D.M. Reyes presents the Introduction to
The Amorist: The Collected Stories of Geraldine C. Maayo
(Popular Book Store, 2026)
THE RELENTLESS HABIT OF LOVING
A Portrait of Geraldine C. Maayo as Amorist
Behind Geraldine Maayo’s literary credentials is a baccalaureate degree in English and Comparative Literature from the University of the Philippines. In college, she was lucky to find the right mentor in Dr. Elmer A. Ordoñez; through him, she fell in love with British fiction during those days when, aside from teaching, he was quietly crafting his own fiction.
Quite importantly, Maayo learned the art of writing stories from the late National Artist Francisco Arcellana. Afterward, as a young professional, she went on to receive a fellowship at the Silliman National Writers Workshop. Further guidance from the writing masters Edilberto and Edith Tiempo (hailed, in due time, as the country’s first female National Artist for Literature) refined her command of the form.
Maayo first hugged literary limelight in 1972. She yearned to make a dent in Philippine Literature in English; no doubt, she had what it takes to do so. But the times were a-changin’, so to speak. What aches in the art of writing did she have to endure?
Diosdado Macapagal’s successor had slammed Martial Law upon a stunned nation; day by day, the schemes and contrivances of his dictatorial regime only became more blatant. Political distress gripped the nation. Quickly, it didn’t spare the writers and their seemingly sheltered practice.
In the writing world, language bred its own forms of hostility. Those who showed great flair writing in English had come to doubt whether it was the right move. For all the committed artists and street-bound activists had started pressing for an expression that was trenchant and accessible, aptly rendered in Filipino. Such direct communication could only aspire to awaken political consciousness, its content scoring social relevance.
For those who were determined to write, the venues for publishing creative works had abruptly shrunk. Quickly, the Marcos watchdogs pounced upon most newspapers. Previously, the Sunday supplements had built up the country’s best writers by showcasing their poems and short stories. But with the broadsheet houses padlocked, the writers had lost their space. Mercifully, the weekly women’s magazines were spared, offering some hope. But warned by the censors, they, too, refrained from publishing literary materials.
In 1977, Maayo scored significant literary victory with her story “The Photographs”; the piece would receive plum distinction from Focus Philippines. It matters, too, that Kerima Polotan led the jury which picked out Maayo’s story, Kerima being the feisty, exacting doyenne of the Philippine short story in English. The accolade propped Maayo in the frontlines of contemporary Philippine writing.
In the ensuing years, she would prove herself worthy of various expectations, working steadfastly to write more stories, releasing a first collection. That first book—The Photographs and Other Stories—would be followed by three more, attesting to prodigious work, confirming her undeniable literary presence.
In such an oppressive milieu, the young Maayo would find a roguish partner in New Day Publishing. During this time of imposed literary silence, New Day played a crucial role in allowing emergent voices to be heard. Through the late Gloria Rodriguez, the church-based publishing house would quietly, steadily proceed with the task of bringing literature to deprived audiences when it was suspicious, perilous to do so.
With the years swiftly reeling, Maayo would steadily gain wind, demonstrating sustained engagement in writing short stories in the last five decades. This present omnibus collection of 38 stories attests to that. All along, the woman had no time to be consumed by the literary world’s dogged attraction to fame and prominence.
Ignored occasionally and even excluded from landmark fiction anthologies, Maayo was not one to languish or howl. She never wavered from her goal: the important thing was to write. She wasn’t one to insist on being part of the mainstream circuits. For her, telling stories went beyond gaining celebrity-like status, warding off the temptation to lord it over as one of the popular figures of the day.
Gauging the broader field that is Philippine Literature in English, how should we regard Maayo’s fiction? How does her writing enhance an already bustling practice?
Looking at the core substance and vision of her stories, we can align Geraldine Maayo with Aida Rivera Ford, Kerima Polotan, and Gilda Cordero Fernando. While informed by a different tone, “The Photographs” echoes Rivera Ford’s “The Chieftest Mourner”. Likewise, Maayo links arms with Kerima Polotan in probing female desire, vulnerability, and resolve. But nagged by journalistic deadlines, the latter had to settle with publishing only a few stories. And then, there is Maayo’s affinity with Gilda Cordero Fernando. But no one could dissuade GCF from her decision to give up writing fiction altogether. This way, Maayo’s musings into the fact, philosophy, and poetics of being woman are more sustained.
