Memoir

Alma Cruz Miclat

The poems above contributed for a dearest friend, Marjorie Evasco’s festschrift on her 70th birthday, should not dampen the joy our hearts are filled with in celebrating her remarkable and passionate life of writing, teaching, sharing, and loving. More than anybody else, Marj will understand the poem’s lamentation on losing a loved one as she journeyed with me when my daughter Maningning passed away in 2000.

I first met Marj in her Foreword to Maningning’s book of verses, Voice from the Underworld (Anvil, 2000), entitled “‘Root-Searching’ in the Underworld of Poetry,” where she describes the collection as “intimations of the kind of inner territories she (Maningning) has had to traverse in search for roots, the deep connections within the ground of being which underlie the very act of living.”

I would learn more about Marj and her literary association with Maningning when Marj wrote “Elegy for Maningning Miclat,” the Interlude in Beauty for Ashes: Remembering Maningning (Anvil, 2001). The book was launched on Ning’s 1st death anniversary. Marj wrote about meeting Maningning “in words and images” in 1987 when the latter sent her poem “Father and I” and a watercolor “Bato at Bulaklak” for the feminist issue of ANI Marj was editing for the CCP Coordinating Center for Literature.

But it was only in 1990, Marj says when she would meet Maningning in person when she “came to see me in the university armed with a sheaf of poems in English and Filipino and a copy of her first book in Chinese.” She further says, “Maningning wanted to apply for the summer National Writers’ Workshop in Dumaguete City and needed someone who knew her poetry to recommend her. Edith and Edilberto Tiempo gave her a fellowship in the summer of 1991.”

Five years later, Maningning would seek her out again to ask her to help her with her “dream book,” a trilingual book of poetry in English, Filipino, and Chinese, the three languages she spoke and wrote. Marj wrote about launching the said book, Voice from the Underworld: A Book of Verses, which has her Foreword on the girl’s 28th birthday on April 15, 2000. She says: “Maningning’s radiance that day was deepened by her almost imperceptible gesture of gratitude: when I went to where she sat to congratulate her, she took my right arm and slipped around my wrist a bracelet of small lavender beads.”

I, too, would be a beneficiary of Marj’s good heart when she wrote a Preface to my book, Soul Searchers and Dreamers: Artists Profiles, jointly published in 2015 by the Maningning Miclat Art Foundation and Erehwon Center for the Arts. She writes: “Alma’s imperative to remember and to sing in praise of soul searchers and dreamers she has met and nurtured maps her quest for the meaningfulness of life’s darkest shades.”

She adds: “Within this book’s intimations of a circle of grace, and enfolded by a family of kindred beings who shape beauty with light and sound, we share Alma’s faith in life’s relentless exuberance, now embodied in her grandson Maharadya, Banaue’s and Dominic’s firstborn, ‘whose life, still unfolding, can be. Be and be better.’”

When Maningning Miclat Art Foundation, Inc. was founded seven months after Maningning’s death, Maningning Miclat Award was started in 2003, alternating poetry and painting. It was so natural for us to request Marj to be on the board of judges for the English poetry. And she has been a mainstay since then until the recently concluded 2021 Poetry Award, which was held along with the posthumous launching of my husband Mario I. Miclat’s memorial edition of the last books he wrote: poetry, essays, and a novel.

Marj Evasco is kindness and goodness personified, and our family is truly grateful and blessed for knowing her and for the deep friendship we have forged. Indeed, Marcel Proust was right when he said: “Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”

Happy and blessed 70th Birthday, our dearest Marj!

Alma Cruz Miclat is a freelance writer and retired business executive. She is the president of the Maningning Miclat Art Foundation Inc., which holds the annual Maningning Miclat Awards alternating in poetry and painting. She is the author of deluxe books Soul Searchers and Dreamers: Artists’ Profiles and Soul Searchers and Dreamers, Volume II, and co-author with Mario I. Miclat, Maningning Miclat, and Banaue Miclat of Beyond the Great Wall: A Family Journal, a National Book Awardee for biography in 2007.