Books + Anthologies
Glimpses: A Poetic Memoir—Through the MDR Generator (2019)
Back from the Crocodile's Belly (2013)
Babaylan: Filipinos and the Call of the Indigenous (2010 & 2013)
A Book of Her Own: Words and Images to Honor the Babaylan (2005)
Coming Full Circle: The Process of Decolonization Among Post-1965 Filipino Americans (2001 & 2016)
Essays
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A Personal Story: Becoming a Split Filipina Subject (1993)
Ever since Mount Pinatubo erupted I have been trying to paint in my mind the new landscape of my hometown. The images of a merry childhood—the days of playing under moonlit nights, chasing each other's shadow—have come to this. Lahar changes the land, it changes the people...
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Born Again Filipino (1996)
Discusses the formation of cultural identity and the development of panethnic consciousness among post-1965 Filipino Americans…
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Teaching about Whiteness When You're Not White: A Filipina Educator's Experience (2004)
So, how do I, a nonwhite teacher, teach about the social construction of whiteness and white privilege? I believe that one must first decolonize before taking on this responsibility…
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A New Twist to Filipino American Decolonization: Eileen Tabios's Poetry (2000)
We journey Home, whatever or wherever that Home draws us to, in order that we may wander out again into the world giving away our gifts because we are full and overflowing…
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Introducing Babaylan: Filipinos and the Call of the Indigenous (2010)
She is still with us. Re-membered. Re-claimed. The various kinds of appropriations of this tradition by Filipinos in the homeland and in the diaspora symbolize our attempts to draw on her power to give us back our sense of wholeness and Beauty and restore the harmony in the interconnected webs of Life in all its forms…
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Foreword to Verses Typhoon Yolanda: A Storm of Filipino Poets (2014)
A philosopher once asked: What are poets for? A question that is even more relevant in the face of Yolanda’s aftermath. What language do we invoke to describe Super Typhoon Haiyan, known as Yolanda in the Philippines? What song can we sing when the songlines have disappeared and there is no more dreamtime to sing us back to life? Can we dance again and offer our bodies to the earth to restore balance?
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Beauty out of the Shadows: The Indigenous Turn in a Filipina Narrative (2016)
This Kapampangan chant was taught to me by a young culture-bearer, Mike Pangilinan. When he told me that the chant is sung to the tune of the pasyon, I told him that I am not Catholic and I do not do the pasyon. He then said that the pasyon is actually an indigenous form of Kapampangan chanting and it was the Spanish colonizers who appropriated it as they went about their missionizing work…
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Holy Tunganga: Meditations on Becoming an Ancestor (2018)
THE SUMMER OF MY HOLY TUNGANGA in 2017: Do Nothing. Do not travel. Do not plan conferences. Do not write and publish. Do not organize. Do not do research. Do go for long walks. Do take up pilates, qi gong, and cardio toning. Do not talk too much. Be alone. Just BE and see how that feels. How different it is from DOing.
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Archiving Hope (2024)
Many years ago, as a tourist in a small village in Languedoc in the South of France, I was impressed by the historical markers everywhere. It made me wonder about my “third world” homeland and my lack of adequate historical knowledge due to the lack of visible markers of important places, events and people in history that would have made me proud to be Filipina. Where are our archives and why hasn’t our educational system done a good job of turning me into a nationalist by making sure our historical archives got integrated into our canon?
Poetry
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After Alex Tizon’s article "My Family’s Slave" as regards Eudocia Tomas Pulido (The Atlantic, June 2017)
Dear Eudocia,
Who knew that your name will be on our lips these days as we ponder your life as a “slave” to the Tizon family?
What kind of a eulogy is this that stirs up our complacent ideas about servitude?
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THE CRITIC WRITES POEMS: Four Prose Poems (2018)
I’ve come to believe that everyone on this planet has been infected with the virus of War – those who wage it may have rationalized it but they suffer the most.
Sometimes I feel like an alien. I can’t relate to Hollywood and television, movies, sports, games, etc – it’s not just age – it’s the whole premise behind these.
I feel like the indigenous person brought out of the Amazon to the big city only to exclaim: How can Mother Earth be repaid for all that’s been taken from her to build this?
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Journaling with MDR Poetry (2018)
For three months, before going to bed, I made a date with Poetry.
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Dear 2020
Dear 2020: Many would rather erase you from memory. As for me, who long ago, claimed to Not be a Time being, calendars (especially Gregorian) do not mean much except as reminders of human-centric concepts that have dominated the Anthropocene…
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Poetry at the End of the World (2021)
Indigenous peoples do not believe
the world is ending.The world is changing, they say…
Interviews, Book Reviews + Articles
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Justin Jones – Black, Filipino, Civil Rights Activist
Justin Jones, a young Black and Filipino activist, reached out to me in late 2019, asking if I could help him lament the harm caused by anti-Black attitudes in the Filipino communities he grew up in. He wanted to embrace his pagka-Pilipino (Filipino-ness) as much as he embraced his Blackness.
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EXCHANGE WITH EILEEN R. TABIOS ON DOVELION: A FAIRY TALE FOR OUR TIMES
Leny Mendoza Strobel: Your novel DOVELION: A Fairy Tale for Our Times (AC Books, 2021) is expansive—art, poetry, history, shadow material, colonial adventures, love, ideologies. How did you decide on what kind of character would best embody these vast themes?
Eileen R. Tabios: In a way, I didn’t decide; the novel itself did—I approached the novel as I do a poem and so, as with the poem, the work wrote itself.
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Eileen R. Tabios, From Poet to Novelist
DOVELION is an inventive, multi-layered novel featuring a poet, Elena Theeland, as she overcomes the trauma of her past. Theeland ends up raising a family who overthrows the dictatorship of the novel’s fictional country of Pacifica…
As her family frees Pacifica from the dictator’s dynastic regime, Elena discovers herself a member of an indigenous tribe once thought to have been erased through genocide. That discovery reveals her life to epitomize the birth of a modern-day “Baybay” modeled after the “Babaylan,” an indigenous spiritual and community leader of the Philippines.
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Yogi Monica Anderson
I've never joined a gym in my life. The ambience just never feels right to my Filipina sensibility. So, when I walked into Tone Fitness Studio in Santa Rosa, California a year ago, something felt different…
I took note of the smiling faces of the staff. When I met the owner, Monica Anderson, something clicked. Of course, I thought, this third-generation Filipina American business owner knows how to build community.
Visuals
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LIBATIONS (2020)
Meritage Press’ Minitage Editions is pleased to release LIBATIONS by Leny Mendoza Strobel. We present Leny’s thoughts on her miniature book, followed by images of its pages.
“To really make beauty, art, or to live artfully, one must do it from a particular place, something focused that we get good at no matter how small.
Gone is the infinite flowering branch of youth’s open-ended possibilities.
One flower is chosen, fertilized and hopefully goes to fruit, dries, and its seeds go to grow a new flowering beyond the individual.
We no longer chase what we desire, we marry what we follow, and cultivate, hatch, raise up what we love.”