On the broader front, Maayo aligns her art with the themes and style of other acknowledged masters. With much daring, she has probed into the intriguing nuances of relating: living, loving, party going—as the English novelist Henry Green avidly explored such concerns. And in the light of Maayo’s attraction to English writing, one can also cite both Ford Madox Ford and Graham Greene. And assess her we must vis-à-vis Doris Lessing, in her habit of loving. In one of Maayo’s stories, the telling details also hint of the protagonist’s fascination with the fiction of the French novelist Francoise Sagan.
The late poet Francis C. Macansantos hailed Maayo as an amorist. No doubt about it, the amorist is perennially in love, unable to keep herself from writing about love. To such a sensibility, love is all—as encounter, union, parting, and heartbreak. To her, love is both fantasy and reality even as it is willful choice. And rightly so, Maayo considers all these stances, expanding her range as she depicts the amorist’s penchant and positions in her fiction.
This way, Maayo herself is fascinated with love—its poetics and rhetoric, taken as conjoined truths. More correctly, she is one writer enamored with qualifying the nature and nuances of human relationships. She does not hedge from confronting the murk, reasonably grappling with the tensive nature of human interaction. In a more philosophical light, another critic asserts that Maayo’s rightful concern is the human condition.
In fiction scholarship, we must invite our critics to revisit more thoroughly Maayo’s sustained depiction of the female experience. Where other fictionists have taken up the concern, writing and quite enigmatically stopping, she belongs to an unparalleled line. Maayo has willfully plodded on, producing several tomes while descanting upon the same theme.
Invested as he was with Philippine Literature in English, the late Fr. Joseph Galdon S.J. wondered how Maayo’s fiction would have flourished had she written about the more serious stuff. But should we demand for something more, dissatisfied with this writer’s exploration of the fact of being woman, casting a relentless eye on women who rehearse daily, tirelessly the age-old habit of loving? Other critics were also dismayed that Maayo has held off from venturing into the area of the large-scoped novel. Yet with this omnibus collection, we confirm that her virtue is one of vigilance, of sustained engagement.
Maayo foregrounds the reality of being a woman. Considering the milieu that nurtured her, she wasn’t one to give in to the pressure of writing about social relevance, refusing to churn hastily contrived material that could pass off as protest literature. Instead, Maayo has chosen to chart experiences which reveal the many dimensions of being a woman—her life in the city and her travails as wage earner or her pleasures and perplexities while relating to men, her pursuit of big and small quests—succeeding, failing, and rising yet again, yearning for secure company, and bravely, stoically coming to terms with the truth of being alone.
In a manner of speaking, the amorist’s pursuit of these concerns affirms how the personal is undeniably political. In the same breath, this is asserting that by political, we acknowledge with our eyes the daily arrogation of power and the pronounced ways in which ordinary people like you and me are drawn to bid, to vie for desired measures of power which simply let us survive.
In many stories, Maayo also looks at society’s attraction to forbidden relationships and the transgressive desires which prod them. She writes about women fiercely in pursuit of love, blowing breath into her characters as wife, mistress, old maid, liberated woman, career woman, those on the edge of a nervous breakdown, even the lovely ones who sadly got away.
She writes about the enigmatic, whimsical, seductive, and perilous ways that women deal with men. Maayo chalks up beguiling portraits of women grappling with their amorous schemes, lusty cravings, mistakes, foibles, and fascination with the power game, as well as their occasional humiliation and mortal wounding. Perhaps, we need to expand our appreciative perspective, locating Maayo’s creative expression in the context of the modern.
Some of her stories are portraits of women in the city. We find them thriving in familiar spaces—the office, the boarding house, the domicile of married life, the street of apartment rows, the recreational places of suburbia.
Maayo evokes the nuances of human relationships best through dialogue. Her characters speak with wit, sarcasm, tenderness, terseness even. Likewise, the narrator’s intelligence makes for an eloquent rendering of both consciousness and perspective. This writer’s language is fluid; she tells every single one of her tales smoothly, without interruption, as it were; and such manner of telling makes her superbly readable.
“Teresa” is Maayo’s portrait of the modern woman whose bragging rights include listing a lusty line of male admirers. The story’s young and impressionable narrator regards this as an enviable situation. Gradually, though, she detects how her idol’s romantic dalliances sputter into brief and dimming tales, none of her vaunted attractions ever holding out.
