a Filipina poet and essayist based in the Philippines, where I embrace life with bipolar disorder and ADHD. My work unpacks the complexities of grief, motherhood, intersections, and relationships. This is a space for poetry, prose, places, people, and small infinities. Join me in inhabiting the human experience – one word at a time.
download my e-book: smol love
a mini-poetry collection
This 27-page chapbook contains 21 poems exploring love’s depths, including 17 previously published ones in local and international media. In these pages, you will find personal favorites such as How I love the world, which became a finalist in the 2023 Greg Grummer Poetry Contest.
Interspersed with photos I took across the years, smol love is a love letter to family, friendship, old bonds, the world, and everything that weaves our shared humanity together. It is a smol offering of connection from one spirit to another, made accessible to everyone – as poetry should be.
Interviews & features
The Hooghly Review
In Conversation with Gretchen Filart
The Isthmus
The Bulb Collective
Recognitions
Published poems
-
First assessment
When the young doctor said, adjusting her thick glasses, “You might have ADHD. I am referring you to a psychiatrist for a final…
-
Ghosting
Welcome to our cityof ghosts who steppedinto the ether, orbitingthe graves of our collectivephantom pain. Missingperson posters as keepsakes. Hypothermia…
-
Memento mori
Ghosts remain even when there is no unfinished business between the departed and the living. Everything—your favorites in a friend’s playlist, your Rumi…
-
Someone told me, “You write from the heart, that’s why everything you write is special”
And I thought, thank godmy heart walks with bandaged calvesthat it knows footprints from fleshwith the same bloody dressing.Thank god…
PUBLISHED PROSE
-
Gardening during a depressive episode
These arms were often ropes that stopped another from looping around someone’s neck. These ears: river mouths where someone’s grief…
-
Poisons
We all desire something lethal to feel alive. In my recurring dreams, snakes entrancing my body. A Philippine Pit Viper…
-
I celebrate my birthday, soaked in rainwater, mothering a sick kid
Thirty-nine years. No longer out for blood – my own, always. No shards hiding in my bag for relief. No…
-
When I send my sexual abuse poems to Western magazines, they always end up rejected
My poems are orphans in blood-stained underwear waiting for an arm to reach inside the dark tunnel of some strange…
from my journal
-
To go forth and multiply
Adjusting his eyeglasses, the priest read Genesis 1:28. “This is the most misunderstood verse in the bible.” I was covering…
-
Letter #27: Twelve
Hello, Lia. You turned 12 today. I am walking in the arid, sticky April dusk, lightweight, thankful. For these lungs…
-
Letter #26: Loving You Like a Haribon
Hello, Lia. By the time you read this, I would’ve told you that I cried in the forest this morning,…
-
The world is f*cked, but I still love it and my soft heart hurts.
Walking in the world with a soft heart after Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation, three deaths, and seeing the poor slapped by systemic failure.
what people say
ABOUT MY WORK
Gretchen writes with a raw, visceral honesty that makes whatever she creates stand out. We’ve selected her poetry and creative nonfiction for publication multiple times over, and Epistemic Lit wouldn’t be the success it is today without Gretchen’s contributions.
Gretchen’s unparalleled gift to weave emotions into her stories that jump out of the screen is both a source of envy and inspiration. I’ve found myself in a variety of states after engaging with her words—weeping, writing with renewed energy, and vowing to never call myself a writer again.
Gretchen is our ice-breaker for Tales from the Bakunawa because her work is stellar, and it was perfect for the opening piece.
