From the author of
The Umbrella Country and
The Gods We Worship Live Next Door
and soon . . .
What Tied is Tied, a literary historical novel
#Rebel | Sonnets |, a poetry collection, and
Funny Little Island People, fiction-in-episodes
Soon, 2027. My first novel, The Umbrella Country, will turn 28 years old and still remains in print. How did I do that? Much truth telling on this website.
Meanwhile.
World History continues 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, one with the power to decimate a technology-dependent humanity? Climate change is also battering our planet. El Niño is making it worse. Hope, they can't kill Hope, says one of my characters in What Tied is Tied. Perhaps that's our own consciousness talking. And perhaps, that's why I love books and I love to write them.
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.
What is even rarer is the fact that I am one of the 2% of the Philippine population whose bloodline connects directly to 333 years of Spanish colonial history. My mother is a Chavacano of Zamboanga, whose DNA results (mine as well) have yielded this rare historical connection through our mysterious ancestry.
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 is a dual-timeline literary family saga spanning a century (1921–2021), four countries—the Philippines, Spain, Mexico, and the United States—and four generations of strong-willed Filipino women who choose the fathers of their children, only to keep their choices secret.
In 2009 in Jersey City, New Jersey, a family Thanksgiving leads to a death. Efren, a Bataan Death March survivor, dies saying Gus, the name of a fellow soldier, rather than his wife Lourdes’ name. After Efren’s death, Lourdes, who never knew her own father, confronts a silence she has kept for decades: the identity of a disappeared political poet from the Martial Law era, known as L. Their daughter Irma visits from Mexico with a question that has never been answered, Who are we? Their son Ben cuts Efren’s hair as he lies dying, keeps it in a Ziploc, and asks, Who are you?
Anchored in 2009, the year Obama signed into law compensation for WWII Filipino veterans, Efren’s death opens two intertwined timelines: one moving forward from 2009 to 2021 and another moving backward from 2009 to 1921, threaded by poems written by L, a political poet from the Martial Law era.
Excerpt from the first page:
Lourdes was born to battle, and she knew her three children were the same. Efren would die. How, nobody knew. When, the forever question. He had been dying since Bataan. Lourdes had only seen women die. Her mother, for one. But never a man. When he finally opened his eyes, she already knew he didn’t see her. When he parted his lips to say a name, she knew it wasn’t hers. Why, the question she never ever asked. And Lourdes had surrendered to the creases on his blanket, where, in a bed moved to the dining room weeks earlier, her fingers, knotting, unknotting, trying to untie the Silences between and around them, asking him questions she herself couldn’t hear.
- 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.