Appraising her suitors, Teresa can be quite exacting, with a penchant for annotating each pyrrhic encounter; all told, this is her way of dissing each failed partner. But as the narrator takes in Teresa’s amorous Canterbury tales, in latter life, she notes a glaring change. The story negotiates a poignant turn where Teresa confronts vulnerability, caving in to loneliness and fear.
“Breakdown” captivates us as that deceptively mild woman’s dormitory fiction. Irene, a graduate student in Creative Writing, recalls rooming with Fatima/Patty, a Sociology instructor. Their nightly chatter reveal the muted battles that each room occupant is straining to win.
Through sharp mood swings, Patty pines for Peter, an erstwhile student with whom she has carried out a delicate romance. But as abruptly, the young British-Chinese lover grows fickle, deserting her altogether. This withdrawal of affection unsettles Patty; she loses her gait. One night, she drags Irene, starting her car and launching into a mad drive through Manila’s confounding stretch of dark roads and highways, only to stop at the gate of Peter’s apartment.
Irene witnesses the moment when Patty throws away both reason and discretion, possessed by the frenzy of passion. Patty’s nervous breakdown puts an end to their rooming arrangement. When Irene stumbles into Patty again, the latter seems to have blotted out all memory of their friendship. The story delivers a poignant insight; eloquently, it dramatizes telling and defacement at once, drawing in both healed victor and witness, the amorist and her stunned memoirist crossing each other’s path one last time.
Humor, wit, and pathos permeate “Sea-Blue”. A well read and discerning Lit-major makes sense of her attraction to a handsome American visiting professor. Instinctively, she holds back from signing up for his class, suspecting him to be a jargon-spouting academic bore. Instead, she settles with sitting in his lectures occasionally, more drawn into conversing with Dr. David Stone at the college’s Basement hang out.
The young lady’s impressions unfold like a college yearbook, offering peculiar notes on her classmates, their disposition, and peculiarities. In this small, textually soaked, yet formative world of academe, she calls her classmates as “all the sad young women”.
But could this be a sly projection trick from the narrator’s end?
And yet, the piece is Maayo’s reckoning of the melancholy spirit, her gendered counterpoint to male existential melancholia, as poignantly evoked in the fiction of Gregorio Brillantes. For Maayo, this quality of sadness relates to romantic desire and its ambiguities—all the sad young women grappling with desire’s complications, as they strive to secure both womanly poise and firm grounding in the face of love’s enigmas, curiosities, and ironies. Boldly, Maayo grounds the sadness of her female characters in the tensions, follies, and ultimate mystique of amorous desire and its pursuits.
The narrative also serves as an amusing sketch of her literature professors and their quirks. Gradually, the narrator realizes that she is falling in love with the visiting Professor. Once his stint is over, the professor sends her a postcard from Hawaii. Ever charmed by the magic of language, the student weighs in on his use of the word “much love”.
“Tears Sweet as Brandy” is a riveting read, a tale of attraction both bristling and barbed. More importantly, it confirms Maayo’s skill in conjuring a contemporary comedy of manners, one that is refreshingly set in the corporate world.
The 23-year-old Marilen is a feisty career woman on the rise. In the corporate hub where she plays boss to a jumpy staff, she finds herself drawn to the new personnel assistant (“a pimply, awkward 19-year-old” who is also a college Marketing dropout).
The attraction baffles and unsettles Marilen’s friends. They imagine the boy merely as her dogged sidekick or bodyguard. Her young ward himself doubts the boss’s affection, the concern never figuring in their sweet talk. Even as he admits being attracted to her, the boy also mouths spot-on observations as to who Marilen is: “Like you’re a snob. You’re not very friendly with the people in the office. But you’ve got your rich and brilliant friends outside. You’re class.”
The unreliable narrator laughs off the attraction, saying that she is really more drawn to a father figure (someone in the mold of either Henry Fonda or Frank Sinatra). All told, Marilen’s image of the perfect lover comes from all the Hollywood films that she has seen.
The unusual office romance proceeds as a prickly game of power. Marilen proceeds as Dr. Doolittle reversed, playing mentor to the boy. She forces upon upon him an education of the senses (“civilizing the little uncouth boy” as she calls it). She brings him to painting and photo exhibits, directs his taste for films and worthwhile magazines.
