Meet Apol Lejano-Massebieu
Rochita Loenen-Ruiz
The Netherlands
March, 2008

In a village called Aigues Mortes, in southwestern France, my husband and I decide to live on land that has belonged to his family for seven generations. It is part of a nature reserve, and laws prevent us from building anything of concrete. To get around this restriction, we bring in two mobile homes, put them together in an L shape. In the rectangle they half-enclose, we construct a wooden terrace. The indoor living space is tight, just barely enough for two, yet despite this inconvenience, the place is without doubt a writer’s dream.

An Interview with Dean Alfar
Rochita Loenen-Ruiz

January 13, 2009

Do a search on Dean Alfar. Google will come up with about 51,200 hits mentioning him and Wikipedia will give you a brief summary on Dean and his accomplishments to date. Wikipedia calls Dean Alfar an advocate of the literature of the fantastic and this is an apt description when it comes to the work this man has produced since he started writing and publishing professionally.

While a majority of Filipino writers choose to write what is defined as literary or academic work, poetry and prose, Dean Alfar's work occupies interstitial spaces. Defying the literary norm, he is perhaps the first professionally published Filipino writer in the Speculative Fiction world to date.

Any speculative writer who knows their speculative alphabet ...

Hope Away from Home
If I could talk to you about the books I've read this year, I'd start with the poets whose works...

Mangyan Treasures and Antoon Postma
At this hour of the dark night
we are still together now
on the woven sleeping-mat.
But when the sun will get up
and...