LIFE has come full circle for a former Bahrain resident who is set to release her book of poems this month which are an ode to ‘fragility’.
Parallel Lines is a chapbook and features a collection of 39 poems written over the years.
In it, Filipino national Ainne dela Cruz takes the reader into the ‘quiet, liminal spaces where the boundaries of connection and distance blur’.
The 39-year-old creative entrepreneur has been writing since her college days. She is part of various writers groups and her work has been published in local and international publications and anthologies.
She also has a micro-chapbook featuring prose-poetry entitled Tumbleweed. During her eight years living in Bahrain, she wrote for various sports, lifestyle and business magazines.
“My professional writing experience in Bahrain helped me hone my skills, which helped me level up my writing game,” Ms dela Cruz, who previously lived with her mum, Amor, in Sanabis, told the GDN.
The writer moved to Uzbekistan in 2023 where she works as a teacher. She has also taught when she lived in the Philippines and even worked at an art gallery. She has a Master’s in Arts and Culture Management with a double major from Rome Business School and Valencia University. She owns a literary and art magazine, Paper Monster Press, longlisted for the RBS4Entrepreneurship prize.
The programme has catered to more than 500 students from 57 countries so far.
While in Bahrain Ms dela Cruz was an active Toastmaster and has recently taken to travel writing for her blog Vagabondes Mundos. Despite wearing many hats, the wanderlust believes that these are just roles that she plays. However, her ‘real self’ emerges during the quiet hours of the night, which guides her words.
“Many people know me as a teacher or a speaker or an introvert, but the real work happens when I’m alone after work hours. Then I can begin to think about the things that I want to do. I think that’s the real work, the hours of reflection, reading, experimenting with language and with art, and jotting down ideas on my phone,” the language enthusiast said, talking about her creative process.
“When I got down to working on this book, the poems just blossomed. I have this poem called Origami, which will be published in the book. It was actually a second version of a poem that I wrote years ago that I no longer have a copy of ... but I remember these lines.
“The actual writing is actually not that hard. I go back to my notes on my phone; A line or two I might have composed on the fly when I had an ‘epiphany’, as my professor used to say. But putting the poem or the story together means letting it sit there for a while and life fleshes out the idea and then, the body writes it. It’s synergy – that’s how I write poems anyway.
“I typed these lines on my phone: ‘The heart contracts/wanting to fold/like hands’ and tried to write a poem so that these lines would fit and it worked. Sometimes I experiment like that and at other times, I like to play with language, like with the poem called The Zero Narratives (featured in the book). I think language is fun and you’ll get to see that good poetry is unpretentious, and there’s something simple about poetry, and something jolting as well.”
Not one to rest on her laurels, Ms dela Cruz is set to publish another micro chapbook entitled The Faces Translated, which will be announced at a later date.
- Parallel Lines will be available on Amazon from March 20.
melissa@gdnmedia.bh
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