“Constantly translating yourself”: Renato Gandia on writing between worlds

I often find myself writing from that space between worlds—between the Philippines and Canada, between past and present, between who I was and who I am still becoming.

Arun Budhathoki talks with Filipino-Canadian writer Renato Gandia, winner of the 2026 Writers’ Trust RBC Bronwen Wallace Award, for Emerging Writers in Poetry. Renato talks about migration, memory, belonging and queer identity and what it means to write and getting published in Canada as an immigrant writer.

Renato Gandia is a Filipino-Canadian writer whose work explores faith, migration, memory, belonging, and queer identity. He is the winner of the 2026 Writers’ Trust RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers in Poetry. His work has appeared in Magdaragat: An Anthology of Filipino-Canadian Writing (Cormorant Books), Beyond the Concert Hall (Laberinto Press), Yay! queer: Free and Queer (Inkd Publishing), The Leaves Still Fallow (Big Thinking Publishing), and other literary publications and anthologies. Renato is the author of the forthcoming memoir Unpriesting (Freehand Books) and the forthcoming poetry collection Eating Rice on Our Feet. He is the managing editor of Salingpusa and the acquisition editor of Constellations of Becoming: Queer Futures and Other Worlds, an anthology of speculative fiction. He lives in Calgary and writes about the stories we inherit, the selves we abandon, and the people who teach us how to begin again. Check his author website: https://www.renatogandia.com

Can you tell us about your emigration journey from the Philippines to Canada in 1997? Did the move inspire you to write, or were you writing in the Philippines?

I came to Canada from the Philippines in 1997 when I was twenty-seven years old. At the time, I wasn’t coming here to become a writer. I had spent years in a Catholic seminary formation, training to become a priest, and was still trying to understand what my life would look like outside the path I had imagined for myself.

Writing actually began long before I immigrated. As a child and young adult in the Philippines, I was an avid reader, and I wrote journals, reflections, and occasional creative pieces. My background in philosophy, literature, and theology also immersed me in language and storytelling. But I didn’t yet think of myself as a writer in the way I do now.

What immigration gave me was perspective. Moving to Canada placed distance between me and the life I had known. Suddenly, I was looking at the Philippines from afar while also trying to make sense of a new country, a new culture, and a new identity. That experience of living between worlds became fertile ground for writing.

Many of the themes that appear in my work today—migration, belonging, faith, family, memory, and identity—grow directly from that experience. As an immigrant, you are constantly translating yourself, not just linguistically but emotionally and culturally. Writing became a way of preserving what I had left behind while also understanding who I was becoming.

So while I was writing before I arrived in Canada, immigration deepened my sense of purpose as a writer. It gave me questions that I am still exploring on the page nearly three decades later.

How has living in Canada, particularly Alberta, influenced your writing? What does poetry mean to you, and what influences it the most?

Living in Canada, and particularly in Alberta, has shaped my writing in profound ways. Alberta is where I learned to see landscape differently. I grew up in the Philippines, where the world felt lush, crowded, and intimate. Then I arrived in a place of vast skies, long horizons, mountains, prairie, and winter. That sense of scale changed me as a writer.

The landscape often finds its way into my work, not simply as scenery but as a way of thinking. The mountains, rivers, and prairies have become metaphors for distance, longing, resilience, and belonging. Alberta is also where I built most of my adult life, so many of the questions I explore in my writing — about immigration, identity, faith, love, and home — have unfolded here.

Poetry, for me, is a way of paying attention.

It helps me slow down and notice what might otherwise be overlooked. Sometimes a poem begins with an image, a memory, or a line of conversation. Other times it begins with a question I cannot answer any other way.

Much of my poetry is influenced by memory, family history, migration, and spirituality. I am interested in how we carry the places we come from, even after we leave them. I am also drawn to the tensions between faith and doubt, belonging and estrangement, loss and grace. As someone who immigrated to Canada, I often find myself writing from that space between worlds—between the Philippines and Canada, between past and present, between who I was and who I am still becoming.

Ultimately, poetry is where I try to make meaning of those experiences. It allows me to hold complexity without forcing easy answers. A poem doesn’t have to solve a mystery; sometimes it simply has to illuminate it.

Can you take us through Magdaragat: An Anthology of Filipino-Canadian Writing? What is the collection about, and what does it speak about Filipino-Canadians?

