Category Archives: books

Penman No. 451: A Harvest of Books

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Penman for Sunday, June 4, 2023

IF YOU’RE reading this on this Sunday morning, then it’s not yet too late for you to find a cab and get yourself over to the World Trade Center in Pasay City to catch the last day of the Philippine Book Festival, and have your favorite Filipino authors sign their books for you.

Organized by the National Book Development Board (NBDB) in partnership with the National Library and other agencies and organizations, the PBF will showcase the best of new Philippine writing and publishing, with the bonus of having most of the authors around for signings, chats, and the now-obligatory selfies.

Since the Internet took off thirty years ago, people have been declaring that “Books are dead!” (And even before that, “The Author is dead!”—although, of course, not quite in that almost literal sense). Well, guess what—both are very much alive, whole new generations of them, as if the Internet never happened. I don’t have the hard figures to show—I’m sure the NBDB has them—but just from what I’ve seen at the past Manila International Book Fairs (the next one of which will be held in September), there’s much more new writing and publishing happening now than there was before the Internet. 

There are many drivers for that, one of which has to be the proliferation of writing programs and workshops, whose graduates really succeed only when they come out with books. (Like I often remind Creative Writing grad students who take forever to “perfect” their thesis projects, “You’re writing for no more than five readers—your dissertation committee—and when you’re done, your thesis will be sitting on a solitary shelf. Just do what you need to pass the damned defense and focus on producing your first book out of that draft! Your real examiners will be your readers.”) 

Another factor is the growth of the publishing industry, which has become much more diversified in terms of ownership, material, and audience. The long years of martial law drove much creative output underground, so to speak, with few available venues for literary publishing and only competitions like the Palancas providing incentives for continued production. (On the other hand, the government presses kept churning out books on the First Couple’s abounding wisdom.) Post-EDSA, the pent-up dam broke, and literature flourished, but still hardly on the scale we’re seeing today.

I suspect that’s because many new players have gone into publishing, finding niche markets for everything from religious and self-help books to graphic novels and high-end coffee-table books. Among these, I’d count Milflores Publishing, founded by the late Tony Hidalgo and now in the hands of the very capable Andrea Pasion-Flores. Balangay Books, focused on local literature, has been opening doors for new young authors, and belongs to the Indie Pub Collab PH, a group of independent publishers. Down south, Savage Mind Bookshop and the Ateneo de Naga University Press have made great strides in literary publishing not just in the Bicol region but well beyond. Emerging in the wake of the Pink Revolution, San Anselmo Publications has made a name for itself as a purveyor of progressive thought. A recent visit to OMF Literature’s bookshop and office along Boni Avenue showed me how Christian literature is flourishing, attracting both new authors and readers. 

Let’s not forget self-publishing, which with such new technologies as print-on-demand and e-books has outgrown the stigma of “vanity” publishing and has produced both commercial and critical successes. While overall quality remains highly variable, the free Internet has empowered and enabled a new generation of young people to feel like they can become “writers” by posting on such sites as Wattpad—and some of them will be. (The irony here is that, as on Amazon, writers who succeed in their e-book debuts then get picked up by publishers of physical books.) Professional design and editorial outfits such as Studio 5 and Perez NuMedia also exist to help individuals and institutions turn their ideas into prizewinning books.

And then of course the long-established big-name publishers and academic publishers are still around: Anvil Publishing, UP Press, Ateneo de Manila University Press, UST Publishing House, and the University of San Carlos Press, among others. Vibal Publishing has produced impressive and sumptuously printed historical books—as has, let’s not forget, the National Historical Commission. They remain the publishers of choice for what might generally be considered prestigious but non-commercial projects, although their marketing savvy has vastly improved, from book design to distribution (much of the bookselling has moved online, to Shopee and Lazada). But since the wait at these publishing houses tends to be long, even established Filipino authors like novelist Charlson Ong (White Lady, Black Christ) have gone with such alternatives as Milflores (as did I, in its previous incarnation), which can often provide speedier results with no sacrifice of quality.

One more thing: more Filipino authors have begun to get published and noticed abroad, beyond America. Note the recent publication of Ulirát: The Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines, edited by Tilde Acuña et al., and the South Africa-based Jim Pascual Agustin’s Waking Up to the Pattern Left by a Snail Overnight, both by Gaudy Boy in Singapore. Singapore is also where Penguin Random House SEA is based, and from where it published Danton Remoto’s novel Riverrun and his book of stories The Heart of Summer(aside from his translations of our classic works in Filipino), and Maryanne Moll’s novel The Maps of Camarines. I’m also happy to report that my novel Soledad’s Sister just came out in a German hardcover edition (as Last Call Manila) from Transit Buchverlag, following earlier editions in Italy, France, and the US. A 15th-anniversary edition of the novel, along with a new edition of my Voyager collected stories, are on sale at PFB—as are almost all of the books I mentioned here, with their authors on hand to sign them.

So wait no further and grab that ride to the WTC, for your share of this bountiful harvest of Filipino books. (Did I say that entrance is free?)

Qwertyman No: 40: Teaching History

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Qwertyman for Monday, May 8, 2023

I HAVE a subscription to the New York Times, which I enjoy for its features and commentary as much as its news coverage, and the other day my attention was piqued by a small headline: “It’s Not Just Math and Reading: US History Scores for 8th Graders Plunge.”

According to the article, recent test scores reveal that young Americans (about 13-14 years old for eighth-graders) have become much less knowledgeable about their history and civics over the past decade—with 40 percent scoring “below basic” and only 13 percent ranked as “proficient.” 

I immediately wondered how our students would score given similar tests. Would they be able to answer even simple questions about why Ferdinand Magellan sailed to the Philippines, what prompted Filipinos to revolt against Spain, why the Americans occupied us, what led to our involvement in the Second World War, and what martial law and EDSA were all about? I’ll probably be safe in my prediction that they would score dismally, from what I’ve seen in my own classes in UP (yes, in UP), where I’ve been dismayed to find a yawning ignorance of history and literature among my students, supposedly among the best in the country. 

Don’t get me wrong: these are bright, idealistic kids, desirous of all things good for their people and their families. They perform well in class and will likely succeed in whatever career lies ahead of them. But when I ask a roomful of English majors if they know or have read NVM Gonzalez and only a couple of hands go up, I get worried. When I ask when or what year the Americans arrived to conquer us and I get strange answers like “1945,” I get worried. 

