John C. Zacharis Award
John C. Zacharis Award Ploughshares is pleased to present Lysley Tenorio with the twenty-third annual John C. Zacharis Award for his short-story collection, Monstress (Ecco 2012). The $1500 award, which is named after Emerson College’s former president, honors the best debut book by a Ploughshares writer, alternating annually between poetry and fiction.
This year’s judge was Ladette Randolph, Ploughshares’ editor-in-chief. In choosing the book, Randolph said: “Lysley Tenorio’s stories range from the absurd to the sublime. They always maintain absolute control and authority over his subject, the many-faceted experiences of Filipino immigrants. Whether it’s a young woman in permanent exile in a leper colony, an ambitious, slightly loony filmmaker, or a desperate young man caught up in a scam, Tenorio finds a way to make the plight of these characters not only plausible but fully sympathetic.”
About Lysley Tenorio Born in the Philippines, Tenorio immigrated to America when he was only seven months old. Growing up in Central California, his early influences included Roald Dahl, Beverly Cleary, Star Wars, and DC Comics. This love for supposedly “low” art shines through his adult work, where the Green Lantern, Filipino horror movies, and trashy talk shows all have their place in his characters’ lives. Tenorio sees his stories as taking such work and “elevating it to a place that resonates in emotionally, psychologically, and dramatically complex ways.” He still remembers his family watching Dallas, the night Bobby Ewing died, and writes, “Even now, I’m reluctant to invalidate our sadness over a TV death, however silly it might seem. As a writer, I like the challenge of that, of finding real emotional depth in the seemingly ridiculous or whimsical.”
Tenorio began writing fiction in college. In the midst of his academic literature classes at UC Berkeley, creative writing courses were initially, he says, “more of a vacation than a vocation.” Quickly, however, it became something more: “I realized it was the only class I was losing sleep over, the only one where I stressed over my sentences, my diction, even my choice of font. My interest in writing had taken on an urgency I hadn’t felt before.”
One source of inspiration was his Berkeley writing professor, acclaimed novelist Bharati Mukherjee, whose writing focused on immigrants in America. His desire to “rise to her example,” Tenorio says, gave him “the energy and motivation to get to the keyboard day after day.” (Asked about his favorite writers at the moment, he still names Mukherjee, along with Jessica Hagedorn, Steven Millhauser, Aleksandar Hemon, and Kazuo Ishiguro, among others.) Today, he continues to be drawn to immigrant characters, as “few dreams are bigger, or more romantic or reckless, than trying to find your home.”
After graduating from Berkeley, Tenorio continued his education as a Stegner fellow in fiction at Stanford. As he found his voice and subject material, the stories that became the Monstress collection began to be published. His story “Help,” based on an actual mob attack on the Beatles during their visit to the Philippines, was his first publication, and was chosen by guest editor Gish Jen for the Fall 2010 issue of Ploughshares. Other stories would be published in magazines including The Atlantic and MANOA, and go on to be featured in anthologies such as Best New American Voices and the Pushcart Prize.
Using everything from television faith healers to superheroes as inspiration, Monstress is tied together by the shared experience of its Filipino characters—both in America and abroad—as they grapple with Western culture and social mores, although Tenorio warns that the stories in the collection are not to be taken as a “kind of socio-political document representing an entire population.” The title story, for example, deals with a young Filipino actress whose career in Manila consists of playing monsters in her boyfriend’s low-budget Filipino horror movies, such as the The Squid Children of Cebu. After years of wearing outlandish rubber costumes, she comes to America with her boyfriend and is finally granted the romantic role of her dreams. The movie she acts in will become a joke for future generations, but Tenorio manages to find a balance between respecting her dreams and appreciating the comedy of the situation—and, eventually, the pathos. In “The Brothers,” which was featured in a Pushcart anthology, a character’s sex change becomes a vehicle for exploring the clash between a family’s devotion to its own members and to traditional Filipino codes of behavior. This story and the others in the collection represent, in the words of Peter Ho Davies, a “confession of love betrayed, told with a mournful, austere tenderness as heartbreaking as it is breathtaking.”
Tenorio is currently working on his first novel, which is “tonally similar” but “not directly related” to Monstress. Currently an associate professor at Saint Mary’s College of California, Tenorio emphasizes to his writing students that “finding your voice” should not be a self-conscious attempt at creating a style, but rather should be a natural progression of being true to your characters. Afterward, when revising, one can figure out which elements of the writing “move the story forward in ways that are memorable, moving, and surprising. Then cross your fingers,” he concludes, “and hope it works.”