Bio-note

Elvie Victonette B. Razon-Gonzalez

I met Marjorie Evasco, or “Prof. Marj,” when I was in my rudimentary and catatonic self: a practicing gastroenterologist for six years, a post-graduate student who was completing her thesis dissertation, a mother of four children who had just given birth three months before. I was unknowingly drifting along, buoyed up by external definitions of success, and centrifugally stretched in multiple directions. I was in a state of inertia despite the bursts of outward energy. I had completely forgotten my feverish eighteen-year-old self, who had always carried with her a small tickler and a pencil, excited by the mere possibility of a line or stanza and whose palms would grow cold and clammy with the slightest provocation or idea. It was no accident when I joined the First Creative Non-fiction Writing Workshop for Doctors under Bienvenido N. Santos Creative Writing Center amid a pandemic. Through this workshop, I met Prof. Marj and communed with other doctor-writers. There I realized the necessity of a well-examined life, an inward eye, and insight. And there, my passion for the written word was resuscitated.

Prof. Marj taught me quiet strength and demonstrated joy in stillness. She showed me that females could grow abundantly with their many branches while deeply rooted in the dark. She introduced me to female writer warriors like May Sarton, who see happiness as “woven out of the silence in the empty house each day, and how it is not sudden and it is not given but is creation itself like the growth of a tree.”

I have yet to meet Prof. Marj in person. Still, I know that despite the islands separating us, our parallel lives often intersect in a well-crafted line of a poem, as we sip our cup of blue ternate tea, as we smell rosal and kamuning in our small gardens, as a gust of wind stirs and moves. I drift toward the shore of my belongings.