My story makes a cameo in Prof. Philip Holden's review

of Maximum Volume: Best New Philippine Fiction 2014. Edited by Dean Francis Alfar  and Angelo R. Lacuesta. Mandaluyong City: Anvil Publishing Inc., 2014.

"Most formally innovative is perhaps

Daryll Delgado’s “The Other Woman Narrative.” In this narrative of cultural 

crossing a woman reads a story she is drafting to her partner as they prepare to go 

to bed. The story she tells is of a woman executive assistant visiting Vietnam who 

commences a love affair with a man whom she later discovers to be married. The 

woman assuages her guilt by rhapsodizing to her lover’s wife, who is from Boston, 

about how very much she loved the city when she visited. The partner of the woman 

getting ready to go to bed in the framing narrative, male and “half-American,” listens 

to the story he is told, and subjects it to approvingly rigorous academic analysis (57). 

As the story progresses, however, he finds it less comprehensible and loses interest. 

The story moves to a denouement about loneliness: how its protagonist felt alone in 

Boston, in awe of the “breathtakingly, darkly beautiful” onset of a snowstorm (66). 

This conclusion to the tale returns readers, implicitly, to the couple in bed together: 

for all their physical closeness, they inhabit two separate mental solitudes." -- Philip Holden

13 th Ateneo National Writers Workshop

I was invited to be one of the panelists for fiction at the 13th Ateneo National Writers Workshop. It was nice to be part of lively, intense, and productive discussions about basic tenets of storytelling vis-a-vis form-and-genre-innovations, notions of representation and the writer's political ideology, etc. It was great to be in the same session with fictionist, Allan Derain, whose work I admire very much, and whose mode of criticism I find myself almost constantly in agreement with. It was especially lovely to be with women writers whose work and work ethics I hold in high esteem -- Beni Santos, Chari Lucero. It was fun to catch up with friends and former colleagues in the English and Creative Writing Departments -- Mark Cayanan, Martin Villianueva, Vince Serrano, Allan Popa, and Laurel Fantauzzo. But I was particularly happy to see and interact with Ma'am Chari, my last and ultimate teacher in fiction. :) After the draining and exhausting disagreements and melee in the literary community, I think I needed to see and listen to Ma'am Chari, to be reminded of why I write.