Lillian Cui Garcia

On Writing and Publishing Lillian Cui Garcia

In this memoir, the author looks back to how even as she grew up thinking and speaking Cebuano, a major language in the Philippines, she somehow found her first literary voice in the poems she wrote in English, the language of instruction in the educational system she attended. She traces how her poetic self-expression in English soon evolved into writing personal essays through high school and college and how this progressed into writing academic articles to keep her teaching position at a university in the Philippines. She then narrates how her academic writing background incalculably facilitated her career as a government researcher and college instructor during more than 3 decades of her 43-year permanent residency in Canada. Interweaving the stories of her writing experience with recollections of family and work-life in the Philippines and Canada, she draws her journey to a full circle with her once again writing literary pieces and putting them together in the three memoirs she had self-published since 2019.