But later on, a more pensive Marilen admits:
I guess it must have been exactly this great disparity, this unbridgeable chasm that made me keep it going, that drove me to keep him close to me. I fed on his insecurity, his vulnerability, his longing to be loved—my poor beloved lad who never spoke to me, nor sung to me, a beautiful line, words I could appreciate. I saw him now as a possession—something I wouldn’t want to give up, the way we hate giving up possessions. The fear of someday losing him started to obsess me.
By Marilen’s own frank admission, she has never been at home with tenderness. With the boy, she styles herself as “a dirty little sadist”. More explicitly, she asserts: “I twist men around my fingers and make them dance to my tune, until they dance themselves to death... a sadist, my dear is someone who loves to inflict pain on the person he loves.”
But Marilen’s sadistic game takes a darkly comic turn. One day, she finds out why her boytoy has stopped showing up. Now, he is pursuing a new girl from another office in the same building. A single detail leaves Marilen all livid: he is dead serious about marrying that girl. This triggers her savage disposition: swiftly, she sends him a memo, firing him on the spot. But as briskly, the boy strikes back, handing her a resignation letter. So, they lock horns and engage in a verbal tussle, both rushing to the proverbial break-up.
With perfect timing, Maayo steers her narrative to a comic high where her unreliable narrator deals with her poignant downfall. Marilen’s power play can no longer hold; the shameful mess that is loss overwhelms her, wounding not only her ego but her heart. In the end, it is she who ironically learns a humbling, wistful lesson from her boytoy.
“The Boys in the Boarding House” is the title story of Maayo’s third collection. Like a rhapsodic project, it is one engaging variation of her dormitory fiction, curiously set in Baguio. One may regard it as the perfect twin companion to the earlier “Breakdown”.
Nadine is the story’s protagonist, a 30-year-old Graduate School teacher at the UP campus in Baguio. Stitched together, the story’s vignettes form her wistful recollection of her younger male companions at the boarding house in Cabinet Hill. Nadine’s eponymous boys are college students temporarily lodged in Baguio, pining to make it to UP’s main campuses in Manila. Low entrance-test scores may have initially barred them from attending Diliman. But getting good grades in Baguio could be their eventual re-entry ticket.
At 30, Nadine is obviously the boarding house’s most senior scholarly tenant. From their end, the boys cheerfully submit, acknowledging how authoritative she is. But she has no qualms luring them to curious talk. Maayo unravels Nadine’s reminiscences in short, intriguing sections—a steady voice print of her fascinating conversations with Egay, Leslie, and Delfin, among others. Inside the boarding house, the dining table becomes their usual meeting place.
Invariably, Maayo’s female protagonists are both articulate and hen-sure. More than sex or casual flirtation, they yearn for intelligent, rewarding talk. In this particular case, Nadine’s talk-time with each boy helps her to figure out how she has struck them and what place she occupies in their imagination.
Chatting with them allows her to piece together their background. As the talk lures each boy to bare their secrets, Nadine also finds out what she means to each of them. Somehow, those discoveries possibly flatter her, feeding her ego. Yet in the beguiling way of enigmatic women, Nadine’s character invites us to linger with the ambiguity: how well at home is she with the images that her boys have conjured of her? Probing the male gaze, Maayo scores richly in exploring how woman is multidimensional—a many-hued, many-scented rose dazzling every single boy.
In particular, Nadine reckons how she is being sought as sister, mother figure, and object of desire—each boy creating an intimate image of her. As they volunteer what she means to each of them, the reader is inspired to trace how the individual confessions arouse greater self-knowledge in Nadine. Nonetheless, we feel how the poignant or the funny moves Nadine, even mildly shaken by one erotic confession.
This way, the protagonist also changes, more mindful how each boy conjures a distinct image of her as woman, driven by the vulnerabilities of their own desire.
The story fleshes out an enduring insight on Maayo’s part. The daily encounter between the male and female of the sexes reveals how women inspire many impressions and fulfill several functions in their interaction with men. It takes a woman to articulate this.
The story highlights the memorable spaghetti-and-meatballs dinner which Nadine cooks for her boys during their final semester together. In the way of literary meals, the gesture shines with symbolic meaning. This way, Maayo dangles a happy ending.