However shocked we may profess to be, we can’t blame the students. In 2014, following the passage of the Enhanced Education Act of 2013 or the K-12 Law, the Department of Education issued Order No. 20, Series of 2014, effectively removing Philippine History as a high school subject and subsuming it as an “integrated subtopic” under “Asian Studies,” supposedly to provide students with a wider global perspective. The idea sounds nifty, but as many educators have since pointed out, its practical effect has been to dilute the teaching of Philippine history to the point of oblivion. The result is that we have young Filipinos with no knowledge of the most basic facts and issues of their past, and no appreciation of how that past brought us to where we are today.

That vacuum has been an open invitation to misinformation and historical distortion, the stock-in-trade of political propagandists, trolls, and spinmeisters. It’s become much easier to sell myths like a golden age under martial law to impressionable youngsters who were never told or taught the truth. Not surprisingly, Order No. 20 has been attacked by its critics as a means to lobotomize the youth and to render them more susceptible to alternative narratives (aka fake news) concerning our history. 

And yes, I have to acknowledge that all this began under the late President Noynoy Aquino, a champion of K-12, whom I prefer to believe had no such nefarious motives in mind, as he and his family would have had little to gain by erasing history. But the policy was upheld and sustained by the following administration, with DepEd Secretary Leonor Briones arguing strenuously that History (including our martial-law experience) was being taught in Grade 6 under Araling Panlipunan, and again in high school as a component of Asian and World History.

Given the current DepEd’s expressed desire to review K-12, it might be a good time to test how effective that policy has been: just how much Philippine History are our high school students learning and retaining? How much should they know by the time they get to college, where thornier issues such as nationalism, agrarian reform, and foreign policy will be threshed out in all their nuances?

Long before these questions arose, it was a common complaint among students and even teachers that our problem with History was how badly it was taught, often as a collection of names and dates rather than a coherent narrative (which I must say I sometimes wonder about, fact often being stranger and messier than fiction). We generally agree that History should involve more reasoning than rote memorization. But as the New York Times reports, “That emphasis can contribute to a troubling lack of background knowledge,” with experts observing a “rapid and very significant decline in what students know about history and geography—like the fact that Africa is a continent, not a country.” So the basics of names, dates, and places remain important—getting the facts straight before getting into more complicated arguments.

It’s even more troubling to note that on top of this decline in historical knowledge and awareness among young Americans, there’s now a ham-fisted effort from conservative politicians to purge school curricula of what they see as “woke” content—subjects that have challenged the longstanding impression of America as a nation forged by whites. Governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis—eager to present themselves as the flag-bearers of political and moral rectitude—have supported moves to eliminate African-American and LGBTQ studies from the curriculum. Others have called for banning books that threaten their view of traditional America, including books titled “The Infinite Moment of Us” (a young adult novel about love and sex) and “How to Be an Antiracist” (a nonfiction book about racism and ethnicity). This reminded me of how some Philippine state universities, not too long ago, went on their own book-banning spree, on some silly suspicion that books by such authors as National Artist Bienvenido Lumbera were “subversive.”

The New York Times piece came with an irresistible teaser: a brief five-question, multiple-choice history quiz for readers to test themselves on how well they know American history. I scored four out of five (failing a question about post-Civil War reconstruction)—not too bad, I thought, for a guy living seven thousand miles away. But then I come from a generation schooled on American textbooks, who know American history and geography better than many Americans. That’s a topic for another column.

In the meanwhile, let’s ask ourselves: how well do we know our history, and how important is that knowledge to understanding our present and shaping our future? Is “Maria Clara and Ibarra” pointing the way forward?

Penman No. 448: Designing for the Eye and Mind

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Penman for Sunday, March 5, 2023

I DON’T normally review books—even books sent to me with a request to be reviewed, which I apologetically ask authors not to do, unless they’re willing to wait a year or two. That’s because I prefer to enjoy books rather than to critique them, which sounds too much like the kind of work I happily retired from. But every now and then, along comes a book I simply can’t ignore, because it’s just too important or maybe just too beautiful to be put aside.

One such book—both important and beautiful—was dropped off at my doorstep last week, and as soon as I opened it, I knew I had to share my knowledge of its existence with fellow enthusiasts of art and design. The book was Felix Mago Miguel: The Art of Book Design, written by Felix’s wife Amelia F. Zubiri-Miguel, edited by Ambassador Jose Ma. Cariño, and published by the Foreign Service Institute.

One of the most talented and prolific Filipino book designers of our time, Felix has designed more than 130 books over the past 20 years, and I’ve been fortunate to have authored and edited a good number of those, including several coffee-table books and the biographies of Edgardo J. Angara and Leonides S. Virata. This hefty 264-page book is a biography, treatise, and catalogue all in one, a fine embodiment and example of its own subject, sumptuously produced not just to showcase Felix’s work but also to discuss his theory and experience of book design.

Ours has always been a country of gifted authors with endless stories to tell, but only recently has enough attention been paid to the proper design, production, and marketing of our books. The growth of Philippine publishing and the opening of foreign markets to Philippine material has spurred some of that interest as a matter of economic necessity, but the general appreciation of book design remains low. 

As an author myself, I’ve always been fussy about how my books look; I didn’t work that hard just to come out with an ugly book with my name on it. But sadly not all authors or publishers share that worry. As Felix himself laments, we Pinoys have a famous fear of spaces—horror vacui—and tend to cram our pages with as much text as we can, as if wide margins (and better readability) were a waste of precious paper.

Coffee-table books, which are Felix’s particular area of expertise, present both special challenges and opportunities. Being typically meant for promotional rather than commercial purposes, CTBs have large budgets that will allow for better production. But a poorly thought-out or executed design can render those millions useless. I’ve groaned at obviously expensive book projects ruined by gaudy or overly busy covers, barely readable type, narrow margins, and bad paper. (One of my biggest pet peeves is printing text over a photograph for that artsy effect, rendering it illegible.)

Felix’s background as a painter (and as a graduate of the Philippine High School for the Arts and the UP College of Fine Arts) allows him to see a book project not just as a technical challenge but also an intellectual exercise—a process of understanding what the book really wants to say, and translating that into a visual language.

