award in the country and widely considered the Pulitzer Prize of the Philippines. Some of the writers in this collection have mentioned in their bio that they have won the Carlos Palanca Memorial Award, though upon visiting the Palanca website, one discovers that most of them have multiple Palancas, and two are in the Palanca Hall of Fame: Jose Y . Dalisay and Luisa A. Igloria. The solid foundation of Igloria’s early education can be attributed to parents who were proactive about their daughter’s intellectual development; they were instrumental in accelerating her reading skills, so that by four Igloria was consuming chapter books, just a year before reading her “first “real” book of literature” (102), which was given to Igloria by her mother. This is probably one of the perks of being born and raised to a certain economic class in the Philippines, where books and reading are not accidental and decorative elements of home life, but are foundational elements for calculated pursuits; in this case, Igloria’s father, who was a lawyer and a judge in Baguio City, had hoped Igloria would follow his footsteps for a career in law. It’s the same economic class Dalisay was raised in; according to him: “My family was technically middle class, but we grew up poor—“(57). Despite being college dropouts, Dalisay’s parents understood that a certain kind of education is indelible to vertical mobility; their awareness of their son’s gifts and possible future prompted them to send him to a private high school, while his siblings enrolled in public school. Dalisay’s parents singled him out as someone special, someone who could carry the baton of economic mobility for generations of Dalisays in the future. And thus, while La Salle became the brainchild for Dalisay’s relationship with books, reading, and language, he understood then that “[he] was studying not just for [him]self, but for the family and [their] future” (58).

 

Indeed, remembering and recalling the earliest stirrings of affinity with books in childhood bears a certain weight on how a number of writers in this collection initiate the timeline of personal history. In a way, these memories appear to simulate a coherent world where English is the one and only language spoken, read, and written at home, which is probably not the case; most likely—based on personal estimation—at least two Filipino tongues, in addition to English, occupy the linguistic space of human interactions experienced by most of these writers: Tagalog, the national language, and a dialect specific to a particular region in the Philippines where the writer was born and/or raised in. We can only imagine the speed and grace of switching from English to Filipino languages and vice-versa, and what this velocity implies on the way Western and Asian ways of thinking collide, interpenetrate, and empathize to form a point of view that constitutes or bears the merits of authenticity, of perhaps something uniquely Filipino, or to those who use Filipino languages and English with equal need and capacity, in daily life. In this light, one wonders to what extent most of the Filipino writers in this anthology, who have chosen to write in English, struggled with the idea of ‘voice’ in their work, which is a summation of elements that cohere into a personality, style, attitude, and sensibility. Editors, publishers, professors, and other gatekeepers of writing and publishing, in the English-language writing sphere, are particularly deft and sensitive, especially on issues related to voice, which, to a large extent, can be a deal-breaker on including a writer in a literary agent’s short-list for a publication contract.

 

Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, the anthology’s editor, once encountered a critique about voice in her work at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, when she was still in her thirties; this was back in the late seventies and early eighties when questions about the Eurocentricity of the American literary canon grew into a movement that would eventually impact the syllabi in today’s colleges and universities. The way Brainard recounts the critique of a workshop cohort on her work at UCLA tells us that it had enough of an exclusionary tone, since “[i]t was a disturbing critique”(14); the critique emphasized that her “writer’s voice” was off”(14). And thus, what followed must’ve been a regimen of hectic self-examination, for Brainard, and, quite possibly, an aspiring writer’s version of panic, which led Brainard “into a journey of figuring out what a writer’s voice [is], and further analysis of what sort of fiction [she] should be writing”(14). Brainard would end up becoming one of the instructors at the writing program in UCLA.

 

On the other hand, a number of contributors in this collection may have been spared from the rigorous and contentious settings of the workshop circuit, where students from diverse backgrounds critique each other’s work, as though fellow novices know enough to offer advice and improve another aspiring writer’s work, to borrow an idea from novelist V. T. Nguyen from an op-ed piece. In Linda Ty-Casper’s case, the tense and intense climate of writing workshops appear to have no bearing at all on the type of writing she might want to pursue, as though the act of writing her first novel (her first work, really) only had to have the right stimulant to make it happen. That stimuli appears to be a specific moment in Harvard University’s Widener Library, where she found material about the Philippines that assaulted her pride, as someone who was born and raised in the archipelago; her reductive term about these books is “derogatory”(31). These books had such an effect on her that she gave herself the obligation to refute what she found in them, to shed light on uninformed knowledge that, no doubt, reduced the Philippines into unflattering images and information; in that regard, Ty-Casper chose the historical novel to 2commence her project, a genre that appears to have an organic place in her imagination since, back in high school, she used to write essays on historical events through an imagined character in those events. That time, Ty-Casper’s creative exercises found guidance under her own mother’s tutelage who was a teacher, wrote textbooks, and contributed articles to educational journals; one can only imagine the bookshelves in Ty-Casper’s childhood, and the books she devoured that helped inform and shape her imagination, especially after publishing her first poem at nine, when her mother sent it to a journal.

