Interview: ELSA VALMIDIANO
HOME MADE: Hi Elsa, thanks for doing this interview. You have two books coming out, congratulations! So shall we start there? How did the project came about, particularly the essay collection?
Elsa Valmidiano: 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.
The project initially was born after reading Oona Patrick’s “Nobody Goes to Mertola” where I realized there are certain travel experiences that shape the trajectory of who we are and who we choose to become. From Oona’s essay, I realized how I hadn’t written about a pivotal moment I had in Australia while visiting relatives at the age of 20 that would ultimatley shape how I would live my life, and I thought it high time to finally write about it. From that came a series of other essays that formed this collection as a reflective and immersive travelogue as well as my own bildungsroman, starting from when I was an infant immigrant from the Philippines.
Published by Querencia Press in 2023
HM: What books or authors were most influential in the making of this book?
EV: Joan Didion’s The White Album, Joy Harjo’s Poet Warrior, and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.
HM: And what was most surprising in your process of completing this project?
EV: What I found surprising was at the very end of editing, I’d wake up with certain stories of ancestors that were nudging me not to be forgotten, and so I’d have to write their stories down just when I thought I was done.
HM: If we could go back in time a little… is there a significant moment early in your life that led you to where you are as a writer and how you approach your work now?
EV: I honestly have been writing for as long as I can remember, when I was probably still in the single digits. I’m guessing maybe 8 or 9 years old. I don’t think I ever realized that this could be a profession. Writing is not a regular 9 to 5, as writing requires the kind of work that feels 24/7, whether one writes in their head all day with ideas, where the brain never stops thinking.
“Believe in your writing as you do have the ability to write books, and yes, people will read them.”
EV (cont’d): When I look at the writer I am today, the business of it is not an overnight thing. It’s a slow and persistent climb when it comes to being part of the publishing industry, but as a writer, which feels like a separate but related endeavor, writing is something I always did and kept at. It didn’t matter where I was in life. Writing maintained its steadiness for me where it wasn’t always about publishing, but whether I was getting the clarity and beauty out of these words that someone, besides myself, would understand.
HM: That is so beautifully articulated, thank you for sharing. Continuing this thread, if you could go back to when your Younger Self was just starting out on this writing/artistic path, what would you say to that person?
EV: I would say that this is a long road that has no deadline. Believe in your writing as you do have the ability to write books, and yes, people will read them.
Elsa Valmidiano reading from The Beginning of Leaving
HM: What does home or home-making mean to you, esp in the context of the work/writing that you do?
EV: Home is complex. I have moved so many times in my life that finding a home has often to do with feeling a sense of safety and security within one’s bones as well as hopefully finding home within someone you love and feel safe with. The latter is always much more difficult and never guaranteed, and so home can oftentimes feel lonely.
When it comes to writing, writing has always provided that sense of safety when everything else in life seems to be spiraling out of control or you feel as if you’re floating in space without any foothold. It seems writing is the one thing that provides that foothold, to help make sense of the spiral or the uncertain feeling of floating in space.
I think it’s an important question to ask whether home is necessarily a place versus a person or thing. For many of us that have moved and lived in various places during our lifetime, does home need to be assigned to the idea of place.
Philippine-born and LA-raised, Elsa Valmidiano is an Ilocana-American essayist and poet who currently resides in Oakland. Widely published in journals and anthologies, Elsa is the author of two essay collections, We Are No Longer Babaylan from New Rivers Press, and The Beginning of Leaving from Querencia Press. Her essay collections have been featured and reviewed in RHINO, Rain Taxi, Pacific Daily News, Women Who Submit, Anti-Heroin Chic, Marías at Sampaguitas, and The Halo-Halo Review. Her third book, which will be her debut poetry collection, Giving Birth in a Time of War, is forthcoming from Jaded Ibis Press in Spring 2025.
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