What a Childhood Game Taught Me About Identity, Literature, and the Limits of Categories When I was a child, we used to play a game called Thinking of Categories. The game moved to a rhythmic pattern of clapping. One of…
Writing Begins with Naming Writing does not begin with ideas, as I once thought, but with something more grounded, almost physical, a name. A place arrives first as a label before it becomes a landscape on the page. A character…
This is a true story of a relative OFW homecoming in the Philippines, drawn from my own experience and memory. I write it here as creative nonfiction flash memoir, using the devices of writing short fiction. I changed all the…
You know how memory starts—not as a neat story, but as something someone says over dinner. An aunt brings it up, a grandfather repeats it the same way he always does, someone mentions a name and then suddenly goes quiet.…
Memoir Writing About Friends: How Relationships Shape Personal Narrative Across Life Stages My life was never truly solitary. Living my seasons, I knew how consistently someone appeared and stayed beside me as my companion, even if only for a while.…