“A book project is always like a thesis, a problem to be solved, an experience to be fleshed out,” he says. “Everything for me begins with figuring out what the book is trying to say and how best to say it. I do my best to learn the narrative, reading to understand it, absorbing its contents. If there are visuals already, I go through them, looking for the narrative that I just read among the photos and illustrations. Doing these things enables me to better feel the book and the direction it will go. My goal is to find the personality of the book, to figure out who is talking and to decide on what kind of experience is best—to design the book in such a way that, as Rita Jacobs says, it may be the only way that it can be presented.”

He designs as much for the mind as for the eye. As Amelia puts it, “Though people may say that a designer’s job is all simply a matter of art, my years of seeing Felix working have told me that it is not. At the end of the day, he always ends up more knowledgeable, better informed, and wiser with insights not just from the manuscripts but from the totality of the discussions and the time he had spent with his clients, which is probably the best bonus and priceless privilege that comes with the job, because at the end of every project, a really beautiful book needs to be more than just pretty to look at.”

Felix adds: “As designers, we become builders of experience. We may not have the privilege of letting our audience touch the skin or the sinews of what they are looking at, but if we did well in our work, what one designed becomes an exhilarating, unforgettable experience. Not only do we introduce the authors and their voices, but through a well-designed book, readers may experience the same things vicariously. What is separated by time and space is connected through emotions. And a book that touches your soul is indeed an experience to be cherished.

“After learning the technical aspects of design—the use of typography, colors, spaces, photos and illustrations, pages, covers, and printing—I realized, I have a new medium. And just like in painting, the medium is not the end of the painting; it is just part of it, because more importantly, there is a story to be told and that story is the priority of the design. My role is to ensure that this invisible visual force will allow the story to be told.”

And tell the story Felix does, in an inimitably pleasing and tasteful style that more than does justice to his material. I look forward to our next project together, whatever that may be—a writer can only write better knowing how superbly his work will look in a capable designer’s hands. 

Penman No. 445: Some Notes on Travel Writing

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Penman for Sunday, December 4, 2022

I’M SURE you’ve noticed—with much envy in my case—how so many of your friends have been traipsing around the world these past few months on what’s been called “revenge travel,” that perfectly human impulse to flee the cage after years of imposed isolation. 

And whether you’re guzzling down a pint of beer in Munich, chasing pintxos in San Sebastian, or crossing a bridge in Kyoto, the chances are you’ll be happy with a raft of digital photographs to show for your adventures. Many will want to post about their tours on their blogs, while a much smaller group will—perhaps months later—sit down to reflect on their experience and write about it in an effort to make better sense of what they went through. 

That’s something I’ve done myself from time to time, and so I thought of sharing some notes for the prospective travel writer—not just of the usual travel feature we produce for commercial media, but of a more personal kind of travel essay, one focused as much on the traveler as on the place itself. Beyond reportage citing facts and figures, this is writing that implicates and engages the traveler, the writing persona, and makes him or her a character in the piece. 

At my age, I consider myself a fairly well-traveled person, but one of the first things I want to say about good travel writing is that it’s really not about where you’ve gone or how many countries you’ve been to. It’s not about quantity, but quality of experience, perspective, and insight. The challenge isn’t to go to what to most Filipinos would be an exotic place like Paris or Tahiti. It’s to go there and to find and to tell us something about it that millions of other visitors or tourists have never seen.  

And when I say “something others have never seen,” it’s not about looking for obscure places, new bars, strange customs, or unique souvenirs. They could all be part of a great story because they’re intrinsically interesting, and if all you want to do is a standard feature story for a magazine, that would be all right. You could even make a good and exciting living writing these travel features, because the industry travel constantly needs them and they sell. 

For many of us, that would be a dream job: fly off to faraway destinations and to first-class hotels with all your expenses paid, just to write about how wonderful the place and the experience was. In my two decades as a columnist for the Lifestyle Section of the Philippine Star, I was lucky to have had a taste of that kind of luxury, having been sent on special assignment to the US, Germany, Israel, and Malaysia, among many other places. When I traveled for academic or professional conferences, which was quite often, I wrote those up too as travel pieces.

But—putting on my creative writing teacher’s hat—I also want you to think of travel writing not just as a function of place, but rather a function of mind. I want you to realize that you don’t need to go to an African safari or to ride a gondola in Venice to be a good travel writer—or a good writer, period. I want you to be able to turn a place you may have been to a thousand times or even lived in—say, Cubao—into a travel destination, and to explore not just its surface but its culture and subcultures, its inhabitants, its range of markets, its daytime and nighttime versions.

There are always two tracks embedded in a good travel essay: the story of the place itself, and the story of the traveler. To put it another way, there is the external journey, and the internal journey. 

The external journey is the story of the journey itself—the purpose of the travel, the choice of destination, the mode of travel, observations along the journey, reaching the destination, first impressions, engagements with the local people, sights, food, experiences, and other vignettes until departure time. 

The internal journey is the story of the traveler’s life situation at the start of the travel—his or her expectations, anxieties, distractions—and then his or her reactions to the unfolding environment, his or her interactions with the place and people, and his or her terminal thoughts and feelings about the whole experience, whether explicitly stated or implied. Very often, the internal journey involves some kind of quest—a search for something beyond the place itself, or some object in it, but an answer to some personal question, which gives meaning to the visit and the encounter with the place. 

That question could be “Who am I?” or “Where do I belong?” or “What do I really want?” or “Is there hope?” As the travel progresses, the answers to these questions begin to be formed or revealed. Thus do the external and internal tracks run parallel or congruent until they bend and meet at a certain point. Indeed, it can be argued that the external track, the travelogue itself, is simply an excuse or a device to tell the personal story, which emerges as the true point of interest in the piece. 

The internal track could also be subtle and subdued, embedded in the main narrative, and palpable only upon closer reading. Nevertheless it will be there, the result of a place or an experience’s impact on a person. In the travel essay, therefore, it is the interaction between person and place and the insight that comes from it that is the real, unified story. 

As the great travel writer Pico Iyer put it, “We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.” 

So when you write your next travel story or travel essay, don’t just tell us about what you’re looking at, which many thousands of visitors before you have already seen. Try to look at it from another angle, or find an interesting detail that’s been paid little attention to, and reflect on what it says to you. Your perspective is as important as the place itself; it may not be shown or expressed too strongly, but it will be there and should be there, for the work to be truly yours, truly unique, and truly worth doing. Happy trails!

