Photo by Lyka Gonzalez
Nicola Sebastian is a Filipino writer, surfer, and National Geographic Explorer. She is interested in “islandness,” both as space and sensibility.
Her work has been published in Orion Magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Bellingham Review, VICE Asia, and CNN Philippines. Nicola graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University, New York, where she was the Managing Editor of the Columbia Journal, and taught fiction writing to undergraduates. She lives in La Union, Philippines, where she co-founded Emerging Islands, a coastal arts-for-ecology residency and organisation. She is also working on an ecological memoir on disaster, discovery, and the Philippines.
The Woman Who Owned the Sea
Flash essay in Orion Magazine
I am standing on Yolanda Beach. The edge of the world. One edge, anyway. East of the Philippines, where the island of Samar meets the Pacific. Samar, a sound like the local word for “wound,” an island named after pain.
Pacifico, Magellan had said of the great ocean, and in describing it gave it a name. El Niño, South American fishermen had said as the ocean warmed, the infant Jesus blessing Magellan’s fleet with fine weather before the doldrums that suspended them between east and west, nearly killing them. His heart bursting with the thrill of arrival, Magellan didn’t know he would never return home.
Salvation, Salvaged
Literary criticism in CNN Philippines
It’s the end of May. The air is thick and still, but clouds are threatening a downpour. Habagat was unseasonably early — it usually arrives in June. We have so much rain in this country that we give them different names, know their characteristics, distinct like personalities.
Filipinos don’t think about the weather much. That is, until it starts to rain. Then it becomes all we can think about, all we can hear, as it pours down relentless on clay tiles, corrugated metal, nipa grass. If our homes are safe, we’ll think of those whose homes aren’t; wonder whether any coastal villages or informal settlements are flooding, or being swept away. We’ll worry that our lights will go out; that our water will stop running. What the death count will be.
So far, there have only been scattered showers. Ambon-ambon lang.
This Construction Worker Taught Himself To Shape Surfboards
Profile in VICE Asia’s Local Legends series
If you want to meet the man who makes surfboards in the Philippines’ La Union province, turn away from the sea and instead, head towards the mountains. If you pass hand-painted trail signs and dirt bike jumps, you’re on the right track. Roosters, goats, and dogs will announce your arrival in the forest clearing where Larry Hufalar, 42, better known as Tikboy, shapes surfboards by hand.
Hufalar emerged from his workshop, a hut made from corrugated metal and tarpaulin banners from old surfing competitions, one afternoon in July. A lean man with gentle, downturned eyes and a patient manner of speaking, he apologized for the many animals that he cares for.
“I didn’t realize that taking care of chickens makes you no longer want to kill them,” he said in Filipino, with a little laugh.