Pinoy profile: From the pen of Dean Francis Alfar
Confession: I’ve never read a blog for more than two hours at any one time. Until I found Notes from the Peanut Gallery by Dean Francis Alfar, an award-winning playwright, novelist, comic book creator, and writer of speculative fiction. The blog itself posts excerpts of his manuscripts and short stories which is kinda neat because every post is like a good book – you can’t stop reading until it’s over, and then you can’t wait for the next posting. It was riveting. This guy undoubtedly has the gift to lure readers into the story and capture our emotions so well that you actually want to respond to his blog. At least I do. Here’s a sampling:
i *heart* x-men
Sunday, May 28, 2006
When I visited my father in Tacoma, Washington, I was eleven years old and Mount St. Helens had just erupted. But there were three things I was more excited about: being with the man I knew only through pictures and letters; snow; and finding the missing issues of Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s “Dark Phoenix Saga” in the Uncanny X-Men (culminating with Jean Grey’s tragic felodise in the Blue Area of moon, under the eyes of the Watcher, while the rest of the team battled the Shi’ar Imperial Guard).
Papa looked just like his pictures, only older, and I wrestled with my fear of meeting his American wife and my half-siblings. Back then, I hadn’t fully developed my Dune-like mantra on how to handle fear, so fearful I was to the point where I almost ruined my visit myself. Part of me felt that as my father’s oldest (and original) offspring I deserved his full attention, accumulated through the years of his absence and sweetened by my interpretations of his occasional letters. But though I know he tried to be the missing father of many years compressed in the span of a few weeks, the realities of our own lives’ trajectories could never be in accord with my magnificent fantasy of how our reunion would be. I had imagined that, upon seeing me, he’d experience an epiphany, a Damascus moment so pure and profound, that he’d abandon his US family and return to Mama and me, book us flights back to Manila, and pick up our lives as if the entire divorce and separation was just a blip, a continuity error, and we’d live happily ever after. Instead, by the third day, I was calling my mother in New York, struggling not to cry over the phone as I begged her to give me a ticket to join her there with her friends as they made a circuit of the current Broadway shows.
For the rest of the story, read here.
He has a new book called Salamanca, and having won last year’s Grand Prize for Novel, Don Carlos Palanca Awards for Literature, now that’s saying it all from a five-time Palanca awardee. Here’s an excerpt from Salamanca.
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[...] 1.Notes from the Peanut Gallery by Dean Francis Alfar. He writes like he’s writing a literary and yet too like he’s just conversing with you. Riveting, was what I said then. Still is. 2.Philippine Art Scene and Gibbs Cadiz are great places for the art afficionados to check out. 3 . The art of Carlo Magno [...]