Novel
Anatomy of Compersion
When journalist Claire Moretti stumbles upon a dating app notification on her husband’s phone, her world begins to fracture. Patrick, a beloved Calgary morning show host, insists on normalcy, but Claire cannot unsee the glow of that screen in the dark. As their son Ethan battles relentless bullying at school, Claire finds unexpected solace in Ethan’s compassionate teacher, Nathaniel—only to discover he is the very man who has captured Patrick’s heart.
Caught in the crosscurrents of secrecy, longing, and betrayal, Claire must navigate not only her unraveling marriage but also the profound question of whether love can expand instead of break. Adding to the tension is her brother Olivier, a Catholic priest and the favored child in their family, who hides a forbidden love of his own—for Patrick.
Set against the sharp winters and vast skies of Alberta, Anatomy of Compersion is a lyrical novel about desire, family, and the radical possibility of compersion: finding joy in another’s joy, even when it threatens everything you thought you knew about love.
Memoir
Unpriesting (formerly Redeeming Renato)
Unpriesting is a memoir of faith, desire, and the cost of living truthfully.
At seven years old in a small Philippine town, Renato survived typhoid fever and made a vow before his community: he would become a priest. That promise shaped his life, propelling him into the seminary. But as he grew, so did the tensions between his devotion and his desire. First loves bloomed in hidden corridors. Friendships became betrayals. Whispered gossip hardened into official suspicion.
Exiled from his seminary in the Philippines after exposing rule-breaking classmates, Renato migrated to Canada to continue formation. In Edmonton and Kamloops, he wrestled with vocation in the cold distances of a new country, navigating loneliness, attraction to fellow seminarians, and the unrelenting demand to silence his sexuality. Along the way, mentors extended grace, while anonymous letters and accusations threatened to undo him.
When he finally came out to a priest-director—My sexual orientation is homosexual—Renato confronted the ultimate rupture: to deny his truth or to leave behind the life he had built his identity on. Choosing authenticity over obedience, he stepped away from ordination, crossing not just borders of nation and church, but of self.
A story of migration and memory, shame and resilience, Unpriesting asks what is lost—and what is gained—when one dares to abandon a sacred calling in order to live honestly. It is a testament to how holiness can exist outside the walls of the church, and how love, even when forbidden, can be its own sacrament.
Anthologies & Beyond
My writing appears in acclaimed anthologies and literary collections that celebrate diasporic memory, queer identity, and the evolving landscape of Filipino-Canadian storytelling.
This year, the following short stories were published in anthologies and a digital magazine:
“The Hikers” in The Leaves Still Fallow: An Anthology of Queer Love (Big Thinking Publishing, 2025), a celebration of Queer Love in all its forms – romance, friendship, found family, and the quieter, everyday acts of care that hold us up. The anthology has an autumnal theme.
“The Librarian” in Yay! All Queer (Vol. 2, 2025), a story of a trans Filipina embroiled in a mistaken identity and the pains of familial erasure.
“Unkind Smiles ” in ginger & smoke, a digital publication dedicated to reclaiming Filipino folklore, mythology, and fairy tales—retelling them with new fire while honouring their roots, blurring genres where fantasy and speculative fiction burn brightest.
My short memoir “Tubigan, Tumbang Preso, Taguan, and Other Preludes to a Trauma” appears in Magdaragat: An Anthology of Filipino-Canadian Writing (Cormorant Books, 2024), the first collection to gather Filipino-Canadian voices from across the country—an ocean of stories bound by language, memory, and migration.
Forthcoming works include:
- “What the Wind Remembers” in Beyond the Concert Hall (Laberinto Press, 2026), a meditation on silence, sound, and the echoes of intergenerational trauma.
- “What You Don’t Burn” and “Wind Prophets” in an upcoming issue of Milk Bag Magazine.
- A contribution to Gathering Our Breath, an anthology reflecting on resilience, healing, and the collective strength found in community.
My poems have also been published in local and community-based journals across Alberta exploring the sacred and the ordinary in the lives of migrants, lovers, and dreamers—verses rooted in the soil of memory and the ache of belonging.
Through fiction and poetry, Renato continues to write at the crossroads of faith, queerness, and diaspora—crafting stories that ask what it means to love, remember, and become whole across worlds.
Poetry
For years, poetry felt like the language I wasn’t meant to speak. I wrote in fragments, erased as quickly as I scribbled, convinced I had no right to keep a poem. But silence, I learned, is never the end. It’s only the pause before another beginning.
My poems now emerge from memory, migration, and the in-between spaces of identity. They ask what it means to carry faith, desire, and loss across borders; how the cadence of Tagalog inflects English; how a single image—of water, of stone, of a face—can hold both grief and possibility.
My work has appeared in POV, the Chinook Poetry Contest 2025, and Salingpusa.com, with new poems forthcoming in the anthology Gathering Our Breath. These pieces live alongside my fiction and memoir, but they carry their own rhythm: distilled, urgent, attentive to silence as much as sound.
Here, I return to poetry not as refusal but as fidelity—to language, to presence, and to the hope that a poem can still surprise me into being.
Here’s a poetry selection.
Renato Gandia 