BEFORE all the fancy and numerous book deals, before all the literary accolades (19 Palancas as of 2020!), before I became the self-indulgent Peter Solis Nery of the Ilonggo newspapers at the dawn of the new millennium, before I was even dubbed “the PSN” (around 2017) by my growing number of literary progenies (mostly online), I was this young, self-indulgent dreamer who didn’t care much about what critics have to say about my books.
At that time of my sweet and also anguished youth, I just wanted to write my love letters to the world—my books, these memoirs, that would speak, and speak gently and lovingly, only to those who needed my words of love, comfort, sympathy, reassurance, and beauty of expression.
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Perhaps, subconsciously, I also wanted some critical success.
That would greatly explain my commitment and dedication to Philippine literary contests until I was finally elevated to the Palanca Awards Hall of Fame in 2012.
But during those early years of my writing life and writerly pursuits, I only wanted to record for my friends and kindred readers, and to document for future generations, what for me were beautiful expressions of my humble human existence.
I felt that my experiences were beautiful (because they were heartfelt and sincere), and I eagerly wanted to share them all to the world.
Surely, there was a certain degree of artifice in my writing.
(Isn’t all beautiful writing some kind of art?)
I vividly remember my publishers repeatedly saying (like a broken record, if you are familiar with phonographs, turntables, and vinyls) that I have a beautiful, if strange, phraseology in English (which, of course, I simply attributed to the awkward auto-translation of my Ilonggo thoughts into the foreign language of national publication back in the past century).
In addition, although I tried to be emotionally truthful and spiritually faithful, I actually had to composite certain events, conversations, and people in the interest of diplomacy and discretion.
I also changed some names to protect people’s privacy.
(Once again, I declare: This is my juvenilia!)
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Oh, but I have loved!
And how grandly I loved them all — events, conversations, people, memories, words and phrases, attempts at poetry, dreams and visions, art, passionate midnight writing, and God — a dancing god who loves, and covets, me!
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I have always been spiritual even as a child.
And at my age now, I continue to believe in God, and in my personal mission to rise above the human condition.
To be alter Christus — another Christ.
To suffer humanity and wretchedness in order to understand it, and to rise bigger, brighter, more extraordinary, more beautiful.
To show others the way of beauty, of salvation and redemption through beautiful words and purposeful phrases, through rhyme and reason — the order and harmony, of things.
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I still identify myself as a Roman Catholic — non-practicing or convenient Catholic maybe, but Catholic just the same.
I am pointing this out now because how very far I have gone from the virtue of Chastity, and the practice of celibacy, that I have devoutly espoused until I was 30 years old (and that’s just a year after the publication of My Life as a Hermit).
As a gay man, I came out of the closet in 2008, almost a decade after Hermit, when I finally agreed to marry another gay man in California.
Sadly, I was widowed in 2014.
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Through the years — married, and unmarried; celibate, or sexually active — writing became an important part of me because of the people who loved and appreciated my early works: my risk-taking first publishers in the early 1990s, the people who bought my first books and have continued to support me in every new title, and the readers who were kind and thoughtful enough to let me know how my books have changed their lives.
In some perverted way, I persevered in writing because I wanted to honor them, to make them proud, and to make them see that their faith in me was not in vain. (To be continued as “Heart of my youth”)/PN
