By Yong Shu Hoong

Filipino poet Marjorie Evasco has had many connections to Singapore. Not only does she have many writer-friends in Singapore, one of her poems was published in QLRS in 2011 and, many moons ago, she was a featured poet at Wordfeast 2004, billed as Singapore's first international poetry festival.

Born in 1953 in Maribojoc, Bohol, in the Philippines, she writes in two languages: English and her mother tongue, Cebuano-Visayan (Boholano variant). In 2010 she received the Southeast Asian Writers Award (S.E.A. Write Award) for poetry. She had also been honoured with the Ani ng Dangal award by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, as well as the Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas, a lifetime achievement award given out by the Writers' Union of the Philippines.

She represented her country in the Poetry Parnassus festival in Southbank Centre in London during the 2012 London Olympics. She has also participated in international poetry festivals in Medellín, Columbia, in 2008, and in Granada, Nicaragua, in 2011. Among her writing residency grants were those awarded by the Rockefeller Center for Studies in Bellagio, Italy; the Hawthornden Literary Retreat at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland; and the International Writing Program in the University of Iowa.

Her poems have been translated into many languages and can be found in anthologies like Norton's Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond, Sustaining the Archipelago: An Anthology of Philippine Ecopoetry and The First Five: A New Collection of Southeast Asian Writing.

She is a University Fellow and Professor Emeritus in Literature of De La Salle University, Manila, where she serves as writer-in-residence and continues to teach in the graduate literature programme.

  1. What are you reading right now?
For poetry, I'm reading In Many Ways: Poems 2012–2016, the last collection of National Artist of the Philippines, Cirilo F. Bautista; for sociology I'm halfway through Making Sense of the City: Public Spaces in the Philippines, edited by Remmon E. Barbaza; and for biography/philosophy I'm relishing Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails.

2. If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play, or poem, who would you be, and why?
In the biography of Siddhartha, I'd love to be Mañjúsrī, the bodhisattva of wisdom, so I can put daily struggles – often terrifying – in my sad republic in the right perspective, so as to see through the reality of human ignorance which is always in pursuit of the illusions of more power and more wealth. I'd like to find ways of remaining engaged in compassionate and meaningful action in my daily life's contexts.

3. What is the greatest misconception about you?
That I'm writing only in English and that I'm not a writer from the Visayas.

4. Name one living author and one dead author you identify with most, and tell us why.
I love Jane Hirshfield's poetry and Terry Tempest Williams' prose. Both see with unblinking compassionate eyes. And I always have William Blake's poetry and visual art with me because his vision reaches far into the living dark.

5. Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
I used to believe in it when I was younger and was harried about not writing something every day. But in more than four decades of a writing life, I've learned to appreciate embodied writing that takes its place in the sphere of one's life and one's attentions. It can be triggered by moments of heightened awareness in the everyday in whatever one is doing, whether one is sitting in meditation, reading a good book of poems or re-reading Bachelard's lyrical reverie on water, watching the sunset or watering the plants in the garden. I've also come to terms with my own pace of writing and I rather like the image of the turtle-poet that I've chosen for myself.

6. What qualities do you admire most in a writer?
A great sense of humour and the capacity for self-discipline in the writing life, which includes 'horizontal reading' across various fields of human knowledge; a sharp sense of the musicality of language, one with its meaningfulness; the bravery to say truth to power for its transgressions; the attentiveness that "suffers with" others in a nation and a world rife with suffering; the patience to listen to the inner self and to life-forms that cohabit in this planet; an inquiring sentient mind that moves deeper into insightful understanding of the stories that more-than-humans tell of the world we live in.

7. What is one trait you deplore most in writing or writers?
I find boring any writer's egoistic competitiveness and attitudinal tendency to make odious comparisons between one's work (as better) and those of others (as lesser). The world is huge enough for all kinds of writers.

8. Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
I've learnt by heart the poem 'Bonsai' by my poetry teacher, National Artist of the Philippines (Literature), Edith L. Tiempo. And I love the images, especially the kinaesthetic images in its closure: Till seashells are broken pieces / From God's own bright teeth, / All life and love are real / Things you can run and / Breathless hand over / To the merest chid.

9. Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I…
am a happy failure of the orderly Virgoan pack-rat.

10. At the movies, if you have to pick a comedy, a tragedy, or an action thriller to watch, which will you go for, and why?
I would watch a Shakespearean comedy semiotically translated into a movie because of the way characters are shown up to be a lot like us when we behave a little less than we are, or less than we could be.

