From the author of
The Umbrella Country and
The Gods We Worship Live Next Door
and soon . . .
What Tied is Tied, a historical novel
#Rebel | Sonnets |, a poetry collection, and
Funny Little Island People, fiction-in-episodes
Soon, 2027. World History will continue to spin in the most frightening ways. And in a cyber-connected world, we are all a witness to it. Is America being re-defined? Is democracy on a balance? Artificial Intelligence has invaded our existence, shaping everything humans do. Resistance has only begun, but it's not quite there. Have we created an e-Frankenstein? Climate change is also battering our planet.
Books -- I write books. I have three new manuscripts to publish, all of them dealing with the issues of our times. I have walked this Earth for more than five decades, and have seen it all.
One book, What Tied is Tied (formerly titled BATAAN NEW JERSEY), puts me in a direct confrontation with my family’s legacy of war and survival, a reminder that half a century later since WW2, I still carry the legacy. I knew that time would come when I would have to take on BATAAN. I am a son of a Death March survivor, and our Filipino voice in the published stories of war is rare. As I search for publishers for my manuscripts, I will explore what new meanings War and History have for me. War, because it's my family's dark shadow. History, because it's my light, my obsession since I was a child in Manila. Both so relevant in the Present. Both a bloodline and a purpose.
I was never told that blood warms at the emergence of new tellings.
- The Warming, #Rebel | Sonnets |
"What Tied is Tied."
My first novel came out in 1999. My first poetry collection in 2006. While keeping a scheduled life that has kept me in line with the universe -- a FT management job in the field of education. With no pressure to publish, I have focused mostly on the Art of writing in the past 15 years. My sacred space. What brought me joy gave me three completed manuscripts. I worked, traveled the world with my husband, and published in literary journals such as The Georgia Review, The Harvard Review, North American Review, Missouri Review, etc. My curated google search will direct you to new works -- the only way you know I haven't not disappeared just yet. Now in my pushing 50s, I have lived, traveled, and lived since the publication of my books. I certainly have gained enough wisdom and world view to call myself -- a writer.
Now literary tasks have shifted. I need to go out there again. The winds of publishing are calling. What I disliked most, I have to face. But this time, I'm wiser, more mature, more experienced in the reality of management, and not as self-absorbed. I document my journey on social media and in my blog. There are no easy paths for those who choose the purity of Art. I have stayed away from academia, and MFA programs, so I know I am on my own. But that doesn't mean a disadvantage, as the art industry, whether literary or visual, will always be kicked on the side by those of us who still believe in literature produced with the very people whose stories need to be heard. I will always be cooking them in my own idea of community.
Old Works
On this website, I am dividing my works into two parts: "old" and "new," between published books and manuscripts, between the past and the future. When I published my first novel in NYC, I was very naive. Naive, even for the co-founder of the seminal organization, The Asian American Writers Workshop. I sold my first novel before I turned 30. Hanya Y. apparently talked me up at Random House that a senior editor started looking for me. It was 1997. Marie L. would refer me to an agent at Harold Ober so I could start the publishing conversation. I finally met the Random House editor who acquired my book as part of a new imprint at Random House. Then, Bertelsmann took over the press. A whirlwind. The Umbrella Country did eventually come out in 1999, a different press at RH, a different plan. One goal: plant the roots so deep the novel would survive for the next twenty or so years.
& New Works
As soon as I finished #Rebel | Sonnets |, I went back to reading and writing fiction. Pandemic era. Binging historical Korean-dramas. After I read Min Jin Lee's Pachinko, I began to see similarities between Japan's violent relationship with Korea and what Japan did to the Philippines during the war. Obsessed with K-drama narrative structures and fresh out of Pachinko's 600 pages, and a Presidential elections in the Philippines predicting the return of the Marcos family, I set out to write a historical novel about the Philippines, with its heart in Bataan. The Past was coming back to shape the Present. What I had avoided for so long became a commitment to surface my father's Bataan legacy.
All works of nature evolve
from one moment of coincidence. An absence,
a rebellion, the fifteenth line of a sonnet.
- Euler's Equation, #Rebel | Sonnets |
CONTACT: Email Binoliterary@gmail.com
About What Tied is Tied
What Tied Is Tied, a literary historical novel spanning a century (1921–2021), four generations, and four countries. The novel will appeal to readers of Pachinko, The Storm We Made, and The Mountains Sing.
Bataan Death March survivor Efren’s son Ben cuts Efren’s hair at his father’s deathbed, keeps it in a Ziploc, and asks his father, who are you? Efren had referred to Bataan Day as the Day of Silence, but he died saying, Gus, the name of a fellow soldier, and not his wife Lourdes’ name. After he dies in Jersey City in 2009, Lourdes confronts a secret she has kept for decades, the identity of a man, a political poet known as Anak Laya, who was disappeared during the Martial Law era.
Excerpt from the first chapter:
Efren was back on his bed, and he heard them all.
He knew he didn’t say much in this household. When he did, he was also aware nobody really listened. Now too old now for Filipino proverbs. He wasn’t around during their formative years, a country away, until he could change his papers to bring them to Jersey City. They had kept him out of major decisions in life, his daughter’s moving to L.A. and raising a family there, and Ben going away to graduate school upstate, and never coming back. He only watched the milestones, a spectator to an unfolding, like the Filipino soldiers trapped in Bataan, a leaf in bands of gun smoke not knowing where to land.
- What Tied is Tied (formerly titled Bataan New Jersey)
Who will recall this night when I cross the
barracks, where stands a Rebel on the other
side and on whose hands rest a red, red rose?
- Dear Blood, #Rebel | Sonnets |
Watch and hear Broadway actor Marc de la Cruz read Bino A. Realuyo's Rebel Sonnet, DEAR BLOOD.