Overseas Filipino monsters
Broadcast journalist-turned-fictionist KM Levis flies our manananggals abroad
Broadcast journalistturned-fictionist KM Levis flies our manananggals abroad
I really love the myths and monsters of the Philippines. But you also have many terrific writers there who can do a better job of telling those stories than I can. —Neil Gaiman
Just recently, a Filipino fan asked famed British fantasy and comic book writer Neil Gaiman on Twitter if he would ever be interested to write about Philippine folklore and mythology, to which he replied: “I really love the myths and monsters of the Philippines. But you also have many terrific writers there who can do a better job of telling those stories than I can.” While it kind of felt good to have your rich cultural and historical source material recognized by a renowned author, it is also quite sad that it took @neilhimself to remind us that we have more than enough talents to utilize that deep well of cultural and historical source material, the likes of Edgar Calabia Samar, Arnold Arre, Allan Derain, just to mention a few. But aside from our locally-based talents, we must also be proud of rising authors who, with our homegrown myths and legends, are retracing their roots through their fiction abroad.
One of them is Sydney-based Filipino writer Kristyn Maslog-Levis. She recently visited the Philippines for the Philippine Readers and Writers Festival, which was held at Raffles Makati. In an interview with the Manila Bulletin Lifestyle, KM shared a little bit about her literary and journalistic life, from the Philippines to Australia.
KM used to work as a TV reporter for ABS-CBN before finishing her master’s degree in communication under the ASEAN scholarship at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. “I didn’t study Broadcast Journalism, but Mass Communication at the Siliman University. Originally, I wanted to be in print journalism, because we’re a family of print journalists. But right after graduation, before the ASEAN scholarship, I was offered a job by ABSCBN for news and production,” she said. “After a year, I left to pursue the master’s degree. It was a great opportunity, they paid for everything. After that, I went back to my hometown Cagayan de Oro. My goal then, inspired by my uncle who has a PhD in communication, was to teach and be part of the academe. Aside from that, I really had no plan. I didn’t know what to do with the MA degree, but I thought: ‘You’ll never know. It was a free MA degree, anyway. Might as well take it.’”
According to KM, she was just going with the flow, with no real end goal. And then Australia happened. “I met my husband, who’s Australian,” she said. “It came to a point when we had to decide. We had to either move there or stay here in the Philippines. I thought opportunities would be better there, so I left. But it was a really tough decision to make. During that time, I was doing well with my job, when I came back to ABSCBN. I had no kids, my life was basically all work.”
The first year in Sydney was difficult for KM, especially in terms of getting a job in the same industry. “They wanted someone with local experience, and how was I going to get a local experience if no one was accepting me? It was difficult,” she said. “After a series of applications, I was lucky enough to get a contract role as a subeditor for a magazine, which was enough to have a local experience on my CV. From then on, I started getting jobs as a journalist then a magazine writer then an editor. When I got bored on one job, I moved on to the next. I also did broadcast for a Filipino radio station in Sydney.”
KM had to give up her regular job when she had her child. “I had to go on maternity leave, and we didn’t have family there. So, I did freelance work. It was, however, a blessing in disguise. At first I was apprehensive, but during that time, I already had contacts in the industry, which made it easy for me to get freelance work,” she said. “Three regular gigs were enough to keep us going. And it was also that time, when my child was a bit older, that I started doing something else—like writing story books!” KM self-published two children’s picture books through Amazon, The Dragon and the Lizard and We Have It All. “I wrote The Dragon and the Lizard because I just wanted to write the story that my mom used to always tell us when we were kids,” she said. “We were poor when I was growing up, we had no money to buy books. So my mom would just tell us tales that she made up herself. The Dragon and the Lizard started as a project to tell the same story to my daughter, so when she becomes a mother, she’ll tell the same story to her children. I wanted to preserve it for the family.” After her first book, KM immediately felt the urge to write more. “I wrote my second book, We
Have It All, another picture book, but this time a true story about my childhood, about my family, our life growing up in Cagayan de Oro.”
After the two self-published works, KM had felt that a literary spirit deep within her suddenly awoke. “I wanted to write something in a different form, something longer,” she said. Still inspired by her roots, her childhood, her family, Cagayan de Oro, and the Philippines, KM began to ask herself: “How do I give my daughter the same fantastic, horrifying, mystical monsters that I grew up with?” Unlike in the Philippines, KM said, she can’t see those monsters in Sydney, they’re not shown on Australian TV and in the movies. Then a sudden realization struck her: “How come when I migrated to Australia, I stopped thinking about aswangs, kapres, manananggals, why did I suddenly forget about them, these amazing, horrifying creatures?”
What if, KM asked herself, what if they could migrate, too? “If the Filipinos can migrate, why can’t they? Why not bring them overseas and let them scare foreigners too? From that seed, I slowly formed a universe for my first novel The Girl Between Two Worlds,” she said. The novel is about a girl named Karina who, on her 16th birthday, starts experiencing supernatural things. One of which is discovering that her mother is a royal blood engkanto, a princess who ran away from the supernatural world Engkantasia. “I included all our classic mythical creatures, like the manananggal, tiyanak, kapre, siokoy, sirena, and many more. I’ve included illustrations, which serve as visuals for those who have no idea about them, at the start of some chapters or when a character is introduced.”
According to KM, non-Filipinos who have read her work often ask one question: Are you sure this is YA fiction? You have this creature called manananggal that slices into half and drinks fetuses from pregnant women’s tummies. “But we Filipinos, we grew up with that. We know these creatures from our childhood. Even six-year-olds know these creatures and their stories,” she said. And this is essentially her drive as a fictionist—a Filipino being a Filipino, more specifically, a Filipino who migrates. “A lot of people tell me that my characters yearn for a sense of belongingness. Maybe they’re right. Maybe it also reflects who I am. I mean, I lived in Cagayan, then I went to Dumaguete to study, then to Singapore, then Australia. I was moving a lot. When am I going to stop moving? Where do I belong? Where am I supposed to be? Maybe it is safe to say that my drive as a fictionist is the retracing of my steps, my roots as a person, as a Filipino,” she said. “I’ve always thought that I am not the sentimental type of person, but it turns out, in my fiction at least, I am.” And wherever she goes, to all the universe she’ll create, according to her, she will always have with her a piece of the mananaggal, a slice of Filipino mythology. Right now, KM further improves herself by continuously reading about our history, local myths, and lore. Immediately after the recent release of her second novel The Girl Between Light and Dark, the sequel to The Girl Between Two Worlds, she said that she is currently working on something within the same universe. A trilogy? Maybe even more? She cannot tell yet. She promised, however, that this third work will possess more references to Filipino mythology and a deeper connection with Filipino values and identity.
KM’s two books The Girl Between Two Worlds and The Girl Between Light and Dark are both under Anvil Publishing; www.anvilpublishing.com