1974, Chicago, IL

Guadalupe Tolentino, my grandmother holding a very pouty RM Alcasid.

“Life is very hard. The only people who really live are those who are harder than life itself.” Egyptian novelist and essayist, Nawal El Saadawi

I am a Filipinx-American woman living in the Bronx. I write about working class life, Asian American experiences in the south and New York City, domesticity, GenX pop culture, racism, mental illness. I realize this is a daring notion for a high school drop out peddling a personal story of Asian Girl, Interrupted (except with guns, queer kids and immigrant Filipinx families set in late 80's Texas). I told myself for years no one was going to care about that time told by people like me. The bookshelves I stocked as a bookseller for years confirmed that assumption. The nearly all white writing workshops I attended in NYC in the late 90’s and early 2000’s helped cement that belief for a time.

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” Muriel Rukeyser, Poet, 1968

Then, I snapped out of it. Fuck that, I thought in 2016, I’m going to have the book I want, even if I have to write the thing myself. Since then, I’ve found solid, nourishing writing community and friends in the N. Bronx Writing Group, at Catapult workshops, as a reader at Craft Literary Magazine, the Resort Writing Community in Queens and upcoming in summer 2021, Lidia Yuknavitch’s book incubator, The Body of the Book.

The current draft is a blend of memoir in objects/ short essays detailing a psychiatric hospital stay in the late 1980's, family gun violence, racism, generational traumas and silence. Point of view is a mother, looking back at her suicidal teen self, through the few items that remain from her fractured childhood and estranged family.

Thematically, there is a faint thread of Tim O'Brien's Things They Carried and Susana Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted and Doug Wright’s play, I Am My Own Wife, in the current draft.

Replies to the irritating “Where are you from, really?”and ”What do you do?”I’ve been uncomfortable All my life answering

Short Version: Born in Chicago, raised in Houston, ran away to Los Angeles and landed in New York City in 1996. I am a writer. I write essays and Memoir.

Long Version: After meandering in Los Angeles and San Francisco in my early twenties, I made it to my dream city, NYC. I graduated Hunter College as a non-traditional undergraduate in 2006 then abruptly traveled to the Planet of Motherhood for a decade, a fallow time for the intellect, but rich in family belonging. I have worked as a personal organizer, bookseller, marketing manager (NYU), project coordinator (B&N), content writer and taken fiction writing classes at NYU and independent writing partnerships. I hosted the North Bronx Writer's Group in my home and workshopped short fiction and essays online and in person for the past 5 years.