Let me tell you about how a chance encounter with Paul Beatty in New Zealand taught me to fight for my work. More here.
book coverage on launch day: Electric Lit, literary hub, incidental noyes, and bmi las vegas launch5/16/2025  Really enjoyed doing this interview for Electric Literature with my good friend and fellow Baguio girl, Cherry Lou Sy!  Then thanks to Lit Hub, I got to write about how my father and I received our literary education in the Philippines from second-hand bookstores!  I'd also like to thank my publisher for featuring my short craft essay about weaving my father's poems into my work in their blog!  Finally tonight, I will be launching my book at the Majestic Repertory Theatre with the inimitable Kim Foster. I am so grateful to the Black Mountain Institute for helping me launch this book into the world in the grandest fashion, in keeping with the spirit of Las Vegas.
 Returning to My Father's Kitchen featured in Lit Hub's The Talk (News, Notes, Talk) in its weekly book roundup, together with new releases from Rebecca Solit and Ocean Vuong.  I also appreciate this short and sweet feature on my book in Las Vegas Weekly's Superguide!  Finally, I got to do a podcast episode with Paul delos Santos of the Delos Diaries.
 I've been sitting on this for a few weeks now, but getting this formal announcement yesterday in my inbox from Nick Norwood, Director of the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, still made me cry. When I read Carson McCullers's The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter as a lonely teenager in the Philippines, I felt that I had met the people McCullers was writing about in my own hometown of Baguio. She was a white woman from the American South, but she made me feel seen. If I could only tell fourteen year old Monica that she'd get to live and write in one of her favorite writer's childhood homes.
As recipient of the Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellowship for Writers, I will live and work in Carson McCullers’s childhood home, the Smith-McCullers House, in Columbus, Georgia, for three months in the fall of 2025. Named in honor of Carson's parents, The Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellowship for Writers was inspired by McCullers's experience at the Breadloaf Writer's Conference in Vermont and, especially, the Yaddo Arts Colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. To honor the contribution of these residency fellowships to McCullers's work, the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians awards fellowships for writers to spend time in McCullers's childhood home in Columbus, Georgia. The fellowships are intended to afford the writers in residence uninterrupted time to dedicate to their work, free from the distractions of daily life and other professional responsibilities.  Proud of this short lyric essay I wrote about my time at the I-Park Foundation in Connecticut (probably one of my favorite artist's residency programs) that has appeared in the latest issue of Poor Yorick, publishing out of Western Connecticut State University. In this essay, I write about arriving at I-Park in the fall of 2021, and letting the colors of a New England fall heal and restore me after more than a year of lockdown in the Philippines. My piece is on page 87--to download the issue, click here.
 Watch me awkwardly talk about my work (and introduce some frozen fish to my newly minted book) while wandering around Seafood City in Las Vegas! Thank you to Joshua Cohen for being down for filming this edition of BMI's Library Sessions at a Filipino grocery store. More here.
I'm starting off the month with finding Returning to My Father's Kitchen on Book Riot's List of ten most exciting nonfiction titles hitting shelves in May!   Then, thanks to Will Woolfitt, I have an interview up about my book on Speaking of Marvels!  Then finally, because I judged this year's Witness nonfiction contest, I got to do a reading with the amazing authors of Witness. We got a good crowd at the Black Mountain Institute Library--I read from my essay, "My Father and W.B. Yeats," which I hope the audience enjoyed.    For details on how to register for these events, click here.
 Grateful to know that people are still reading and talking about my first book! This event is free and open to the public, though they cap registrations after the first 100. Register on Eventbrite.
 I love these two essays so much, and I'm honored to have been given the opportunity to choose them for this year's Witness Literary Awards! They will appear in the Spring 2025 print issue of Witness. This is what I wrote about the winning entry:
“There’s a sense of nostalgia in the essay 'When You Write about Trees' that invites us to look closely at our own lives and the losses that come with the passage of time. With sentences that stretch and expand to accommodate the shifting nature of wonder, affection, and grief, our narrator takes us along with her as she and her two young children form a lifelong bond with two oak trees in their New England town. As a reader, I was taken by the essay’s measured and contemplative voice, which pulls us into the author’s deepening sense of loss as she watches one tree grow, and other tree age. I love how the lives of these trees aren’t made to reflect the author’s personal struggles, and how she instead recognizes the mysteries that these trees hold, allowing their quiet flourishing to run parallel to the everyday dramas of the human world. There’s a lot of wonder that this essay quietly holds, which resounds beyond the page. It’s a beautiful piece.” |
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