Yet, in the end, a poignant tone takes over. Without flinching, Nadine tucks in how that happy day is the last for all four of them, fate never obliging to let the roads converge again. Life calls and each one responds to the summons a different way.
Only the shadows and the echoes linger—Penelope, Laura, Beatrice, even the Blessed Mother stepping forward, articulating what it means to be left behind.
In “November”, Maayo casts an eye on romance in the time of the internet. She traces where this present age has taken the habit of loving, motivated by the desires and capabilities of cyberspace. In ways never before possible, social media has instantly brought together family and friends, undaunted by the distance, magically reuniting those who have lost track of each other. But to the lonely and the vulnerable, Facebook has also dangled prospects of love—of finding a virtual lover.
Maayo’s protagonist is tech-savvy, a sure-handed Facebook habitué who knows her way through the internet. One day, she gives in to a friend request from a certain Nicholas Mcdonald, an Irish-Italian paramedic once connected with the French Foreign Legion. The narrator is delighted with love at first sight; she admits being drawn to his face, taken by his profile picture.
Quickly, she yields to an internet romance with the man. They become virtually intimate, giving in to daily phone calls. Not one to run out of questions, the curious protagonist sleuths, trying to uncover the identity of her enigmatic Facebook lover.
One day, Nicholas tells her that he is flying to Malaysia with his mother. At last, he can collect from the government the hefty sum which is due his late father. From Malaysia, the virtual Romeo intends to swing by Manila to see her. The prospect excites the narrator wildly, imagining the amorous motions of a face-to-face tryst. But before that happens, Nicholas appeals to her for help. He must settle the 10 percent tax in advance before he could receive his father’s severance pay.
As Nicholas nags the skeptical narrator to help him raise the amount, she quickly detects something afoul but decides to ride along. Right away, she sets the boundary by declaring that she has limited means to bail him out of the situation. But the virtual lover refuses to give up. The smart narrator extends faint reassurance, suggesting that she could try borrowing money from friends. Here, her artful struggle involves the rhetoric of goodbye. Victory means calculation, never giving Nicholas the least bit of an idea that she knows his scam.
With ironic grace, Maayo illustrates how cyberspace has become the platform for romantic deception. In various degrees, her characters live out their crafty skills, each one manipulating their virtual identity. In such a place, honesty isn’t only a lonely word; it is hardly the virtue of the cyber lover. In hyperspace, the habit of loving recedes into a scam. The goal is not to become intimate but to make a profit.
In her own amorist fiction, Maayo wrestles with the internet, luring us with its fantasy of reinventing our identity. The profile picture enables us to compose and edit the face which we will wear virtually. This way, the brand name Facebook extends an obvious hint. Maayo does not flinch from dramatizing the ruthless changes to the game of love as Facebook plays it.
In the way Maayo has crafted her stories, we glean the amorist, undaunted in her heralding the age-old creed: love conquers all. And, indeed, with sustained attention, through the 38 stories served here, the fictionist traces humanity’s audacious habit, pushing beyond the limits, committed to love, no matter the risk of falling and bleeding upon the thorns of life. Let us not forget, too, how the writer has modernized her outlook, suiting the attraction to eros or agape to attain perfect fit with our times. This way, Philippine Literature in English is all the richer because of Maayo’s sustained curiosity about how love directs our literary imagination. We hear rumors that she is completing yet another collection. Or perhaps, much like her female protagonists, she is yet again neck-deep, heart-deep in the throes of loving. Until her next descent, we can only bask in this present tome, these collected stories of the amorist, Geraldine C. Maayo.
*****
As Professorial Lecturer, D. M. Reyes enriches his academic career through fresh teaching opportunities at the Department of English and Comparative Literature and at the Departamento ng Filipino at Panitikan ng Pilipinas of the University of the Philippines Diliman. As a writer, he has found competent expression in both poetry and prose. His creative-writing engagement includes directing several editions of the Silliman National Writers Workshop. He has received significant research fellowships from the Asian Public Intellectuals Program and the ASIA Fellows Program of the Asian Scholarship Foundation. He has also written monographs on the visual arts and on the iconographic traditions of Southeast Asia. For 34 years, he taught at the Ateneo de Manila University, developing a range of courses in Literature and Creative Writing with the departments of Filipino, English, and Fine Arts. In 2023, he received the Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas for his lifetime achievements in Poetry.
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