WORKS

ABOUT: Jolyssa

Jolyssa Gundayao is a Pangasinense writer who writes because she thinks that this is the only sensible thing she could do. To make sense of what's blatant and suppressed to hopefully reveal something truthful, unhinged, and tender to pass on to someone else.

READ HER WORK: Category: Love Child

ABOUT: Cello

Cello Friginal is a writing major who, in an attempt to bridge similar experiences in her writing, pens issues that keep her up at night. She is in the pursuit of collecting experiences and finding what it means to love what is mortal.

READ HER WORK: Blackbird

Her written work, The Village Breadhouse, brings a dive into her childhood memories filled with the warmth of her mother’s love through baking. Being born and raised in Los Baños, she aims to commemorate the history of a local mom-and-pop bakery, showing how it greatly influenced her formative years.

ABOUT: Andrea

Andrea Mercado is a part-time Communication Arts student, part-time graphic designer, full-time cat mom and baker by heart. All while powering through her coffee addiction, she's on a mission to save animals from cruelty and make the world a kinder place. She dreams of running her own sustainable garden-café, and creating the best vegan recipes you'll ever find.

READ HER WORK: The Village Breadhouse

ABOUT: Clare

Clare Garaña is a sapphic writer from Marikina City who immortalizes her experiences about her family, the stars, and her queerness through pen and paper. Her works are mostly women loving women stories and she lives for the day these types of works would be widespread and normalized.

About Turning a New Leaf:
Turning a New Leaf is an essay showcasing the writer's intimate journey from being a hesitant senior high school graduate to a chill college student. It talks about lostness, dreams, and acceptance caused by such a pivotal moment in her life: the acceptance of losing one of her dreams.

READ HER WORK: Turning A New Leaf

Through this piece, Chrystel hopes that the readers would be reminded to take their time, breathe, and pause. When we perceive love as something that can be measured, we might show it in a wrong way to other people that could cost us our self-love. For her, the greatest gift we could give to the people who truly love us is our very own presence and existence. She wants the readers to know that they are already enough, just as they are.

READ HER WORK: Lavender Dress

ABOUT: Chrystel

Chrystel Darbin, 21, is a Communication Arts student in UPLB who uses writing as a way to overdose herself with caffeine and pleasant memories of the past. If not writing, she spends most of her time lucid dreaming, playing the piano, and wondering what next Matcha flavored pastry to eat.

Lavender dress, her most recent essay, was written in memory of her Lola Iddi and the six-year-old Chrystel who has unwavering faith in things she wants to believe in. For some, sewing is just a mundane task and seeing fabrics laid out on the floor is nothing but clutter. But for her, sewing ties her back to the untroubled past and to one of the persons she loved the most. During the pandemic, each day is a blessing but also a battlefield. It is harder to stay afloat and motivated, yet we still feel the need to be productive and to even be successful.

ABOUT: MJ

MJ Bernal is a 21-year-old queer female writer and artist of sorts from Parañaque. She has an unbreakable habit of leaving her works unfinished - her space characterized by sketches that beg to be inked and embroideries that have yet to form a coherent image - but she has a keen eye for works that strongly need to be finished (apart from the urgency a deadline requires).
Her relationship with pretense is one of her longest relationships to date, spanning nearly two decades. She felt compelled to write about it as an attempt to compensate for the years she could not be honest to other people, but more importantly to herself. She does not write nonfiction as often as she does fiction, so her choices are much more deliberate in this genre. Her choice of approaching the essay in a different angle, through a shift in point of view and structure, is a way of proving her dedication to being more genuine.

Currently, she is both excited and on edge about her impending senior year in college (and thesis). You can find her poring over romance comics online in the morning and checking out fruits and street food at the market with her mother at night. She has other future plans other than writing, but she swears that she will not end her nonfiction streak here especially when the world offers an endless amount of material to write about.

READ HER WORK: The Show

READ HER WORK: Recollection in a Panemic

ABOUT: Eya

Thea Marie Apostol, Eya for short, is a 22-year-old college undergraduate at the University of the Philippines, Los Banos. She currently resides in Los Banos, Laguna with her family and pets during this pandemic. Writing has been one of her secret hobbies during her teenage years. Besides writing, she enjoys listening to music and playing games with her friends.

Recollection in a Pandemic is a diary log about her continuous highs and lows of life during the pandemic.

ABOUT: Claude

Claude Russel D. Sastrillo is a BA Communication Arts student in the University of the Philippines Los Banos, majoring in Writing. Despite being enrolled in such a course, he is horrible at communication and treasures his solitude and privacy. He is currently learning how to write stories that reflect on who he is as a person, the people he encounters and what kind of society he lives in.

READ HIS WORK: Volcanic Palette

ABOUT: Bianca

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