NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Si Yu'us Ma'ase to Mar-Vic Cagurangan for her mention of my column "When the Moon Waxes" and NaNoWriMo in her column earlier this month in The Marianas Variety. For those who want to know more about NaNoWriMo from a Chamorro perspective or ChaNoWriMo, please check out the Chamorro Studies Facebook page.  ********************** Stranger than Fiction Mar-Vic Cagurangan 11/8/13 The Marianas Variety THE hardest part of writing is coming up with the opening sentence. With every new piece, you are a virgin – even if you have had this job all your adult life. You embark on the process with nothing but a blank screen and frequent but unnecessary trips to the bathroom, hoping for the first atom of an idea to emerge. Writer’s block can be crippling. For news writers, the challenge is to write a catchy lead with an interesting angle, coupled with the difficulty of digesting a 100-page document, a one-hour interview or a two-hour forum into a 500-word (

This Friday, July 16th my most recent art show, "Before the Storm, After the Fire," at I.P. Coffee in Mangilao, will be coming down. In its place a new exhibit by artist and editor of the Marianas Variety Mar-Vic Cagurangan, called "Naked Truth" will be opening. So Friday night from 6-8 pm we'll be having an opening/closing party, where you can meet both artists, enjoy some good food and wine and also try to pick up some of my pieces before they get stored in the trunk of my car. For this last show I divided my artwork up into different themes. When I paint things, even abstract imagery, they tend to follow a set of regular themes. So even though the artwork is abstract and open to interpretation, when I paint it and when I title it, I often end up coming back to the same sorts of themes: movies, song lyrics, puns, Guam history and so on. So when I was figuring out how to hang my show, I decided to divide them up into groups based on shared imagery or names. Th