Qwertyman No. 19: The Real Maria Ressa

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 12, 2022

I WAS very honored to speak last Saturday at the launch of Maria Ressa’s new book, How to Stand up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future (Harper, 2022). I’d read an advance copy of it a couple of weeks ago, and to cut to the chase, if you’re thinking of buying a book to read for the holidays or to gift to friends, look no further. This book, for me, is among the year’s best in nonfiction.

I have to emphasize that word—nonfiction. As we all know we live in times when fiction has taken over as the most influential form of human discourse, particularly in the political arena. As a practicing fictionist, I should be happy about that, but I’m not and I can’t be, because so much of it is bad fiction, crudely written—and surprisingly, infuriatingly effective, at least with a certain kind of reader. 

Maria’s book cuts through all that. It’s undisguised, old-fashioned, in-your-face truth-telling, told in the same voice and tone we’ve become familiar with over the years of listening to her reportage over CNN. I’m sure that, like me, many of you wondered the first time you heard her: “Who was this little brown-complexioned woman speaking with an American accent?” She looked Filipino, but how come we’d never seen her before?

This was all before she rose to prominence—some would say notoriety—as the moving spirit behind Rappler, and subsequently to global fame as a Nobel Prize winner for Peace. We identified with her travails, shared her anger and sadness at the abuse she has received, and rejoiced in her victories, whether in the courts or in the larger sphere of public opinion. 

But how well do we really know Maria Ressa, and whatever drives her to be who and what she is? This book takes us to the person behind the phenomenon, and answers many questions we may have had about her and her stubborn advocacies.

The book’s title sounds like that of an instruction manual—which it is, and also is not, being part autobiography, part journalism, and part testimonial. As a manual for freedom fighters, it emphasizes the need for collaborative and collective action against seemingly insurmountable forces. Those forces now include the Internet, which, as Maria documents with both precision and profound dismay, has morphed from a medium that once held all kinds of liberative promises into a medium for mass deception and targeted assault. She draws her counsel not from some esoteric guru or academic paradigm, but from some very basic values that have informed her own life—the Honor Code she followed in school, and the Golden Rule.

“That’s what I lay out in this book,” she says, “an exploration into the values and principles not just of journalism and technology but of the collective action we need to take to win this battle for facts. This journey of discovery is intensely personal. That’s why every chapter has a micro and a macro: a personal lesson and the larger picture. You will see the simple ideas I hold on to in order to make what have—over time—become instinctive but thoughtful decisions.”

It’s this constant back-and-forth between the personal and the political—and at some point they become inextricably fused—that forms the fiber of Maria’s narrative and gives it strength. Her convictions are grounded in personal experience; they have not been paid for—as the hacks in the journalistic trade will allege, seeking to bring her down to their own level—except in the coin of personal suffering under the constant threat of imprisonment and violence.

But we learn from this book that trauma is nothing new to Maria. (We also learn that Maria Ressa wasn’t the name she was born into, but to find out her birth name, you’ll have to buy the book.) From her abrupt relocation from Manila to America at the age of ten, to her journalistic immersion in the horrors of conflict and disaster in Indonesia and Ormoc, the book chronicles Maria’s quest for truth, meaning, and purpose in her life, and that of others. She stresses the importance of remembering the past to make sense of the present, quoting TS Eliot’s phrase, “the present moment of the past.”

And so can we, she seems to suggest, even in these times of high anxiety, when we can see the vultures hovering over such once-sacrosanct treasures as our pension funds, while billions more go to feed the dogs of an increasingly untenable counter-insurgent war. The big words we have become used to tossing around—truth, freedom, reason, justice, democracy—they all come down to a personal choice to do the right thing, and the courage to do it. 

Nowhere is this matter of choice more evident than in the fact that Maria is here in the Philippines, having willfully subjected herself to our brand of justice, however imperfect it may be, instead of escaping to the safety of America or another haven, which her dual citizenship if not her celebrity can certainly afford her. She will see her own story through to the end, in the locale where it matters, among the people to whom it matters most.

I’ve often remarked, as a creative writer and professor of literature, that in this country, the writers most in danger of political persecution and retribution are really not fictionists or poets like me. Not since Rizal has a Filipino novelist been shot dead for what he wrote. For sure, we have lost many brilliant writers to the struggle for freedom and democracy—Emman Lacaba, and most recently Lorena Tariman and her husband Ericson Acosta. But they were killed by the State not for what they wrote—the State is illiterate when it comes to metaphor—but for what they allegedly did.

Rather, the most imperiled writers in the Philippines as in many other places are the journalists who speak the language of the people and of their plaints in terms too clear to ignore. They could be radio announcers like Percy Lapid, or the victims of wholesale murder in Maguindanao, or high-profile and exemplary targets such as Maria Ressa. It would have been easy for her to lash back at her critics and tormentors with the same viciousness. But, she says, “I will not become a criminal to fight a criminal. I will not become a monster to fight a monster.”

That, too, is a difficult choice, and one I am sure we are often tempted to cast aside. But Maria’s equanimity in the face of savagery shames us back into our better selves. It will be that kind of quiet resolve that we will need to survive and prevail. After all, we survived martial law. We can survive this regime—with agility, patience, and courage. But don’t take my word for it. Read Maria’s book to know that we can, and why we must.

Qwertyman No. 6: The Extraordinary Vice Mayor Koo

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Qwertyman for September 12, 2022

“PAPA, PAPA! What does ‘consanguinity’ mean?” 

“Consang-what?” Vice Mayor Edison Koo was busy with his cellphone, negotiating his cut from the new bridge they were putting up in Barangay Tullahan. It annoyed him that Mayor Baloloy was going to make double, despite the fact that all the mayor did was to sign the papers while he had to meet with the contractor at a popular girlie joint in Manila—not that he minded the female company.

“Consanguinity. C-O-N-S-A-“

“I can spell it!” VM Koo knew he wasn’t the sharpest pencil in the box—he had passed the bar on his third try, after much coaching from his friends and a novena to St. Jude the Apostle—but he could still remember what “consanguinity” meant and how to spell it. He had stumbled on a question about wills, trusts, and estates that involved consanguinity in his second bar exam, which was why he had to study it extra hard for his next retake. 

“So what does it mean, Papa?” At thirteen, Lawrence was about seven years past being cute and was just being pesky at the worst possible times, but Edison had plans for the boy’s political future and wanted to impress him with his knowledge. “Consanguinity” was easier to explain than to spell, Edison thought with a triumphant smile. 

