Memoir

Joel Vega

I first met Marj in 1990 during the UP National Writers Workshop, where I was a fellow for Poetry in English. I was apprehensive during the panel assessment of my poems, but Marj’s words, in particular, were encouraging and kind. After the session, we talked briefly about Bohol, the writing craft, and Grace Monte de Ramos, who turned out to be one of Marj’s best friends, and whose poetry class I attended at UP Los Banos as an undergraduate. The following day Marj gave me a handwritten letter full of comments and advice on refining my poetry. That letter was one of the gifts I carried from the UP workshop. I always kept that letter on my writing desk when I was in Saudi Arabia when I returned to the Philippines, and when I moved to the Netherlands in 1999 to remind me of her wise counsel. Marj’s letter was like a literary talisman, and together with the letters of Manny Viray, with whom I kept a lengthy correspondence in the 1990s and just before his death, their words were like the beams from lighthouses in my journey across the landscape of poetry. After almost three decades, I met Marj for the second time at the 2019 National Book Awards. I was delighted with the fortuitous meeting, a chance to thank her for her invaluable encouragement personally. She didn’t know that her advice that I should keep a sharp eye on line-cutting was like the gentle whisper of a fairy that alighted on my shoulder. But beyond that, it was also the recognition that our words to one another can have a long life, and that these words can carry us in the most solitary moments while honing our writing craft.    

Joel Vega is the author of Drift, published by the UST Publishing House and winner of the 2019 National Book Award for Best Poetry in English and an equivalent prize from the Philippine Literary Arts Council. His poems have appeared in literary journals in the Philippines, the United Kingdom, the US, Germany, France, Austria, and the Netherlands. He lives in Arnhem (The Netherlands), where he works as a freelance editor.