Overview

Elsa Valmidiano's The Beginning of Leaving is a hybrid collection of journalistic prose and lyrical essays, weaving a personal examination of how leaving not only reflects a picture of immigration and the diaspora, but how migration through generations compels any individual to honor the Motherland we left behind, and acknowledge whose land we now inhabit and have adopted as our own. In these essays, leaving is not simply a finite act but a process of resistance, reconciliation, and release-from a Motherland, a childhood, War, a body, a mindset, a painful past, or shame. Within this collection is a reflective and immersive travelogue as well as bildungsroman of a woman who is the daughter of Filipino immigrants. As she travels from her ancestral barrios in the Philippines, to the suburbs of LA, to the High Desert of California, and finally to the Australian Outback in Murujuga, themes of heartbreak, family, trauma, and race are intimately interwoven inside discussions surrounding gender expectations, as well as Motherland values versus adopted homeland values.

Full Product Details

9781959118480

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Philippine-born and LA-raised, Elsa Valmidiano is an Ilocana-American essayist and poet whose debut essay collection, We Are No Longer Babaylan, was a recipient of the Editors' Choice selection from New Rivers Press' Many Voices Project competition in Prose. Elsa's work recently appears in Anomaly, Cherry Tree, Hairstreak Butterfly Review, and MUTHA. Her work is also widely anthologized and recently appears in Unbound: Composing Home (New Rivers Press) and Not Ghosts, But Spirits: Volume I, An Anthology of Women, Queer, Trans, & Enby Issues (Querencia Press). The Beginning of Leaving is her second essay collection.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available