Facing a mango tree, he recited a memorized Civil Service Commission pronouncement to impress himself with his knowledge: “Under Section 79 of the Local Government Code of 1991, the prohibition against nepotic appointments extends to the appointing or recommending authority’s relatives within the fourth degree of consanguinity or affinity, such as first cousin or first cousin-in-law.” He turned to Lawrence and said, “Does that answer your question?”

“No,” said the boy, fiddling with his cellphone, “but never mind. I found it on Google. It means ‘being descended from the same ancestor.’ So if my Science teacher says we all came from apes, that’s consanguinity? All monkeys are my cousins?”

“Weeell…. If the monkey can show a valid NSO-certified birth certificate that can prove the relationship, why not?” VM Koo congratulated himself for his clever answer; the boy had to think his dad was a genius, to follow in his footsteps and inherit his musty law books. “Why are you asking, anyway? Aren’t you supposed to be going to the mall with your friends? I gave you some money—” A mall—the town’s first—had opened six months earlier, a sure sign of the place’s progress, as a consequence of which the mayor was able to acquire a new van for his wife and an SUV for himself. This was why Edison was convinced he had to run for mayor in the next election—not because Mayor Baloloy was a corrupt bastard, but because he, Edison J. Koo, Esq., was the much better, more highly qualified bastard.

“You know I don’t like hanging out with my friends, Papa,” said Lawrence. “I prefer to stay home and read books and to listen to the news about the war in Ukraine and climate change and all the things that will affect my future as a young Filipino citizen!”

Edison looked at his son more closely, looking for signs that Lawrence was gay; it was his mother’s fault, giving the kid all those books about endangered species and disappearing islands, when any healthy teenage boy should have been hanging out in malls watching the girls in shorts go by. “So what does that have to do with consanguinity?”

“Well, I came across this news report about a new law that will require public officials like you to disclose all their relatives linked to subversive organizations, up to the fourth degree of consanguinity….”

“Really? What for? Don’t those idiots have better things to do?” It infuriated the vice mayor that on top of the SALN—on which he had to very deftly dissimulate—another reporting requirement was going to be imposed on hardworking civil servants like him.

“What does ‘subversive’ mean, Papa?”

“Oh—it means someone who doesn’t like the government, people like me, and wants to bring it down!”

“You mean like Tita Rory?” Lawrence remembered her fondly for giving him books like Catcher in the Rye and The Little Prince.

Edison felt a wave of shame and guilt wash over him, which he tried not to show the boy, who picked it up anyway. Rory was his younger sister, who had been a troublemaker since high school as far as he was concerned, who never listened, who deplored and never supported his entry into politics, and who once even denounced him in the plaza as a crook. So he also publicly disowned her, calling her a madwoman, and cut off all communication, even when she left and vanished into the underground.

“Yes, like your Tita Rory!” Edison sputtered, barely able to say the name. His eyes bulged as he began to understand the import of “consanguinity.” “Dammit, even when she’s not here, she’s going to put me in trouble!” He was thinking ahead to the next mayoral race, to being accused of consorting with the enemy, and worse, of being a subversive himself, which was the most ridiculous thing, because he didn’t have a rebellious bone in his body. He even ticked off Rory once by calling Rizal stupid for having badmouthed the Spanish.

“I like the books she gave me,” said Lawrence, thinking of a little fox and a garden of roses.

“Burn them! They’re full of silly ideas that—that will turn you into a little red monster. You won’t believe in God, you’ll disobey authority, you’ll do all kinds of terrible things—” 

“Is stealing money from the people subversive, Papa? Tita Rory said—” 

“Your Tita Rory said a lot of crazy things! That’s why she’s—not here. She’s not one of us. Not anymore. I pray for her soul, but I firmly believe in the government’s anti-insurgency program! And I’ll make sure everyone knows that—that their humble servant, Vice Mayor Koo, is a staunch defender of democracy, of peace and order, and of the rule of law! You’ll be very proud of me, my son!”

Just then a text message arrived. The bridge contractor had agreed to throw in a free trip to Seoul for him and Mrs. Koo, with a “K-drama Location Tour” attached. Edison beamed. His wife loved “The Extraordinary Attorney Woo,” and although he hadn’t seen it himself—he preferred Vin Diesel movies—she was sure to love him for it, too.

Qwertyman No. 3: The Book Convention

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Qwertyman for Monday, August 22, 2022

THE ANNUAL convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Books of the Democratic Republic of Kawefo was about to begin, and after a rowdy rendition of the National Hymn that was sung in two keys when the video failed, followed by a ten-minute prayer in five different languages invoking Divine Guidance in the formulation of a “coherent, cohesive, and comprehensive national book development policy,” the Introduction of the Honorable Guest Speaker began, properly enough with the birth of the speaker in the country’s easternmost islands, better known for brigandry than textual poaching. 

“Minister Fwefwe could not have arrived at her exalted position at the helm of Kawefan higher education and cultural development without her deep and abiding commitment to the promotion of knowledge, which she gained through her lifelong immersion in the world’s intellectual foundries,” intoned her introducer, the current Vice-Minister of Propaganda whom everyone knew was angling for Fwefwe’s job at the next Cabinet reshuffle. An ex-Marine colonel who had been sacked for leading his men into a rebel ambush while searching for a cellular signal on which he could call his mistress, Vice-Minister Penpen had been rehabilitated through the good graces of his cousin, the chief cook at the Palace who served President Ongong his favorite dishes. “Who could have known that a chance encounter at the circulation desk of the Manoa Public Library on that fateful day of the 23rd of November, 1986, would lead to her elevation from a humble library assistant to our republic’s Chief Cultural Czarina?”

“Good Lord,” muttered Dr. Gawgaw in his corner, “he’s going to tell the full story all over again, is he?” Gawgaw dipped a nacho into the puddle of cheese before him and munched on it noisily. He sat with a group of old men sporting flowery ties and silver-tipped canes, with a sprinkling of elderly ladies whispering in an arcane Creole-like dialect. A retired Professor of Kawefan History, Gawgaw would have preferred to stay home in his library, sniffing the powdery biblichor out of his pigskin-bound volumes on “Robinaux’s Account of Kawefan Border Crossings, 1773” and admiring the faux-Victorian binding of “Society in a Centrifuge: Sugar and the Colonial Domestication of Kawefo,” which he wrote himself. But he had to attend this silly convention on behalf of his Society for the Preservation of Kawefan History, to ensure that any new book policy did not forget to account for the past, of which he was both protector and gatekeeper. “Madame Minister, republish our books!”

