Description

Followers of the Seasons is a collection of the life's work of renown Pilipino American writer Oscar Peñaranda. It is divided into five suites that cover topics of history, struggle, family, friendship and concerns for humanity. The work takes us from locations in various aspects of the writers life: the Philippines, student cultural and political activism at SF State campuses, work as an Alaskero in the canneries, to San Francisco's Manilatown.

Oscar Peñaranda claims everything is inspired by a true story. In Followers of the Seasons, he gathers seemingly disparate events and images from his life, ancestral memory, and universal experience, sprinkled among multiple genres, slowly order and assemble themselves in the reader's consciousness, ultimately yielding larger truths. A bridge, a toilet, a flag, a burning pot of lumpia - familiar objects, when handled by Peñaranda's deft storytelling, conjure feelings of loss, heartbreak, the search for our roots, our selves, and for home.

-Tina Bobadilla- Mastel, Master Teacher, mentor, educator all her adult life to several generations of students and citizens, James Logan High School, Union City.

"There are extremely few people in the world who think and move with equal levels of sensibilty, grace, intellectual agility, and accuracy in two distinct and often conflicting cultures. Oscar Peñaranda is such a person - truly and deeply bicultural - all and at once Filipino and American. His writings present the truest of truths, envisioned through a lens molded from an amalgam of knowledge of literature in English, Filipino, Cebuano, and Waray and polished with the fine-grains of decades of personal adventures and experience as an educator and mentor. Read on - you'll see and enjoy!

-Daniel P. Gonzales, Professor of Asian American Studies Emeritus, SF State.

Foreward by Tony Robles

Introduction by Aileen Cassinetto

Acknowledgements

SUITE #1: The Bridge

SUITE #2: The Voyage

SUITE #3: The City

SUITE #4: The Alaskeros

SUITE #5: The Cure

Epilogue

Oscar Peñaranda is an educator, writer, and culture-bearer for and from both shores of the Pacific and is a recipient of the prestigious Gawad Alagad ni Balagtas for lifetime achievement for his writings and endeavors; and the 2023 City of San Francisco Trailblazers Award. He has a Bachelors in Literature and a Masters in Creative Writing from SF State University. While he was working one late summer in Alaska, he was recruited to teach a class in the newly formed Ethnic Studies Department at San Francisco State. Oscar began his teaching career as an assistant of Joaquin Legaspi of the International Hotel and created several classes, one of which was a Survey of Philippine Art and Literature. While at SF State, he created three fourths of those classes which still exist to this day.