Name
Benita Noveno, Lecturer
Department
English
Type of Leave
Fellowship Award for Creative work in literature/arts
Full year starting Fall 2021
Project Description
Inspired in part by the works of John Steinbeck and Carlos Bulosan, Mud on the Moon is an interlacing of lyrical stories and memoir, historical research and meta-narrative, to map dreams, migration, and memory. One strand is composed of imagined tales of my father’s youth in the Philippines in the era of American colonization, his passage to the US on the eve of the Great Depression, his journey as a migrant laborer on the west coast, and trials as an aged family man in an Alaskan Filipino community. Meta-narratives on my research and writing process preface each chapter in this strand, revealing the Philippine history of rebellion against Spanish colonial powers, its relationship with the US as a double-sided coin of promise and bigotry complicit in the manong struggle for opportunity (“manong” is a Filipino term meaning older brother that also refers to the first generation of Filipino immigrants to arrive collectively to the US), and the challenges of piecing together my father’s life. Another strand is made up of my personal narratives of growing up in a northern wilderness in 1970s and 80s pop culture America, a youth marked by conflicts with a father of an equally tenacious nature and shaped by a close Filipino community, and of my restless spirit at home in transit that echoes my father’s history.