Across the aisle, the Kawefan Educational Publishers Guild had other ideas. “Books are everyone’s business!” And indeed it was, especially for Mrs. Krekre, lifetime president of the guild, the grande dame of Kawefan textbook publishing, and supplier of choice to all the government’s informational requirements. The guild employed hundreds of moonlighting schoolteachers to write textbooks that satisfied whatever Kawefan industry and ideology required (the ideology changed every six or twelve years, except for the occasional coup in between), and there was always a need to refresh history and its interpretation. The new administration was anxious to encourage the rumor that its ruling family’s wealth had been founded on ancient treasure, so new myths were being discovered and stories being written about the Lost Kingdom of Lifofo, to which President Ongong could trace his divine ancestry. New material meant new editions and teaching supplements, all of which required thorough vetting by the Ministry of Public Instruction, where Mrs. Krekre’s patient goodwill ensured everyone’s satisfaction.

Oblivious to the proceedings onstage were the members of the Kawefan Popular Writers League, an association dedicated to the principle of literature as entertainment, toward which they concocted dizzying romances set in the Swiss Alps, deep-space honeymoons, movie-star ghost stories, and murder sprees provoked by a secret kimchi recipe. They sipped their wintermelon-flavored milk tea at their table, sharing stories of their latest forays and frolics, and when Minister Fwefwe screeched into the mike about something that sounded like “social responsibility,” they screeched right back and giggled, annoying everyone else, but no one could shut them up or leave them out of the party, because everyone read them in their cars and bathrooms, including Dr. Gawgaw and Mrs. Krekre.

Looking much less happier were the dozen-odd members of Kawefan PEN, who stood forlorn just outside the convention hall, clutching placards that mentioned words like “FREEDOM” and “JUSTICE” alongside a slim stand of books illustrated with skulls, barbed wire, and raised fists. They were led by Prof. Mikmik, who had done his dissertation on Baudelaire at Harvard but who, after the Vietnam War, had seen the Marxist light and now sported a goatee and wrote inflammatory poetry. He had once been friends with Dr. Gawgaw until they quarreled over whose books mattered more in the grand scheme of things. Mikmik was convinced that he was under constant and intense surveillance, especially since his FB account was barraged by friend requests from nubile ladies masquerading as masseuses and escorts.

There were spies, indeed, on the convention floor, shuttling from one exhibition booth and table to another, deputized by the Inter-Agency Counter-Subversion Agency to locate, expose, and denounce subversive literature “in whatever form, format, or genre, for the purpose of undermining the people’s faith and belief in duly constituted authority….” The IACSA’s operatives had attended a workshop in Camp Ngungu, where important questions like “What’s a genre?” were addressed by retired professors of comparative literature (“A novel, a cookbook, a nursery rhyme!”). Key words like “liberal,” “gay,” “rejection,” and “penguins” were dissected and discussed to lay bare the insurgent cancer throbbing at the heart of Kawefan society.

Agent Pogpog had joined the IACSA after sleeping on his call-center job, and was now intent on making a name for himself by bagging his first major subversive author, following the recent, high-profile arrests of poets Gemgem, Kripkrip, and Ricric. For the past three hours, pretending to be a graduate student, he had been keeping Prof. Mikmik company, trying to figure out if Mikmik’s autobiographical epic, Seven Seasons of Solipsism, was subversive or not. It contained a line about “the promethean susurrus of unvanquished desire,” which sounded suspiciously rebellious. “It’s totally subversive, I assure you,” said Mikmik, “and if those fools in the military only knew their Homer, I should have been locked up and shot dead thirty years ago when this book came out. And then this book would be in its tenth edition!”

Inside the convention hall, Dr. Gawgaw burped, Mrs. Krekre laughed, and Minister Fwefwe raised a toast to all authors past and present, and to their boundless imagination.

Hindsight No. 18: Wisdom from Suffering

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Hindsight for Monday, May 16, 2022

(Image from tunedinparents.com)

THERE’S A line I remember from a college course in Greek drama—specifically the play Agamemnon by Aeschylus—where Zeus memorably explains why the gods bring pain and torment to humans, when they could just as easily shower them with joyful blessings: “Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering.” Man suffers, so he will learn.

I kept going back to that line this past week as I tried to comprehend the enormity of what had just happened: by what appeared to be a huge majority, our people had chosen a dictator’s son to lead this country for the next six years. Despite reports of massive vote-buying and irregularities at the polling stations, I wasn’t even contesting the overall results—I was never much of a conspiracist—but asking myself how and why the masses of our people keep making poor choices at the ballot box, voting against their own strategic interests. (Am I being presumptuous to sit in judgment of our average voter? Yes, and I make no apologies, having lived through martial law, all three EDSAs, Garci, tokhang, and Covid.)

Did we not suffer enough over the Marcos years and from the plunder and repression enabled by martial law to have learned that unbridled authoritarianism is a curse on everyone, both despot and citizen alike? Clearly not, or we would not be here today, facing the restoration of that rapacious regime. And it will be because—going by the moral logic that informed the Athenian stage—we have brought it upon ourselves, by casting more votes for the very same people whose greed we continue to pay for, and will pay yet more for, all over again.

In that case, should we flog ourselves over that seeming poverty of collective wisdom? Shall we call ourselves stupid and even hopeless, to have gained the freedom to vote, only to squander it for the benefit of those who took it away in the first place?

Of course, the right to vote never came with any assurance of voting wisely and responsibly, with democratic values foremostly in mind. For those whose lives have never changed regardless of administration, it can simply be another source of easy income. For others, it can be a form of personal revenge for injustices suffered daily, for the sharp tongues and heavy hands of otherwise pious employers. Still others might simply want, for once in their lives, to be part of what they think is the winning side. 

From these “winners,” we can expect a barrage of gloating and taunting, which has already begun. The cynical will remind us that we were wrong to have even hoped and tried; this was all foreordained by the numbers, which are the only thing elections are ever about. Some will even trot out that hoary quote, “Vox populi, vox Dei,” to stamp divine approval upon this outcome. In other words, we were all just exercising our free will, our freedom of choice, which after all is central to democracy. Only sore losers cry.