 

Memories about one’s involvement with the arts in childhood and adolescence are not lost in this anthology; they bookmark one’s earliest indulgence with creativity, such as Allan N. Derain, who recalls creating his first storybook in second grade based on a TV program of Aesop’s fable The Lion and the Mouse, where he drew the illustrations, and pasted them on a repurposed family photo album. The sheer pleasure of recreating what was seen on television must feel like a golden moment for the child, since he would form a group in third grade and sell comic books with his friends; in 2011, he would win the Palanca Grand Prize for a novel written in Pilipino, Ang Banal na Aklat ng mga Kumag, which Derain has illustrated, as well. To a large extent, the text and the visual appear to have equal footing on the pages of Derain’s work, wherein the visual is not mere inspiration for the text. Now in Eileen R. Tabios’ case, the visual also draws inspiration to the text, though as the visual becomes part of the interior life of the text, the visual remains invisible on the page: it doesn’t become an illustration to amplify the text, or something highly visual and graphic to complement the text. Tabios associates her use of crayons in childhood as one of the earliest attempts at trying to understand the world around her; and thus, scrawling green on a page was her way of articulating that the grass is green, since, at two or three years old, this was the period before the formation of words in her imagination. Tabios categorically aligns the scrawling activities of childhood as asemic writing, or writing devoid of language. In a sense, writing, for Tabios, is an act of zooming into the visual, perhaps illuminating it, or, more so, it is a vivification of the visual:

 

I became a writer because I wanted to see as clearly as I could. But to see, for me, is not just about what’s seen but to understand the significance of what’s sighted. Writing—the  articulation—helps me understand what I saw and/or am seeing. (148)

 

One could argue that these lines are extracted from the manifesto of an acute observer, the kind of observer Tony Perez requires for anyone who wants to be a writer, though for him, and quite uniquely so, being a writer goes hand in hand with being able to draw or paint. And Perez is certainly on to something with his observation that: “writers who cannot draw or paint well, really do not write well—they cannot even articulate their own works for their gallery exhibits”(117); if Perez had written a pamphlet or book on this topic, with in-depth analyses and theories, that text would’ve been a potential requirement or elective text for creative writing workshops in the Philippines, since Perez appeared to be a veteran instructor of these workshops, in addition to being a prolific painter, and a dramatist with two major trilogies in Filipino drama. When Perez passed away in May, 2025 in Quezon City, the Cultural Center of the Philippines mourned, and noted on a Facebook post that:

 

[Perez] is best remembered for his psychologically rich and socially resonant plays such as Bombita, Sa North Diversion Road, Biyaheng Timog, and Saan Ba Tayo Ihahatid ng Disyembre?[...] He was a staunch advocate of psychological realism in drama and was among the rare few whose creative practice also embraced spiritual exploration. [...] His creative genius and metaphysical vision have left an indelible imprint on our cultural soul. We honor his memory and celebrate a life lived fully in the service of the arts.

 

That Perez publicly embraced the spiritual within the framework of creativity can be viewed as a form of homage to the Catholic sensibilities of his environment, regardless if he followed a religious belief or not. Kristian Sendon Cordero, too, finds an alignment between the spiritual and the art of writing. Steep in Catholic and animist rituals, Cordero’s background offers a glimpse of an upbringing fit for a future archbishop in any archdiocese in the Philippines, where Catholicism and animism are not necessarily rivals when it comes to the metaphysical but are inevitably intertwined into a complex network of belief systems in the subconscious unique to the archipelago. Cordero credits his devotion to novenas growing up as one of the foundational factors for turning his attention to literature, for instilling in him the skill of disciplined attention: “Listening, reading, and praying were the first habits I learned [...] which shaped me into the writer I am today” (44). And one might assume that his decision to enter the seminary to be a Catholic priest was immune from doubts; not quite: he eventually abandoned the life of a seminarian, and chose to devote his life to writing poetry, “to behold this magnificent feeling of the eternal and illuminated by the memories of the unborn and the images of the unsaid and the unfulfilled” (47). To an extent, Cordero hints about his relationship with the sublime, here, and, no doubt, the divine, as well, both waiting to be tapped in the well of the imagination.