Magdaragat: An Anthology of Filipino-Canadian Writing brings together Filipino-Canadian writers from across the country, representing different generations, experiences, and literary styles. The title, Magdaragat, means “seafarer” or “one who crosses the sea,” which felt especially fitting for a community shaped by migration.

What I love about the anthology is that it challenges the idea of a single Filipino-Canadian story. Instead, readers encounter many voices speaking about family, migration, identity, work, love, language, belonging, and the complicated experience of living between cultures.

I think the collection shows that Filipino-Canadians are not a monolith. Our stories are diverse, nuanced, and deeply woven into the Canadian experience. At the same time, many of us remain connected to the Philippines in ways that continue to shape who we are and how we see the world.

In your memoir Unpriesting, what have you confronted to write an account of your journey from a small town in the Philippines to a Canadian seminary? As a writer, what was the biggest challenge for you to face the dichotomous tension between religious devotion and queer identity along with loss of love?

Writing Unpriesting required me to confront memory with as much honesty as I could. In its current state, the memoir begins in a small town in the Philippines and follows my journey through thirteen years of seminary formation, immigration to Canada, and ultimately the decision to leave the priesthood. Revisiting those experiences meant returning not only to moments of joy and conviction, but also to disappointment, grief, and uncertainty.

As a writer, the greatest challenge was resisting the temptation to turn the story into a simple conflict between faith and queer identity.

My experience was more complicated than that. I loved my faith. I loved the Church. I sincerely believed I had a vocation. At the same time, I was coming to understand a part of myself that I had spent years trying to suppress or explain away.

The deeper tension was not between devotion and desire, but between the life I had imagined for myself and the truth of who I was. Writing the memoir required me to sit with that complexity and to acknowledge the losses that came with choosing authenticity. There was the loss of a vocation, the loss of certainty, and the loss of relationships that mattered deeply to me.

Ultimately, Unpriesting is not a story about rejecting faith. It is a story about becoming whole. It asks what happens when the life that once gave you meaning can no longer contain who you are becoming, and what it takes to begin again.

In your novel Anatomy of Compersion, you have explored the evolving relationship between a straight woman, her bisexual husband, and her husband’s gay lover, asking if love stretches wide enough to feel the joy of your loved one’s happiness even when the source is someone else. Can you tell us what you have aimed to achieve through this novel?

At its heart, Anatomy of Compersion, is a novel about the limits and possibilities of love. While it explores an unconventional relationship, my goal was never simply to write about polyamory or non-traditional relationships. I was interested in a deeper question: how do we respond when the people we love seek fulfillment beyond us?

The idea of compersion — the ability to feel joy for someone else’s happiness even when we are not its source — became a lens through which to examine love, jealousy, vulnerability, and selflessness. Most of us are taught to think of love in terms of possession or exclusivity. I wanted to explore what happens when those assumptions are challenged.

The novel also asks readers to look beyond labels. A straight woman, a bisexual man, and a gay man may sound like a premise built around identity, but the story is ultimately about very human questions: what do we owe the people we love? Can love expand without diminishing? Is it possible to celebrate another person’s happiness while grieving what it costs us?

I don’t offer definitive answers. Rather, I hope the novel invites readers to sit with those questions and to consider that love may be more complex, generous, and expansive than we often imagine.

Can you tell us about your experience in getting published in Canada as an immigrant writer? What are the challenges, and how can an immigrant writer overcome them?

My experience has been both challenging and rewarding. Like many immigrant writers, I began without the networks or cultural familiarity that often help writers navigate the publishing world. I was also writing in my second language, which sometimes brought an added layer of self-doubt.

One challenge for immigrant writers is the feeling of being caught between worlds.

There can be pressure to explain your culture to one audience while remaining authentic to your own experience. It takes time to realize that you do not have to write the version of your story that others expect. What helped me was persistence. I kept writing, revising, submitting, and learning. I sought out writing communities, attended festivals and workshops, and built relationships with other writers. Over time, I learned that publication is often less about a single breakthrough than about years of steady work.

My advice to immigrant writers is to trust the uniqueness of their perspective. The stories we carry — of migration, family, language, displacement, and belonging — are not limitations; they are strengths. No one else can tell those stories in quite the same way. The challenge is to keep writing long enough to find the readers who need them.