But then again, free will has never guaranteed critical intelligence. Which leads me—not being a political scientist—to ask these questions of those who might know better:

What if that “freedom” had been subverted and compromised by massive and deliberate disinformation? Was it still a free citizen who willfully cast a ballot for someone provably inimical to democracy, or a wound-up robot executing a series of plotted motions? Can we blame the desperate and the misled? Can we still call it a “free, fair, and clean election” if the fraud already started many years before, in the distortion of history and the rehabilitation of unpunished convicts? 

If and when voters elect a buffoon and a bully president—like they did with Donald Trump, among other such demagogues we know—does that validate buffoonery and bullying, and make them acceptable? Does it wipe the slate clean, erase all liabilities, and establish a new norm for political behavior? Most simply—as millions of us must have been thinking these past few months—if the president refuses to pay his lawful taxes, can we be morally compelled to pay ours? 

Vox populi, vox Dei—if this was God speaking, what was he saying? This is what I’m hearing: “By your own choice, I am giving you this man to be your president—so you will learn.”

I wonder how much more suffering we shall have to endure for our people—especially the generations post-martial law—to learn that voting has personal consequences, that the Marcoses do not represent “moving on” but sliding back into the dismal past, and that this election was their best chance in ages of creating a true “golden era” of humane, honest, and progressive governance, instead of the tinsel fantasy they’d been sold. How and when can we value the truth once more?

Again, Aeschylus—writing half a millennium before Christ—throws us a line from Prometheus Bound, spoken by the hapless girl-turned-cow Io. Hounded by a gadfly, Io is in constant pain, and tells Prometheus her tale of woe; but she insists, at the end of her story, that she wants to know her future, however difficult it might be: “If you can say what still remains to be endured, tell me; and do not out of pity comfort me with lies. I count false words the foulest plague of all.” This campaign saw innumerable “false words” rain down on our electorate, not just words of spite but also of artificial sweetness. 

I am angry and dismayed, but not without hope. In Io’s case, despite her terrible travails, she learns that her future is much brighter than she would have expected—she will be restored to human form, and would count among her descendants the great hero Hercules. 

We can yet be the progenitors of our best selves as Filipinos. We just need to endure, to learn, and to endure some more.

Hindsight No. 12: The Color of Danger

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Hindsight for Monday, April 4, 2022

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS ago, I took on the first of what would become many biographical assignments: the life story of the Lava brothers. In many ways, they remain the most fascinating of my subjects, brilliant men with PhDs and other advanced degrees from such schools as Columbia, Berkeley, and Stanford who, despite their upper-middle-class origins, were counted among the most dangerous subversives in the 1950s and 1960s. 

Three of them—Vicente, Jose (Peping), and Jesus—became general-secretaries of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas. Never Party members, Horacio and Francisco (Paquito) were nationalists and civil libertarians who served in high government positions—Horacio as one of the new Central Bank’s top economists and Paquito as chief legal counsel of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which he helped organize. (A sixth brother, Pedro, also became a Party member in the US but died before the war.) 

I remembered them last week when I read the reports of bookstores being splashed with red paint and of a certain government official spewing the same substance out of her mouth. No, I’m not going to defend Vicente, Peping, and Jesus Lava against Red-tagging; they were proud communists to the end. 

What has stuck in my mind from the many interviews I held with Peping and Jesus in their home in Mandaluyong was a moment with Peping—who, when I met him in the mid-1990s, was a frail and white-haired old man. Peping had graduated salutatorian from the UP College of Law in 1937 and his thesis, hailed by Dean Vicente Sinco as the best they had ever received, was published by the Harvard Law Journal. In his dotage, Peping seemed stiff, dour, and humorless, but as a young man he had played the banjo, with “Always” and “Five-Foot-Two” among his favorites.

At some point, I asked Peping: “Among all the figures in history, whom do you admire the most?” Without batting an eyelash, sitting ramrod-straight in his wooden chair, he answered: “Stalin and Marcos.” 

The mention of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union’s brutal dictator for over 30 years until his death in 1953, was disturbing but not surprising. The PKP looked up to the Soviet Union as a model, and some of its members had been trained there, although the Lavas themselves downplayed the connection, citing the Philippines’ greater affinity with the Chinese experience. Upon his release from prison in 1970, Peping had gone to Moscow, and then to Prague, where he and his wife lived for the next 20 years. Clearly, even if Stalin had long been officially repudiated in Russia, he left a deep and positive impression on Peping. 

What I didn’t expect—although it would make sense in retrospect—was his admiration for Ferdinand Marcos, whom he had never personally met. Why would Peping Lava, a hardcore Communist, admit to being a fan of yet another dictator, whose martial-law regime was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of so-called “enemies of the State,” many young and idealistic revolutionaries among them?

The answer might be found in the relationship that Marcos cultivated with the old Left, including a meeting between Marcos and representatives of the Movement for the Advancement of Nationalism (MAN) in 1968. Negotiations between Marcos and the PKP leadership reportedly followed, resulting in the release of Peping in 1970, and of Jesus Lava and Casto Alejandrino in 1974; Luis Taruc had been released even earlier in 1968. (The PKP had been decapitated by the arrest of Peping and many leading members in 1950, followed by the arrest of Jesus in 1964.) 

The Lavas were convinced that, despite all his liabilities and abuses, Marcos was a nationalist at heart who was aware of, and opposed to, American imperialist control over the country’s economy and politics. The Americans, not Marcos, were the main enemy. (Peping believed that the Americans were responsible for the deaths of Ramon Magsaysay, Claro M. Recto, and Ninoy Aquino.)

They were attracted by his “independent” foreign policy, especially his diplomatic overtures to China and the Soviet Union. Citing international sources, they even surmised that their release had been a precondition attached by the Soviets to rapprochement with the Philippines. Jesus Lava would contend that as of 1974, the PKP had entered a “negotiated political settlement” with the Marcos administration and had therefore been legalized. (Meanwhile, breaking away from the old PKP, Jose Ma. Sison had “re-established” the CPP in 1968, and it would be his CPP-NPA-NDF combine that Marcos would go after under martial law, as would Marcos’ successors.)

If any of this sounds familiar in light of our recent history, you win no prizes. When Rodrigo Duterte came to power in 2016, my old friends on the Left bubbled over with excitement, believing they had found a trustworthy ally who was prepared to unfriend America in favor of rosier relations with China and Russia. I was dismayed then by what I thought was fatal naivete, or miscalculated opportunism; he played them, not the other way around. 