 

Like Cordero, some contributors in this collection have detoured away from writing, lured by obligations, other callings and/or career paths, before capitulating to the discipline of writing, to hone their skills on a particular writing form, or finish a writing project. For example, after university, Mignon “Migs” Bravo Dutt dived into “market research reports and meticulously crafted PowerPoint presentations” in a corporate career track in Manila, while her writing time entered an indefinite period of postponement. Because, indeed, one must earn a living and raise a family. But as Dutt continued cruising into corporate life in Singapore, for at least another decade or so, the hunger to be published again in small journals and create a track record of publication persisted to grow, and eventually became a reality, until her writing transitioned to longer forms, and later became a debut novel, The Rosales House, which was accepted for publication, in 2020, by the new Southeast Asian branch of Penguin Random House. 

 

Similarly, Elmer Omar Bascos Pizo has to earn a living, as well, before devoting himself to writing. But early on, while growing up, Pizo expressed his penchant for words through journal-writing to document the harsh aspects of family life, especially his father’s abusive relationship with his mother. This journal-writing tendency continued in Saudi Arabia, where he couldn’t stand the indignities deployed on OFWs. But on his last trip home from the Middle East—because he severed his employment there—the bus he was riding on collided with another bus. Pizo never thought he’d recover from the accident, which affected his nervous system. Instead, the recovery became a kind of ironic catalyst for a life in letters, when his neurologist advised him to do mental activities, such as solving puzzles and reading. Pizo began to read, and soon revived his routines in writing, which resulted in something so deliciously unexpected it’s probably better not to mention it here. 

 

And, too, Hope Sabanpan-Yu’s foray into writing has a direct link to a medical condition, after being hospitalized to remove a twisted ovarian cyst. After the operation, she encountered a “rare stillness, a period of rest that became a period of reckoning” (181) that became a new momentum in her life to be a writer. Family members opposed her decision citing the dearth of financial rewards attached to the idea of becoming a writer. But Sabanpan-Yu forged on to create a path against this opposition, pursued an MA in English in Canada, then an academic career while editing numerous anthologies, and writing creatively. For Yvette Fernandez, a kind of lightness flickers on the page on how she became a writer: Fernandez’s mother found her daughter dozing, and falling fast asleep on her accounting homework, and soon encouraged her to take a course in writing. The suggestion is not so much based on intuition, but hindsight; Fernandez’s mother had noticed her daughter’s excitement before when she wrote a column for their parish bulletin. Family support appears to play a significant role in Fernandez's journey to become a writer. Opposition among family members appears absent. She had two semesters before graduating from business school, when she answered the call of journalism. I detect the same lightness reading Paulino Lim, Jr.’s essay, where he appears to cruise into the writing and reading life from college at UST, then after earning a PhD at UCLA. As a professor in Long Beach, California, he wrote his first novel, followed by three more novels.

 

Indeed, the anthology operates on a number of variations on how its contributors became writers, which underscores a process, a long, arduous journey, filled with doubts, fear, and palpable states of despondency, still unsure if they’re up to something frivolous or something that truly matters to their lives, and, too, their sense of fulfillment. Many times though the how or the process of becoming a writer embeds ideas and notions of the why—as in, why become a writer, in the first place—to a point where the how and the why become inseparable, that the why is somehow in the heart of the how already, and the how in the why. This is the case with the late Joel Pablo Salud whose life as a writer “began […] in the glut of reportage”(140). For Salud, the appeal of journalism hinges on its attachment to events in daily life waiting to be encapsulated or framed in a story’s arc, and how language puzzles out information, hoping to illuminate ideas and frameworks of imbalance in the background that might be the seed for change. Salud “believ[ed] that the world can be changed for the better by restructuring the post-modernist narrative of 5capital superiority and social subjectivism”(140), a belief that sits at the heart of why Salud wants to be a writer: “the truth needs to be told” (143). To a large extent, Salud views writing as a tool for social transformation. Quite different from John Jack G. Wigley wherein writing serves as a tool for private concerns; through writing, Wigley feels “that the understanding of [his] past would help [him] better understand [him]self today”(172), and more so it allows him “to reflect, to examine personal demons, and to reassess [him]self”(172). Wigley has lived through a trifecta of struggles growing up: first, in the context of gender, for being gay, then class for growing up poor, and lastly, in the framework of race, for being half-Caucasian where insults and taunts in his immediate community about his origins ingrained feelings of being constantly marginalized. Writing about these struggles has become both a “strategy to emancipate [him]self” and a “tangible attempt[] at self-preservation” (171).

