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: May 15, 2026 for Issue #21. Duplications of authors/artists and more than one testimonial are fine.
Mangozine's Issue #20 Presents
Rachielle Sheffler on The Talusan Sisters: Grace, Liza, and Mary
Eileen Tabios on Elmer Omar Bascos Pizo
Ava Avila on F.H. Batacan
Eileen Tabios on Elaine Castillo
Angelo V. Suarez on Ned Parfan
Eileen Tabios on Joel Vega
Rachielle Sheffler on The Talusan Sisters: Grace, Liza, and Mary
I met the Talusan sisters on separate occasions.
First, I picked up a copy of The Body Papers by Grace Talusan because I was intrigued by the publisher’s name, Restless Books. Then, emblazoned on the cover was “Winner of the Prize for New Immigrant Writing.” The book was a haunting account of being undocumented in America, experiencing abuse, and anticipating cancer. It was fraught with difficulty within family relationships, yet I cannot help but admire the triumph of the human spirit. After reading the book, I reached out to Grace Talusan, and she responded with incredible generosity, answering my questions during a one-on-one Zoom call. I was curious about writing family stories, and she suggested a few tools, such as StoryCorps, which I used to conduct interviews with relatives for my family history project.
I continue to see Grace during the Boston Filipino American Book Club (BFAB) meetings, where we discuss books written by writers of Filipino descent. In February 2023, we selected Liza Talusan’s "The Identity Conscious Educator." I read passages to my husband and daughter, both teachers, who agreed that each school should have a copy of this magnificent work. Teachers need to see their students as individuals, not blank templates to be treated the same way.
I had the good fortune to meet the third sister, Mary Talusan, in person at the Liwanag Lit Fest in Long Beach, CA, during Filipino American History Month 2025. Mary discussed her book, Filipinos of Greater Boston, along with other writers who published their community histories through Arcadia Books. Mary also wrote "Instruments of Empire," where she leveraged her expertise as an ethnomusicologist to examine the intricate history of music and colonialism.
I asked Mary how it was being a family of writers.
“It’s been amazing, since we do different styles of writing,” she answered. She recalled an event at the Ayala Museum in the Philippines, where they all gathered on one stage.
I could imagine how proud their mother must be!
*
Eileen Tabios on Elmer Omar Bascos Pizo
As a poet, I once created a slogan: “Poetry as a Way of Life.” I used to sign my books with the phrase and occasionally still do. I thought of this slogan when I read Elmer Omar Bascos Pizo’s contribution to the anthology How I Became a Writer (HIBAW) edited by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard (Vibal Foundation, 2025). In one of the most powerful accounts in this anthology, Elmer described a challenging life involving coming from a poor farming family, being abused by family members and as an overseas worker in Saudi Arabia where he also suffered prison torture, and then a bus accident that temporarily took away his short-term memory. As a result, he took to writing as therapy; poems versus longer prose was his choice as the latter could not accommodate the frail attention span caused by his injuries. Elmer also wanted to write to dispute others’ criticisms of him as a failure. He had the good fortune to meet the poets Marie Hara, Eric Chock, Juliet Kono and Christy Passion whose Bamboo Ridge (BR) community supported his literary efforts. BR eventually published his poems in its journal and in their anthologies before releasing a single-author poetry collection, Leaving Our Shadows Behind. He details this story through the only poem contributed to HIBAW. The poem ends with how, with his poetry collection,
… the Hawai’i Literary Arts
Council awarded to
me the Elliot Cades Literary Award
for the Established Author Category.
This award is
Considered the most prestigious
Literary Award in Hawai’i.
It’s an astounding life and literary history that, to me, offers a powerful manifestation of “Poetry as a Way of Life.” I am so moved by Elmer’s history and thank him for sharing his life and poems with us all.
*
Ava Avila on F.H. Batacan
In the Filipino psyche, the phrase "accidents happen" is layered. It's not just a casual way to brush off mistakes and misfortunes. Within the context of Filipino culture, it reflects deeper social attitudes shaped by history, faith, and survival. In FH Bataan's Accidents Happen, the title itself plays on tis tension: are these accidents truly accidental? Or are they symptoms of deeper, ignored violence in society?
Since reading Smaller and Smaller Circles, I have been yearning for more F.H. Batacan. Bataan's writing is both evocative and sharp, capturing the nuances of Filipino society while creating universally resonant tales. Her ability to blend elements of crime, horror and speculative fiction showcases her versatility and depth as a storyteller. Accidents Happen is a compelling read that offers both suspense and social commentary. Each of the 11 stories not only entertain but also provoke reflection on the pervasive issues of injustice and inequality. It does not have a single unremarkable moment. In Bataan's world, violence lurks in every aspect, even in something harmless as a No. 1 pencil.
