On Writing

In writing, everything resonates. This is one of things I have learned in my four years as a Creative Writing student. A part of me knew that intense emotions fuels the fire of literary passion, that the excess of love, hope, pain, fear finds its way into the words that seemingly bleed from a metaphorical wound slashed across the writer's wrist. I was young then. That is how I wrote before.

Now, I am slowly re-learning how to write again: more care, more distance, more craft. What seemed to flow so naturally before is now a painful process of writing and re-writing. We are never truly satisfied with our art, I've learned, and so now I must be wary of being complacent in what I say, always examining the minutest of details in an effort to fit within the grand scheme of things. This is one of the things I am now struggling with - writing outside the academe, finding a place for an art amidst the chaos of building a career, a life within and yet outside writing. What a paradox, if you think about it.

Another struggle for me is a deviation from genre. I began writing poetry, and ultimately achieved a goal of sorts - publishing a collection of poems, with thanks from a grant from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts. Poetry has always been my comfort zone, my playground, my four-cornered nook. Everything was familiar then - the air, the metaphors, the language of the unsaid.

But now, I find myself deviating from the path of least resistance, focusing instead on the prose, the fiction of a life, creating worlds out of nothing and pretending that it is something. The difficulty here is wondering where to place myself. Who am I and what do I write. The constant pursuit of identity, of naming something, of defining the unknown, is always a struggle for me. Once I am comfortable within a structure, I find myself wanting to escape the walls of my own making.

Excerpt: Capture

Epilogue

The three prints that Same took of Lydia that were part of the final exhibit of Sam’s photography class were the ones that received the highest mark for that summer semester. The serpentine shadows that Sam skillfully played with as they slithered across the bare skin of his model was lauded by Professor Alcantara, before shaking his head in regret at the disappearance of Sam’s partner.

In the first photograph, Lydia was seated at an angle on a flat rock inside a cave, her head draped with a sheet of white lace. Sunlight pierced through the gloom of the interior, the shadows of rocks. Her eyes were closed, lashes curling demurely on her cheeks. A hint of a smile danced on her lips. Her tattoo danced across her belly, the head of the dragon just above her pubic mound, the flickering tongue pointing downward.

In the second photograph, Lydia was still inside the cave, standing on the flat rock. Her lace headdress trailed at her feet, an abandoned heirloom. She was facing the camera, her tattooed dragon visibly encircling her torso. In her cupped hands, an offering, she held an apple.

In the third photograph, Lydia was curled up on the flat rock, her back turned towards the camera. Her arms were wrapped around herself, her fingers peeking from where she was gripping her shoulders. A knife seemed to be embedded on her side, and a dark liquid trickled from her prone form onto the sand. The tail of the dragon curled around her lower back, the top half disappearing as it seemingly climbed over the curve of her waist. Her hair was spread over the dark surface of the rock, melding perfectly with the shadows.

Excerpt: The Snow Queen

In all the stories, she is beautiful.

They say that she lives in a castle of ice, the walls glass-like, minarets and turrets dancing in endless spirals. The walls are like the purest glass, a reflection without ripples, the a mirroring of the true self. She is served by silent bears dressed in white fur, their dark eyes the color of stone.

It is endless winter in her domain. Here, the sun refuses to shine, and so it is the moon that casts its white face across an ocean of dead water. The shadows are long in this land, thin and stretched, mere distortions of a changing land. No mountain here is the same, no hill or mound of snow remains constant. No snowflake ever has the same pattern. The snow here burns, the cold creeping inside the skin, between bone and blood, a deadly sleeping stillness.

Here, she sleeps, her pale curls rippling down goosefeather cushions, her slender body frozen out of time and space.

They say she cannot be awakened until he walks the land again.