Marga Ortigas: Journalist with a Literary Soul
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Marga Ortigas in Tacloban after Super Typhoon Haiyan (Source: Al Jazeera)
Prior to being an author, Ortigas was a broadcast journalist, traveling from Asia and Oceania to Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. However, an ache to write something more expansive than news reportage gnawed at her with each assignment. The idea for The House on Calle Sombra germinated when one day, in Manila, she and a colleague were on their way to work. Their office was located in a commercial high rise. To get there, they passed clusters of shanties interspersed between gated communities. The visual gap between the wealthy and the destitute struck Ortigas.
Marga Ortigas’ The House on Calle Sombra
For a few years after, with such images constituting her daily route, Ortigas became increasingly attuned to Philippine class disparity. In time, she noticed palatial dwellings grow decrepit, as well. She would hear stories about a family feud over inheritance that had carried on through generations, taking its toll on a structure that once stood as a symbol of a clan’s pride.
“An inheritance is more than monetary. A family inherits the trauma, the issues, the love, and also the anger and the jealousies… It made sense to tell the story of a family rooted in a house that eventually goes into disrepair.”
After nearly 30 years, Ortigas quit journalism to pen her novel. Creative writing has always come naturally to her. Her mother, a literature teacher, was the head of the Filipinas Heritage Library and a director of the Ayala Museum. Her father was a music aficionado, with an eclectic taste that ranged from Beethoven to ABBA. As a result, she grew up in a house rich with storytelling media that involved a fusion of words and notes.
At the age of five, Ortigas would fabricate stories about the passengers in a neighboring car whenever she was caught in traffic. Seven years later, a TV mini-series that dramatized the Kennedys’ role in American history seized her imagination. The melding of history and drama would once again have a hold on her when, in high school, she read Ingrid Bergman: My Story.
“It had humor and tension. I was captivated by the author’s personality coming across through the narrative. It felt very intimate, that I was in the head of this person.”
Ortigas singles out The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho and Sexing the Cherry by Jeannette Winterson as the fictional works that had an early impact on her. She was in college and was impressed by their ability to create a world with an economy of language.
Of Winterson: “I liked how she played with words. A sentence could begin by saying one thing, but by the end of it mean something else because of the way she tweaked or juxtaposed one word with the next one. This gave you layers of meaning. Language became magical in that sense.”
At Ateneo de Manila University, Ortigas majored in communications. She landed a part-time job during her junior year with GMA Channel 7, where she prepared and presented hourly news bulletins, and was eventually hired full-time upon graduating. For the ensuing three decades, she went on to work as a journalist with CNN and Al Jazeera. The events she has witnessed and the memories she has accrued are staggering. She has met with besieged Palestinians in Gaza. She has reported on children orphaned and families displaced by cataclysms and wars. She has covered the plight of stateless children in Sabah.
On the Iraqi-Jordanian border with CNN staff.
“There are too many people in this world living in such distressing circumstances. Humanity as a race should really be doing more for each other.”
On her seventh year as a journalist, The British Council in the Philippines awarded Ortigas its country’s version of the Fulbright - the Chevening Scholarship – so that she could further develop her craft in the United Kingdom. She wrote an essay for the scholarship to fund her passion for fiction instead. Her desire was to narrate the human experience through literary eyes; thus, endowing headline stories with poetry and heart. She earned an M.A. in Literature and Criticism from the University of Greenwich.
Ortigas started The House on Calle Sombra in 2016. Traveling back and forth to London, Manila, and Los Angeles, she would write and wonder: Who’s going to read this? Who would bother to sit through a hefty novel? She also fretted over her prose style, which a friend called “experimental.” To Ortigas, though, the style was nothing she labored over but one that came naturally, so she persisted.
Friends and former colleagues, whom she selected for their reading discernment, commented that they couldn’t put the manuscript down. Several read it in one night and said that the characters reminded them of people they knew. Even her non-Filipino readers felt a connection. Nobody said anything negative or discouraging, easing all doubts about what she had written.
Cold queries to American literary agents came to naught. She then caught wind of an Asian division of Penguin Books that welcomed writers to submit even without representation. And so, the release of The House on Calle Sombra in the winter of 2021.
Ortigas is now working on her next novel. Its themes are a longing for connection, displacement, and a search for home, and it is set in the Asia Pacific region. Marga Ortigas is proud to parlay her journalistic knack for the global issues she holds dear into her lifelong yearning to tell stories.
This is her mission.
Her advice to writers seeking publication: “Keep going. If you give up on yourself, then who’s going to push for you? What I’ve discovered is that everything has an audience. If somebody comes to you and says, ‘Well, nobody’s gonna read this.’ I will tell you now they’re wrong. I’m sure somewhere out there, somebody will read it.”
Rafaelito V. Sy is the author of Potato Queen, a novel about the relationship between Caucasians and Asians in the San Francisco gay community of the 1990s. Please visit his blog of short stories and inspirational essays on film: www.rafsy.com.
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