11. What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
I dislike the word "nice" because it is so flippant. My favourite is a word in my mother tongue, Cebuano-Visayan: "pamalandong", which evokes the act of reverie or contemplation under the sheltering shade of a big old tree. Whenever I hear it or use it, I'm always transported to a hot tropical afternoon under the shade of an old mango tree in bloom, where a rattan hammock is swaying gently to the breeze and there is time to dream.

12. Write a rhyming couplet that includes the following three words: front, origin, hyphen.

What use is that hyphen in your family name,
When front and centre your origin is the flame?

13. What object is indispensable to you when you write?
A blank notebook.

14. What is the best time of the day for writing?
I'm a morning person and I write best after a bath and a brisk half-hour's early morning walk, or an hour's yoga practice and meditation.

15. If you had a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree, and why?
I'd be delighted to break bread with Tu Fu, Li Po and Maningning Miclat, the young Filipino poet who grew up in Red China where her parents were Communist exiles during the Marcos regime. We'd all follow the good Chinese practice (I learned this from Beth Yahp's memoir) of eating first and talking later. Then we'd enjoy a postprandial with rice wine on the table in a quiet garden under a towering pine tree. From time to time, I'd listen to the three poets recite their poems in Mandarin, a language I don't know except for the basic conversational phrases. Perhaps Maningning would translate into Filipino or English for me some concepts or names of things. Just to be in their presence would be more than enough!

16. In view of events happening in the Philippines and the rest of the world, how has your writing about women's rights evolved over the years?
My ecofeminist work continues through writing, translating and publishing on one hand, and on the other hand, through research and teaching in the university, in writing workshops and in conferences.

In 2014, the Institute of Climate and Sustainable Cities published a ground-breaking anthology called Agam: Filipino Narratives on Uncertainty and Climate Change, and I contributed a narrative poem in my mother tongue. In 2017, the University of Santo Tomas published Sustaining the Archipelago: Anthology of Philippine Ecopoetry, edited by Rina Garcia Chua, which had three of my poems. And because the terrible 2013 earthquake shook Bohol, my home island, and destroyed our heritage buildings, I worked for four years with Boholano writers in retrieving our fragile memoirs of growing up on the island, and edited a place and memory anthology titled The Bohol We Love, published by Anvil in 2017.

In September 2019, I was asked to come back from retirement to teach again in graduate school, while also serving De La Salle University (DLSU)'s appointment as writer-in-residence. I designed a course on 'Pathography', which enabled students to write narratives on illness, healing and death.

In early 2020, the pandemic was declared by WHO while I was on my second term of teaching. The university shifted to full online teaching while Manila was put under a harsh lockdown. I then broached to the university's Bienvenido N. Santos Creative Writing Center the idea of holding a writing workshop for Filipino doctor-writers, to enable them to write their nonfiction narratives on the pandemic. I designed the prototype workshop and directed it last September 2020 with two doctor-writers as co-panellists. There were only four out of 10 female doctors in the first batch. Among them is gastroenterologist and clinical epidemiologist Dr Elvie Razon-Gonzalez, whose creative nonfiction on the existential challenges of being a frontline female doctor-poet who is also a mother of four, a wife of a surgeon, and a dutiful daughter to elderly parents was presented in the fifth plenary session of the March 2021 DLSU Arts Congress on the theme 'Pandemic, Resilience, and the Arts'.

In March and April 2021, I'm directing the second of the series of Creative Nonfiction Writing Workshops for Doctors, which now has seven female doctors out of 10 workshop fellows.

From time to time, I also write journalistic articles for the Women Writing Women blog managed by former members of the Women's Feature Service collective. And I'm in constant touch with my wish-sisters in writing, namely Susan Lara, Grace Monte de Ramos and Nadine Sarreal, sharing our critique of current events in our society's toxic masculinity in politics, and inspiring each other to resist and endure the general ineptitude of the present administration in handling the pandemic in favour of its preparations for the forthcoming presidential elections in 2022.

17. What would you write on your own tombstone? I'd like the last four lines of my poem 'Is it the Kingfisher' to be engraved on my tombstone: Seawaves sing it, the kingfisher flies in it, this island is rooted in it. Desiring God is transparent blue – the colour which makes our souls visible.

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