Light : selected stories / by Joy T. Dayrit ; edited by Edna Zapanta Manlapaz.

Short stories.

thumbtacks placed on context and setting. Sometimes the detailing is in dialogue, how evenly measured, its cadence I can imagine she tapped using her cane. Her characters "became" or were always in the process "of becoming"-that obscure moment in between a "before" and "after" pinned, delincated, figured (in the painterly sense). Like the way she wrote, loved, and lived, it looked effortless, inevitable, and yet you knew it came with knowing the deepest pain. Rica Bolipata-Santos

Joy was a dear friend, and a fellow woman-writer. She would eventually become a teacher to me. She taught the way she wrote-quietly, surreptitiously, constantly attempting to obliterate herself so that what would only remain were tips on craft, lessons on living well, and the different ways to achieve the strange balancing required of those of us who live and write. I can still see her in my mind's eye, sitting on her windy veranda as we ate cheese pizza. Her eyes had the ability to dwell long on things. She was not the type to flit from one scene to the next. This quality appears in her fiction too-in the painstaking detail given to objects that inhabit space so that it does not take flight