Memoir

Myrna Peña-Reyes

To the many felicitations conveyed to Dr. Marjorie Evasco, let me add my personal congratulations and best wishes on her retirement from a long stellar academic career distinguished by her dedicated professionalism, scholarship, and creative work. She departs with the deep respect, gratitude, and love of her colleagues, students, and friends for the hard work and care she shared with them, inspired by her intellect and humanity.

Close friendships are formed in one’s youth: among playmates in one’s childhood in the old hometown, in high school, college, graduate school, and in the workplace during our prime. Close friendships are seldom forged in old age. My friendship with Marj is a blessed exception.

I met Marj for the first time in 2008, three years after I retired in my hometown of Dumaguete. After living for thirty-plus years in the US—and being mostly ignorant of the literary scene in the Philippines— I did not know who she was when we were introduced at a birthday party of Mom Edith Tiempo in Montemar.

Four months later, when she was awarded the highest alumni award of my former university, I quickly learned who she was (I was already gone when she was on campus working for a master’s degree). With her exemplary work and reputation, it was my honor to write the citation for the 2008 Outstanding Sillimanian Award for Creative Writing conferred on Marj at a special convocation in the Luce Auditorium during the Founders Day of Silliman University on August 28, 2008.

With her open and easy friendliness and warmth, we soon became good friends, our friendship growing in closeness through the years as she took me into her confidence, and vice versa, our kinship enhanced by our Visayan heritage and Cebuano language, as well as our shared roots in writing from Silliman. It did not matter that I am a decade-plus her senior. Our common interests in literature, art, music, and science-filled the lengthy hand-written gossipy letters we exchanged regularly.

In popular demand around the country as a resource person, lecturer, workshop facilitator, and panelist, Marj shared her notes and written formal lectures with me, which prodded my mind out of retirement.

Her discipline and serious dedication to teaching impressed me when she would write enthusiastically about her classes, sharing her lectures, readings and research, class outlines, and student assignments designed by her with imagination and creativity. I could only think how fortunate her serious, mature students were to have such a teacher.

When a harrowing pandemic took over our lives and classrooms shifted to the internet, Marj, like teachers worldwide, had to adjust and, though nearing retirement, learn to manage her virtual classes, a challenge she has met with aplomb.

Well-known for her affectionate loyalty and generosity (readily offering help where needed, sharing her close friends with new friends, making time for them, keeping in touch, and gifting them regularly with thoughtfully-chosen presents), she showed me just how kind and unselfish she is when she facilitated my rejoining the Philippine writing community after my long absence abroad. She brought my new work to the attention of her contacts, such as editor friends Sarge Lacuesta, Marne Kilates, and even her editor friend in Cuba. In addition, she used my poems in her classes (then shared with me the students’ comments as well), continuing to the present, doing the same for her other close writer friends like Susan Lara and Grace Monte de Ramos (prompting the latter to comment once that “Marj is our literary agent”).

I felt honored when she asked me to write a review of Skin of Water (Aria Edition, 2009), her exceptional collection of beautiful and exquisite poetry based on her childhood “shaped by the sea of [her] home island, Bohol.”

While preparing the manuscript of my third poetry collection, Memory’s Mercy: New and Selected Poems (UP Press, 2015), I would depend on Marj’s editorial expertise in planning the order of the poems in my book.

Marj’s sharp editorial instincts can be fully appreciated in “The Bohol We Love” (Anvil, 2017), a beautiful and lovingly conceived anthology she edited of the remembrances of growing up on the island by native Boholano writers. Their enduring love, great pride, and loyalty to their beloved Visayan island home ring strongly in their sensitively-written essays shaped under her patient guidance.

Although Marj makes light of her part in endorsing me for the 2018 Taboan Award in the Field of Poetry in English from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, I am deeply touched, humbled, honored, and most grateful.

Soon she will be returning for good to Bohol. She has earned the rest that will come with leisure to loaf and remember. Still, I trust her to continue to write her beautiful poetry, perceptive essays, and biographies on her island home neighboring mine, with our shared waterfronts on the balmy Bohol Sea.

Mabuhi ka, Marj! Tagay!

Myrna Peña-Reyes