 

But for Merlie M. Alunan, who was one of the recipients of the 2025 International Writers Award of The Royal Society of Literature (RSL), she “never wished to be a writer”(8), early on, even after reading numerous dog-eared pages “of wrong and forgotten books moldering in rarely-visited library shelves” (8). And even after obtaining her MA in English and Creative Writing under Edilberto and Edith Tiempo, the writing didn’t flow, though later, much later, the gravity of words percolating in her head eventually gave in, because “perhaps as one lives longer, one’s bag of memories becomes too heavy to contain”(8). I was hoping for Alunan to expand the element of memory in the creative process, here, and how it manifests into a foliage or forest of words, with age; but then perhaps this is reason enough to read more of Alunan’s work in the future. 

 

For Noelle Q. De Jesus, her journey as a fiction writer reached a new stage once she considered the idea of “empathy, and, to a certain extent, curiosity” (68) in her work. To be in someone’s shoes and view the world from their perspective underlines an act of generosity and selflessness, at first glance, since, to an extent, it can be viewed as an act of leaving the confines of the self, or perhaps escaping it, to understand how life configures itself in others. But within the context of fiction, one wonders how empathy works with or considers the idea of detachment, as the author finds her way into the interior lives of her characters, its joys, desires, and unmitigated obsessions; detachment may be required to avoid emotional biases between characters in a story. Now one might also ask if empathy in writing is a vehicle for autobiography. Ian Rosales Casocot probably touched on this relationship, when he appears to blur the anthology’s question of how one became a writer into why one writes, in the first place; and thus, for those who write fiction, at least, he argues that “writing may be a way for fictionists to begin to understand their own self and their world” (22). I urge you to read his piece, especially for the lilting texture of his prose.

 

On the other hand, it’s possible to surmise a certain dimension of empathy in this collection, within the context of mentorship. When an established writer finds the time to deploy suggestions and criticisms on an aspiring writer’s work, the act entails an understanding of a writer’s journey, particularly the apprehension before the letter of rejection arrives, the urge to read the best writers and digest something from their output, and, no doubt, the dilemma of managing one’s time for continuous, uninterrupted indulgence with sentences on one’s keyboard, or, to traditionalistsII, pen and pencil on empty sheets of paper. The depth of Aileen Cassinetto’s gratitude for Ed Maranan’s critique on her poems could not be underestimated. An alumnus of Iowa, Maranan was already a Palanca Hall of Famer then. Before returning to the Philippines in 2006, Maranan worked as a foreign information officer at the Philippine Embassy in Kensington, where Cassinetto would visit him, since they were good friends prior to his assignment in London; but looking back, decades later, Cassinetto realizes that her time with Maranan then had the seriousness of “a masterclass in nuance and why the line “thickening, damning blood” wasn’t working” (39); he also encouraged the aspiring poet to compose a poem each day “using the issues of the day as prompts” (39). John Iremil Teodoro also had a one-on-one workshop with a mentor, early on, when the poetry editor of a Catholic monthly magazine kept rejecting Teodoro’s poetry submissions; one day, Teodoro received mail that contained all the poems the editor had rejected, plus a note, an invitation, to show new poems his mentor can critique. Teodoro’s mentor was Leoncio P. Deriada, who was the Director of the Information Office, at the University of the Philippines, Visayas, and was already a winner of multiple Palanca Awards. Teodoro’s sessions with Deriada became a catalyst for Teodoro to stop pursuing medicine, in his third year in college.

 

The anthology doesn’t have to be read in order. But without much rhyme or reason, I suggest reading Caroline S. Hau’s essay last, on the ninety-third page, where she underlines furniture we can associate with environments conducive to a writer’s concentration and silence, such as nooks, desks, windows, and bookcases. In a sense, Hau zooms into the notion of space, where the actual act of drafting and writing takes place, where the hows and the whys one writes disappear for a while, or rendered irrelevant. One is just writing, or, to an extent, breathing. But being in that space, one wonders if the writer thinks of who they are writing for, if they think of a Filipino community, or a diaspora with fluid or without national boundaries..

 

 

*****

 

Michael Caylo-Baradi is an alumnus of The Writers’ Institute at The Graduate Center (CUNY), directed by André Aciman. His work has appeared in The Adirondack Review, Hobart, Kenyon Review Online, The Galway Review, Galatea Resurrects, London Grip, New Pages, PopMatters, and elsewhere. His debut pamphlet Hotel Pacoima came out in 2021 from Kelsay Books. In another name, he has been an editor’s pick for flash features at Litro Magazine.