Geronimo Tagatac

Weight of the Sun, a short story collection by Geronimo Tagatac, sparkles with an appeal that comes from a deep understanding of human nature.

Here are the farm laborers, dancers, kitchen workers, and soldiers who make up a world that is wrought with pain, nostalgia, and stunning grace. From the widowed Filipino father raising a son in a migrant work camp to the young veteran haunted by the ghost of war, The Weight of the Sun shows us not only what it is to be human, but how the human spirit can grow when faced with overwhelming adversity. Tagatac brings these characters home in our hearts with a poise and dignity that marks a new and powerful voice in short fiction.

For more information: ooligan.weightofthesun@pdx.edu

ISBN: 978-1-932010-11-4
5 ½” x 8 ½”, softcover
176 pages
$14.95

About the Author

Geronimo Tagatac

After Geronimo Tagatac returned from Vietnam, he began to write on scraps of paper as a way to deal with the strong ideas that would come into his head. At first, his writing was without form or direction. When he moved, he would throw the scrap piles out. Then he began to write on napkins in coffee shops, stuff them in envelopes, and send his thoughts to his friends. Eventually he started to keep a journal. He finally took a writing class and within a few years, he began publishing his stories in magazines. In 1997, Tagatac was awarded the Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship and in the summers of 2001 and 2003, he was invited to teach at the Fishtrap Fellowship.

As a writer, Geronimo has had a rich and varied life to draw from. Geronimo’s mother was a Russian emigrant, and his father was from the Philippines. After his mother died, his father moved to Louisiana to work as a fisherman. His father remarried and eventually relocated to California where he became a farm worker. Geronimo has vivid memories of the fields and orchards, irrigation ditches, rain on the cornstalks, jackrabbits, and stars shining over the plowed fields.

For a while, he was homeless. He served as a demolitions expert in the army during the Vietnam War. He has been a ski and rock–climbing bum in Colorado. He has studied dancing and danced with a modern dance company. Geronimo studied physics in college and went on to grad school in a program of Asian studies. During that time he traveled and studied language in Taiwan. Eventually he settled in Oregon where he works for the government. Geronimo has also taught writing at the college level, and led writing workshops. He has one daughter.

From the Author

Geronimo Tagatac, on how he became a writer.

I began writing without form or direction. When I got back from Vietnam, and went back to school, I’d write things on scraps of paper, strong thoughts about what it was like to be back from the war. They’d pile up on a corner of my brick-and-door desk. The stuff would get thrown out whenever I moved. When I was a rock climbing bum in boulder, Colorado, I wold go out tho this place at night and drink cup after cup of coffee and write things that came to me, what the colors of the mountains and trees looked like on a rainy day, things like that. I wrote a lot of in on paper napkins that I would later stuff into envelopes and send to friends. When I was a grad student and a modern dancer, living in Berkeley and in Davis, I’d type pages and pages of things about what I was thinking and going through. As a language student, on Taiwan, I kept a journal that I lost somewhere. In 1991, when I moved to Salem, I took my first real writing class with a very talented and demanding teacher, Martha Gies, who taught for the PSU extended learning program. She showed me the craft of writing. It wasn’t until 1995 that I had my first story, Ten Degrees North, accepted by Writer’s Forum.

Praise

Geronimo Tagatac is a quiet man with a powerful voice. His stories draw you in to a world of curious ethnic mixes and cross–cultural situations that surprise, then seem natural and true; engage you in Vietnam and the aftermath of war and leave you hovering at the edge of thirty year old stories that still live, often quiet and hidden, in America today. Maybe they are growing louder.
— Rich Wandschneider, Executive Director, Fishtrap, Inc.

These are the stores of lost boys who have become lost men. They look in the mirror and don’t quite believe what they see before them. Who do these sad eyes belong to? Where have they been and where will they go? They have toiled in the fields beneath the hot Manila sun. They have wasted away in claustrophobic cubicles lit by artificial light. And they continue to search for something just beyond their reach.
— Leslie Royal, former Portland publicist now with Avalon Publishing Group

These are important stories giving heart and voice to people often overlooked in mainstream literature.
— Craig Lesley, author of The Sky Fisherman