my letter to an author

Dear Mrs. Tuvera-Quimbo,

You would probably wonder why I am sending you an email when I can simply write to you on your Facebook wall or leave a two pages letter in your pigeonhole. Alright! I confess, this letter is for a requirement in my creative non-fiction class. But I hope you won’t get me wrong. I wanted to let you know how much your stories and our brief encounter influenced me in my development as a reader and as an aspiring writer. But it is always harder to tell all that in person because I am naturally shy, beside that I don’t know how to approach you. In fact, I am glad that my professor made this as a requirement because I know it will serve a double purpose.
When I read your short story collection, Testament and Other Short Stories, I want to know whether you are aware (when you were writing the story) that you are creating characters portraying a sense of loss, and decided to carry the theme for the whole collection? The Flight, for instance, where the main character recalls her memories of her Uncle who left when she was only nine; Testament, where the protagonist broods over her inability to bear a child, and that no one, after her, will validate her existence when she dies; Marion and A Passing Life seemed to have depicted the same sense of losing someone. Right! I know I really need not to summarize. But, you see, I try to read the stories thoroughly as I studied how they were structured, not just scan through them and show and tell my friends an autographed copy of your book. I realized I wanted to emulate those authors I read by borrowing their style as I continue to develop my own, and maybe someday someone will want to borrow mine.

Thinking about what’s happening in the stories, the next question I had in mind is that whether they (the characters) are imagined people or somehow a self depicted portrait of the author. Though I guess that it’s a little bit of both, I realized as what Stephen Koch said in his book, The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop, “It doesn’t really matter much whether your characters are modeled on yourself, on somebody else, or on nobody at all. It is in the realm of invention that you invent every single one of them in exactly the same way you invent the story.”

I remembered, I once mentioned that I particularly like Marion and A Passing Life among the other stories. However, when I reread all the stories in the collection, I realized how I under-read the Testament. It must be something special to think that it carries the title of the book. True enough because I noticed how the foreshadowing of the impending conflict was written in a subtle way, maybe it’s the same reason why I needed to look back over and read again. It must be what Shirley Lua also meant when she noted about your style:
Her strategy of holding back is decisive to suggest something more, to bid the mind still before taking a leap, to stand still on the edge and see the vast timescape. The silences between words, as much as the deliberate details, allow readers space for introspection. (Reframing the nation By Shirley O. Lua Inquirer)

Reading it the first time, I thought that the conflict lies with the character’s not being able to sleep or her being insomniac, but it is in giving the story a closer look that I discover a much deeper need of the character. It’s good to understand by what you mean, when you commented on my story, on how to create a character; that we don’t think of them as “characters” but as living, breathing people we’ve met or could possibly meet in real life with all their complexities and contradictions; that being inside their mind is just like magic.

Now, when I try to invent my own story, and get stuck in the middle, I read again more stories; yours and others. I haven’t given up on Jeffrey Archer, but I move on reading and discovering works of other Filipino writers.

You know when I decided (though I honestly think that I’m a bit too late) to study Creative Writing, almost a year ago, I wasn’t expecting to see you sat in front of the class, because the form that bore my class schedule stated that my professor is a Mr. But for a departmental or whatever reason, you turned out to be my mentor, and that made all the difference.

P.S.
I chose A Passing Life to be my subject for my Psychoanalysis Study in Lit Crit class last term. Maybe it wasn’t that bad to get a grade of 3.00. And one last thing, will you sign my copy of The Jupiter Effect?