Today, with such instrumentalities as the NTF-ELCAC and even education officials at the vanguard, going against the Reds is back in fashion. The “threat” they pose is allegedly serious enough to warrant billions in the budget for anti-subversion programs, never mind that the CPP-NPA’s military significance has been severely diminished over the past 40 years, and that we need that money for more pressing concerns. 

Never mind, too, that Russia and China—the erstwhile centers of the global Red revolution—are now universally condemned as oppressors of their own people and aggressors beyond their borders. Stalinism is back with Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping is trying to out-Mao Mao. (And another Marcos threatens to return to Malacañang. Peping Lava could feel right at home today.) Our government says it hates communists with a passion, and yet the best it can do is remain “neutral” in Putin’s war on Ukraine, and “realistic” in dealing with China’s encroachments on Philippine territory. 

All this leads me to conclude that the old Marxism-Leninism—which is barely recognizable in today’s Russia and China—is no more than a bogeyman, and even the government knows that. Red-tagging just happens to be a convenient cover to attack the real enemy: the liberal middle forces now at the forefront of reform and of democratic regime change. The color of danger is pink, not red. 

Penman No. 436: A New Blooming at Milflores

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Penman for Sunday, March 6, 2022

CHAIRMAN MAO’S dictum about letting “a hundred flowers bloom, a thousand schools of thought contend” must have been on the mind of former activist, writer, retired UN official, and later gentleman-farmer and entrepreneur Antonio “Tony” Hidalgo when he founded Milflores Publishing in 1999 to publish books that would “meet the needs and wants of the Filipino masses.” His wife, the celebrated author Cristina Pantoja “Jing” Hidalgo, could not have been more pleased. Aside from building a lovely heritage home in San Miguel, Bulacan with a cock farm for Tony behind it, the Hidalgos were eager to do their part for Philippine literature beyond teaching and writing. 

Milflores would go on to publish 80 titles on such varied subjects as suburban living, cockfighting, and 20th-century masculinity, on top of the usual fiction. It was beginning to make a mark as a small but quality press—and then Tony sadly and suddenly died in 2011, leaving a devastated Jing to carry on with distributing their titles. Busy with her own professional life, Jing soldiered on as far as she could, until 2020 when a white knight entered the picture in the form of Andrea Pasion-Flores, who had been her student (and mine) at UP many years earlier. 

Since graduation, Drea—a fine fictionist in her own right—moved on to become a lawyer, then executive director of the National Book Development Board, then our first international literary agent, and until 2020 general manager of Anvil Publishing. Post-Amvil, Drea was looking for fresh challenges and opportunities, and she found it in Milflores. Her husband Javi, also a lawyer, put her up to it: “Javi and I thought about starting a new publishing company, which might’ve been cheaper. But Javi gave me the idea of buying Milflores. First, because of the name—it fits with ours. Second, it already had some goodwill that would be a shame if it were forgotten. Third, it wouldn’t hurt to ask Jing if she had any plans for it. In a heartbeat, she said yes.”

Since that takeover, Milflores has already come out with an impressive list of titles that herald a new blooming for both the company and Philippine literary publishing as a whole. Against all the odds thrown her way by the pandemic, the tenacious Drea managed to secure publishing rights from top-drawer Filipino authors such as Charlson Ong, whose wild and wacky novel White Lady, Black Christ became Milflores’ flagship offering in May 2021. As Charlson’s agent, Drea had already sold an earlier novel of his to a Malaysian publisher, so this was a natural follow-through.

This was followed by a new edition of Nick Joaquin’s Rizal in Saga. Drea had also sold NJ to Penguin Classics. “I wanted this book more than anything because, as Ambeth Ocampo said, the book went out of print the moment it was published because the government gave it out as a souvenir during the centennial of Rizal’s death in 1996, and was never reprinted.” Drea pulled out all the stops, and went for a hardcover edition. “If I was to deserve this book, there would be no cutting corners. I had to make people realize the value of this book. It had to be an object to be desired. And, as Ambeth told me, we both made sure it came out well because we both felt NJ deserved no less. When I die and go to book heaven, I want to hear Nick and Rizal tell me, I did well by them, haha!”

Simeon “Jun” Dumdum’s Why Keanu Reeves Is Lonely and Why the World Goes on as It Does, a small collection of poetry, was another risk worth taking. “Knowing I wouldn’t be raking in millions with this book, why did I want it? Because anyone who reads his poetry will be uplifted. It’s a book to treasure, really. Jun Dumdum was so game with whatever we did with it, even if we said we’d like the book to be neon pink and green. He was onboard! I like those kind of writers.”

Writer and noted bookseller Padma Perez brought Milflores its biggest book yet, Harvest Moon: Poems and Stories from the Edge of the Climate Crisis, co-published with the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities (ICSC). Most books with a political agenda tend to be preachy and off-putting, but Harvest Moon is unique in its concept and execution. Twenty-four writers from around the world were given evocative photographs as prompts, with the further stipulation that they were to avoid buzz words and phrases such as “sustainability” and “climate change.” The result is visually and textually moving, investing the project with deep personal insight. This book is being sold at a deep discount, thanks to a subsidy from ICSC.

Drea Pasion-Flores has followed these up with other provocative projects, including many more in the pipeline. Robby Kwan Laurel’s Ongpin Stories is a timely reprint; former Sen. Rodolfo Biazon’s biography by Eric Ramos is a gripping narrative of a man who rose from doing other people’s laundry and selling in the market to become a general and senator, and one of the heroes of EDSA 1; David Guerrero’s The Crap Ideas Book is an inspirational book on creativity; the bedridden Nick Carbo’s new book of poems, Epithalamion, is, says Drea, his “shot at immortality.”

Milflores also has something lined up for younger readers: Kat Martin’s debut novel At Home with Crazy is the story of a 14-year-old girl dealing with the stress of living with a mother with a mental illness. Internist-oncologist William Liangco’s Even Ducks Get Liver Cancer and Other Essays is a hilarious romp through the travails of med school in a charity hospital. Drea will also publish two graphic nonfiction books by the feminist Swedish graphic illustrator Liv Stromquist and a cookbook by artist and cancer-fighter Robert Alejandro.

“I have big dreams for Milflores,” says Drea. “I want to try to bring a Philippine company out there, not just here. I’m guessing it’s not going to be the next Coca-Cola Company. It’s going to take time and lots of good books, but I have no doubt I can get there—or somewhere close to it.” (More information at milflorespublishing.com)