Your poem Psalmody for the Estranged won the 2026 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award. What does this kind of recognition actually mean for you?

Winning the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award was deeply meaningful because it arrived after a ridiculous number of hours of writing, revising, and often working in relative obscurity. Like most writers, I spent a long time wondering whether the stories and poems that mattered to me would ever find a wider audience.

What made the recognition especially significant was that it came for a body of work rooted in experiences that are deeply personal: immigration, faith, family, estrangement, and queer identity. The award felt like an affirmation that these stories matter and that they resonate beyond my own life.

At the same time, I see the award less as an arrival than as an encouragement to keep going. Writing remains an act of curiosity and discovery. The recognition has given me confidence, but more importantly, it has given me a sense that there is a community of readers willing to engage with difficult and deeply human questions.

For me, that is what the award means most: not validation of where I’ve been, but encouragement for where the work might go next.

Within weeks of winning the award, both my memoir and my first poetry collection found publishing homes. The timing made it feel less like a single moment of recognition and more like the culmination of years of work finally finding its readers.

Over the years you have worked as a journalist and government spokesperson and now work in strategic communications. How does your job complement your writing?

I now work in health-care communications. Before that, I worked as a journalist, a government spokesperson, and in communications roles across several sectors. Each of those experiences has influenced my writing in different ways.

Journalism taught me to listen closely, ask better questions, and pay attention to detail. Communications work taught me how to find clarity in complex issues and how to think about audience. Those are skills that transfer directly to creative writing.

At the same time, creative writing gives something back to my professional work. Writing poetry, memoir, and fiction has made me more attentive to voice, emotion, and the stories people tell about themselves and their lives. Whether I am writing a media release or a poem, I am ultimately trying to understand people and communicate something meaningful.

While the forms are very different, both kinds of writing begin with the same impulse: curiosity about the world and the people in it.

Who are your favorite writers and, if you can name any, who have shaped your writing?

There are many writers I admire, but a few have had a particularly strong influence on my work. André Aciman taught me the power of introspection and emotional precision. His work pays close attention to longing, memory, and the inner life, and that has certainly influenced my memoir and fiction.

Ocean Vuong has shown me how lyrical language can carry both beauty and difficult truths. As an immigrant writer, I am especially drawn to the way he writes about family, displacement, and identity with such tenderness and complexity.

I deeply admire Billy-Ray Belcourt for the intellectual and emotional courage of his work. He writes about love, loneliness, identity, and belonging in ways that are both deeply personal and politically aware. His writing reminds me that vulnerability can be a form of strength.

I also admire Ann Napolitano for her ability to create compassionate, deeply human characters. Her novels explore the bonds that connect families and communities, even through grief and conflict, and I find that generosity of spirit inspiring.

What these writers have in common is their willingness to engage with difficult questions while remaining deeply attentive to the human heart. As a writer, that is what I aspire to do as well.

Can you also tell us about your poetry collection Eating Rice on Our Feet?

Eating Rice on Our Feet is my first poetry collection. The poems explore immigration, family, faith, queer identity, and the experience of building a life between the Philippines and Canada.

The title comes from a Filipino expression that evokes movement and resilience. That idea runs throughout the collection, which is interested in journeys — across countries, across identities, and across different stages of life.

At its heart, the book is about belonging: what we carry with us, what we leave behind, and how we learn to make a home in the world.

What’s your message to immigrant writers in Canada? How can one win poetry prizes like you have?

My message to immigrant writers is simple: don’t give up.

Publishing can be a long journey, and rejection is part of the process for every writer.

I sometimes joke that I have a wall of rejection. But when I look at it, I don’t see failure. I see evidence that I kept trying. Every rejection taught me something, pushed me to improve, and reminded me to return to the work with greater discipline and humility.

As for winning poetry prizes, I don’t think there is a formula. The poems that won the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award came out of years of writing, revising, reading, and learning. My goal was never to win an award. My goal was to write poems that felt honest and true.

For immigrant writers especially, I would say this: trust your voice and your story. The experiences that may make you feel different are often the very things that make your work unique. Keep writing, keep submitting, and don’t let rejection have the final word. Sometimes success arrives only after you’ve accumulated enough rejection to wallpaper a room.