He was born and raised in the southern Philippines. He was the 2017–2018 David T. K. Wong Fellow at the University of East Anglia. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Zell Writers’ Program, he was a 2012 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow. He has received scholarships to attend Tin House, Sozopol Fiction Seminars, Sewanee, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, among others. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, American Short Fiction, Ninth Letter, The Massachusetts Review, The Bare Life Review, and the Des Moines Register. He is a senior lecturer at the University of the Philippines, Mindanao.
At Electric Lit Go tagged eight novels with "narrators that defy our expectations of how they 'should sound' given their societal, racial or other preconceived backgrounds." One title on the list:
A Tiny Upward Shove by Melissa ChadburnRead about the other entries on the list.
This fantastical novel employs an aswang, or a dark spirit, to tell us about Marina, a teenager who was brutally murdered. While aswangs come from traditional Filipino folklore and are ageless, Chadburn’s version sometimes sounds more like avengeful Filipino-American relative who’s unafraid to cuss and reference pop culture while delving deep into history: “This man who strangled Marina was a pakshet trick who didn’t know how to be a trick — always fell in love with the wrong girl. Pure PoCo trash, drove around Vancouver in his van loaded with possibilities…”
But what if comedy or satire isn’t the novel’s genre? Can a more subtle narrator within the realm of realism still defy our expectations? Readers do seem to wholeheartedly accept a narrator who can tell stories with precise prose, even if it might strain some disbelief. Language, after all, is one of the things we enjoy in literature.
--Marshal Zeringue
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