Narisma
Oyster River Pages: What is the most challenging aspect of your artistic process?
Narisma: One of the most disheartening things about writing is realizing that the piece in your hands looks nothing like how you envisioned it in your head. It is akin to carefully planning an outfit for a get-together, only to realize that you look like Bozo the Clown.
Poems and essays often take a life of their own, burnishing themselves as they grow. While frustrating at first, this keeps the artistic process refreshing and fun. The best pieces a writer will produce are the ones that stretch their limits, forcing them to utilize their full creative potential. Even the piece I have published with Oyster River Pages, "Batok: Micro-Essays on Indigenism, Craft, and Matrilineality", went through several iterations over the course of a year before I deemed it fit for submission.
ORP: What do you think is the best way to improve writing and/or artistic skills?
N: Writing is simultaneously individual and social, both personal and shared. I have found that my writing skills improve most dramatically after quality feedback from friends within the literary sphere. It is easy to develop tunnel vision during the artistic process. By having others review your work and offer suggestions, the scope of your piece widens and grows. My fidus Achates, Yvanna Vien Tica, a brilliant writer in her own right, is someone I've consistently turned to for trusted feedback.
ORP: Who do you consider to be your creative ancestors and contemporaries for your art and/or writing? How does your creative work converse with theirs?
N: In 'Noli Me Tángere', Filipino writer, activist, and national hero José Rizal wrote, "I die without seeing dawn's light shining on my country... You, who will see it, welcome it for me... don't forget those who fell during the nighttime."
My creative work is both a by-product of, and resistance to, personal nostalgia, cultural melancholia, and, perhaps most pressingly, neocolonialism. My writing welcomes the light that those who fell during nighttime couldn't reach. This is a recurring theme I've engaged with across all my creative inspirations. Whether back home in the Philippines, or as a foreign academic here in America, my work tends to revolve around both deeply personal issues as well as broader subjects related to my people. Alongside my friends and contemporaries, Anna Lete, K. Raye Bland, and Yang, Hoi Teng "Eunice" C., among others, we navigate topics such as mental health, race, society, and politics.
ORP: Do you know more than one language? How does this influence your art and/or writing?
N: I grew up learning both Tagalog and English, though I used the latter more frequently due to my attendance at an international missionary school in Metro Manila. While I may have dozed off more than once at church for not following the deeply archaic vocabulary, I do still try to integrate Tagalog where I can into my pieces. This always feels intimate—it's like pulling back the curtain so the audience can see what my personal life is like. Interweaving English with Tagalog into my writing is very intentional; it's a way to bridge the gap between my two lived realities.
ORP: What does vulnerability mean to you as an artist and/or writer?
N: Vulnerability, to me, is essential to writing. How could I possibly hope to touch the reader if I can't produce something emotionally substantial? Vulnerability is terrifying, and more often than not, our honesty is misconstrued and mishandled. But if even a single person is moved by my work, if they can somehow relate to it themselves, then I have done my job right.
