Friendship on tumultuous waters
I’ve always been comforted by, and fascinated with, vanishing lines as found near the sea.
I fear the vastness of the ocean, and prefer to stay where I can still find the shore, where a line can be drawn between water and land. That a shoreline is temporal, tirelessly shifting…
Prose poem
Today is for staring at a blank page, at the fullness of nothingness.
I push to the edges of the page, into the abyss, the words with their claws ready to etch themselves again deep into the slate. …
Involving self-knowledge, metaphor, and narrative
Some class days, when I don’t have the energy to teach, when I’d like to just sit back and make students write something quick and then endlessly talk, I ask them to pull out a small piece of paper and to fill in the blanks:
“My dream is __________, my…
It has become a ritual for her father and I, this taking turns that we do when detangling — by hand, by comb, and with lots of determined gentleness — our daughter’s shock of thick, stubbornly untamable, wildly curly hair.
When Dione was a little girl running around on the…
The importance of absence in the creative process
I’m a writing and literature teacher by profession. But when it comes to writing about writing, or teaching writing, I’ve always found myself veering away from touching on the technicals like grammar or rhetoric, writing habits or “best practices.” One can only say so much about things like constructing the…
A speculative exercise
My two-year-old son climbed on to my lap, effectively distracting me from the work I was doing on my laptop. Whatever enjoyment I derived from that caffeinated, early morning’s work, before everyone else was up to ask what’s for breakfast, I quickly forgot when Joaquin woke up earlier than usual…
How to keep on making art without burning out
I credit this secret to Lisa Macuja, a prima ballerina from the Philippines whose illustrious career spanned 30 theatrical seasons when dancers generally stay only up to 15 seasons, 20 at most.
Several years ago — and I can’t say for sure now exactly how many years — I was…
To get my English/Literature Department fix
I know I’m not alone in feeling this way towards The Chair. As a long-time faculty member of a postcolonial English Department in a neoliberal university, I can’t bear to watch it.
I lasted till the end of the first episode. Yup, it’s definitely like that, I would catch myself…
Slowly, then all at once
Pandemic time is brutally inconsistent. It marks the midpoint of slowly, then all at once — it’s the comma, the pause, the preventive delay in the wound-up clock reaching its alarming point, after which the world speeds down to destruction.
What were only inevitable a few years back are happening…