*
Eileen Tabios on Elaine Castillo
My slogan as a poet is “Poetry As A Way of Life,” by which I mean that to be a poet is not just writing poems but living life in a different—presumably better—way than how one might live if one weren’t a poet. I was reminded of my slogan, my constant reminder to myself, when I read Elaine Castillo’s How to Read NOW. Prior to opening her book, I hadn’t realized that Castillo had intended something larger than reading books—she’s really talking about how to view our world or our life/lives NOW, which is to say, “how to dismantle the forms of interpretation we’ve inherited; how those ways of interpreting are everywhere and unseen.”
While reading Castillo’s book, I also was writing another contribution to my local newspaper where I write a poetry column. In that column, I discuss how Wikipedia described the years that Robert Louis Stevenson had spent in Samoa. Samoa caused “a political awakening” in the author of Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Kidnapped, among others. At the time, Samoa was beset by the colonial powers of Britain, Germany and the U.S. In my column, I wrote in part:
What grabbed my attention and stuck in my memory was Wikipedia’s description of Stevenson’s concern for the Samoans, specifically what Stevenson “perceived as the Samoans’ economic innocence—their failure to secure their claim to proprietorship of the land through improving management and labour.” Just months before his 1894 death, Stevenson had addressed the island chiefs:
“There is but one way to defend Samoa... It is to make roads, and gardens, and care for your trees, and sell their produce wisely, and, in one word, to occupy and use your country... if you do not occupy and use your country, others will. It will not continue to be yours or your children's, if you occupy it for nothing. You and your children will, in that case, be cast out into outer darkness."
In the above excerpt, I italicize the words “occupy” for emphasis; that is the word that makes it difficult for me to forget Wikipedia’s feature on Stevenson. For when I think of the word “occupy,” I usually associate it with invaders and colonizers (and, yes, settlers) coming to occupy a land that was not previously theirs. In Stevenson’s and Samoa’s case, the matter is of an indigenous people occupy-ing land where they already reside.
Stevenson’s thoughts were based on the “Lockean” sense of property. The philosopher John Locke developed a “labour theory of property” through which ownership of property is created by the application of labor. As implied by Wikipedia’s description, the Samoans’ failure to adequately apply their labor and management on their lands would make logical the result five years after Stevenson’s death of Germany and the U.S. partitioning the Samoan Islands (Britain gave up its rights there by concentrating on Africa).
Wikipedia’s write-up seemingly creates a cause-and-effect on how Samoans didn’t manage their lands in the Lockean manner with the subsequent actions by Britain, Germany and the U.S. But it's not clear whether the Lockean sense of property comports with Samoan indigenous values. Indigenous culture usually considers nature as not something ("other") to occupy and be “used.”
These three “great powers” likely would have done what they did regardless of Samoans’ actions; colonizers are rarely that influenced by who/what they’re colonizing as they move to control others’ resources, in this case Samoa’s copra and cocoa bean processing as well as harbor rights.
Wikipedia is a poor example to use for proving my—and Castillo’s—point because its entries are often incomplete if not flawed. But its entries surely can’t be worse than any of the so-called “fake news” that are believed by the unchallenging (pun intended) reader. In How to read NOW, Castillo counsels, albeit in different contexts than what I’m raising here, for challenging contexts and/or conclusions that come one's way, particularly since adjustments need not be radical to make a sizeable change (e.g. how Linda Ty-Casper titles her memoir Lives Remembered instead of Remembered Lives or how the Anonymous Chocolatier in the Netflix series “Romantics Anonymous” doesn’t change the individual recipes for wasabi or chocolate but simply reverses the placement of the ingredients in a combined truffle to come up with a yummy bit of heaven).
I not only love but adore How to read NOW for highlighting the importance of thinking for one’s self instead of relying on received perceived-wisdom—that improved way of living that I associate with poetry and Castillo with, ultimately, ethics.
*
Angelo V. Suarez on Ned Parfan
For various reasons, my favorite from Ned Parfan’s Beloved Antimatter is easily the suite “Shadowboxing in Polyester” — with all first lines culled from Lourd de Veyra’s Shadowboxing in Headphones and last lines from Ophelia Alcantara-Dimalanta’s Lady Polyester. There’s an odd musical lineage that runs from Dimalanta to De Veyra that gets pointed out often but much less frequently appreciated, and it’s fantastic seeing them juxtaposed at opposite ends. Ned’s own lines embody the continuity of this lineage — whether or not we should describe this musicality “Thomasian” we will leave to literary history — but there really is much to be said about how deeply and widely Dimalanta’s influence goes across generations, in ways Dimalanta herself may or may not approve of.
*
Eileen Tabios on Joel Vega
Joel Vega is an artist-poet-curator who has crafted one of the best ekphrasis poems I've read. Ekphrasis refers to art created inspired by art in another medium, in this case, a poem inspired by a photograph. The title/phrase "loaves of stone" is a marvelous line, and the poem resonates to be, as they say, a "keeper." Here is the poem that also is published in Rattle:
