Filipino Fridays #2 Favorite Books as a Kid: Wizards, Dragons, Legends, Groovy Pop

Q: What were your favorite books as a kid or while you were growing up? Do you still read children’s books? If you could give your younger self a book to read, what would it be?

Image from www.ladybirdflyawayhome.com.

A: My very first memories involved reading. I remember trying to read Cinderella. I remember that magic moment when "the" became not just a mix of letters but an actual word. I can't find the book cover anymore but I went on to other fairy tales like Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and The Beast. These were not the Disney variety but rather large hardbound books that I happened to receive on birthdays. When I was in Grade 1, I remember reading The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde and I remember crying my eyes out.  I have since been fascinated by fairy tales. I bought a large Hans Christian Andersen collection of stories when I was much older...just because it reminded me of the stories I used to read, growing up. I also very much enjoyed Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, a retelling of traditional fairy tales.

When I was in grade school, I got a book from my stepmom called Stories and Legends from Filipino Folklore by Maria Delia Coronel. Below is the exact book that I used to have.

Image of book cover from www.nancycudis.com.

I remember reading this book until it got dogeared. I was fascinated by it. It was another version of fairy tale, this time from all around the Philippines. I really liked this story about an engkanto or tree spirit who fell in love with a maiden and turned into a human for her. But because she insisted on meeting his family, he ended up slowly becoming a tree during their journey, leaving his human form and leaving their child fatherless. There were lots of Mariang Makiling stories there too.

Image from www.series-books.com.

I also remember having library card contests with my classmates about who could read the most books from the library. At that time, I borrowed almost all the Nancy Drew books in the library!

Image from Rappler.com.

I also really loved the series of children's books by Nick Joaquin: Pop Stories for Groovy Kids. I read all of them. My favorites were about the manananggal (Lilit Bulilit and the Babe-in-the-Womb) and his version of the Beauty and the Beast called Johnny Tinoso and the Proud Beauty. I wish my kids could read them too. Sadly, they're no longer available. I even signed a petition to have these books printed again but I don't know what became of that. 

Image from Goodreads.com. 

I also read Jane Yolen's Pit Dragons series: Dragon's Blood and Heart's Blood. But I was bitin! My grade school library didn't have the other books. It was only later as an adult that I found A Sending of Dragons and Dragon's Heart. I loved the idea of how the dragons communicated very differently from humans and it opened up my imagination. 

Image from seantcollins.com.

Lastly, I reserve a special place in my heart for Ursula Le Guin. I read her A Wizard of Earthsea series (A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore...and later on Tehanu and The Other Wind, the latter two I bought as an adult) and I was forever in love with fantasy. They were in my grade school library and I love the librarian who put these books there. I even attempted to write my own fantasy story inspired by The War of the Roses, complete with maps and background stories about the warring factions from Aetamar and Gitel (my fictional medieval cities). Sadly, I've lost the manuscript...one of my greatest regrets. I continued to read Ursula Le Guin later on, as an adult, and she remains one of my favorite writers of all time. 

I still read children's books up to today because I have two young children. One of my favorite activities in the world is reading stories with them! I encourage them to read by taking them to secondhand bookstores and giving them the run of all the books they could possibly choose from. 

Image from Wikipedia.com. 

Hmmmm. If I could give my younger self a book...what would it be? I guess it would be Neil Gaiman's children's books...only because I'm sure I would have loved them even as a kid! Also, I would have appreciated a book about anger, death or loss because I lost my mom so early. I didn't really know about it (death) and the grieving process was a very long one for me. If I could go back in time and give myself a book, it would probably be a book about anger and loss like Where The Wild Things Are or about death like Gentle Willow or The Brightest Star. 

The Earliest Poems I Can Remember

by Justine C. Tajonera

I'm glad I get email prompts from Poetry.About.Com. Their latest email asks me what was my earliest remembered poem. Sadly, I can't say that they were the classics like The Tyger by William Blake. I would have loved this poem from the start. I only really appreciated children's poems later on.

No, I must say that my foray into poetry started in fantasy. The earliest poem I can remember is from The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin which I read when I was in grade school. The poem below was powerful, especially when taken in context of magic as practiced in Earthsea. It taught me that words are worlds. Each word has power and uttering the true name of something was enough to bend it to one's will, wreak havoc, or heal.

You must not change one thing
one pebble, one grain of sand
until you know what good and evil
will follow on that act.
The World is in balance, in equilibrium.
A wizard's power of changing and summoning
can shake the balance of the world.
It is dangerous, that power.
It is most perilous.
It must follow knowledge and serve need.
To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

Ursula K. Leguin - 1975 A Wizard of Earthsea

In the same vein, maybe what I can talk about is the poetry that prompted me to write poems myself. I will have to say that after The Wizard of Earthsea, the poems from Dragonlance really captured my imagination. I must credit my brother, Gus, for being my partner in crime in reading these fantasy books.

Here's an example of one of the poems from this collection of fantasy books:

Crysania's Song

From Dragonlance Legends Volume 3 (page 151)
Novel by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
Poetry by Michael Williams

Water from dust, and dust rising out of the water
Continents forming, abstract as color or light
To the vanished eye, to the touch of Paladine's daughter
Who knows with a touch that the robe is white,
Out of that water a country is rising, impossible
When first imagined in prayer,
And the sun and the seas and the stars invisible
As gods in a code of air.

Dust from the water, and water arising from dust,
And the robe containing all colors assumed in the trust
Of ever returning color and light,
Out of that dust arises a wellspring of tears
To nourish the work of our hands
In forever approaching country of yearning and years,
In due and immanent lands.

I chose this, in particular, because Crysania (she's the one on the cover, above) was one of those characters that I could identify with. She was really uptight! Hahaha! She was also very spiritual, even to a fault. That was why I loved her character. Her very devotion (and its severity)...were both her strength and her weakness.

Some of my earliest attempts at writing was in fantasy (with poems incorporated!). The tentative title of my then-fantasy novel was A Tale of Aetamar and Gitel. My heroine was Aerelle (a princess of Aetemar) whom I took with me to my days of tabletop gaming later on in life. I had maps, character banks, back stories and histories for each city. Sadly, my work on Aetemar and Gitel have been lost. What a big blow. I would have loved to share it with my kids now. Well, I could reconstruct it. But that's another story.

So, thank you, fantasy genre, for being my wellspring of poetry. How funny to recount this and to explore the origins of my writing. Fantasy has had a very powerful impact on me and I didn't even notice until I dug up my memory bank. My poetry started on dragons' wings and uttered chants or spells. And how right that I remember now. May I never let the child in me grow old.

Woman in a Red Dress

Woman in a Red Dress

What is it about the wine-colored,
crushed-velvet red dress?
A bit of the girl in a riding hood,
a hint of the girl with wayward shoes,
a deep cinnamon base note.
The mirror where you catch a glimpse of her
is misted with dew and wet leaves,
has an ornate, gilt frame, with minute
dragons hidden at the edges.
She's there, through a door,
in a tree, in a vast forest.

You never consider
that she is you.

- Justine Camacho-Tajonera

Image from Wikimedia Commons, Daniel Case