Apollo centennial gregorio brillantes biography

HOW did you begin to write?

And why in English?

Friends and strangers alike would ask me that question. But the notion of beginning still surprises me until now.

As a child, I loved to draw, to memorize in my mind’s eye images of the passing day.

I also loved to read — I would finish reading my English textbooks in one week, when we were supposed to read them for the whole year.

I read ravenously, and I read everything — the ingredients in a can of soup, the newspaper my father bought every day, the Philippine Journal of Education my mother subscribed to, the volume “Children’s Classics” that an uncle had given us.

I grew up in Basa Air Base, Pampanga, in a small white house with a sloping roof and French windows.

My father was a soldier, and my mother taught music in school. The “Distance to Andromeda and Other Stories” by the peerless Gregorio Brillantes was the first book I bought with my own money when I was a first-year student at the Ateneo de Manila Uni