With ‘zero resources for Filipino kids’, Pinoy teacher publishes Filipino books

As a Filipino teacher in a Catholic school with almost a thousand kids from the Philippines, Eric Tigley couldn’t find any Tagalog books as resource materials, so he started a publishing company of his own.

“They had no resources, zero resources for Filipino kids”, said Tigley, from St. Paschal Baylon Catholic School near Steeles and Yonge Street in North York.

With a background in animation and graphic design, Tigley “decided to use both skills, and combine the two” to produce books.

Back in 2016, he said that a lot of publishers told him that nobody wanted ‘Filipino stuff’.

Undaunted, his response was “I’m not gonna care about anybody else right now. I’m just going to do whatever I want. That’s why I started my publishing company Yeti Arts.”

Yeti Arts is a boutique publishing studio comprised of professional artists and educators collaborating with youth to grow their ideas within a professional setting.

The first book he published–Round Brown Blues–was a minor success. Tigley stripped the book’s characters of people and gender.

“That’s why it’s all shapes,” he said. Round Brown Blues “follows a toy cylinder that wonders if there is more to life than its original purpose”, according to the website.

The book retails for $5, and can be purchased through the website.

Tigley’s second book was a Filipino activity book called “Hoy” (meaning “hey”).

Designed and illustrated by Tigley, the book is an homage to the Philippines: over 60 pages of history and culture of the country presented in fun ways such as mazes, colouring pages, Baybayin script writing and mythical creatures.

Tigley also helped publish “Bodies of Water”, a fictional book from writer Yves Lamson, a first generation Filipino-Canadian writer.

“Lamson’s mythological revisionist fiction aims to preserve the intangible histories of the Philippine oral tradition”, according to the website.

At times historical, but infused with magic, “Bodies of Water” takes from the Philippine oral tradition to spin tales of fantastic creatures. It retails for $25.

“(It was) the same story, where the book got denied by a lot of publishers. They don’t want to hear from Filipinos back in 2016,” Tigley said.

Nowadays, Tigley said the publishing world has changed. “Publishers are now trying to fill their BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) quota, even though the demand has always been there.”

“It took them long enough,” he said.

Tigley is writing two more books: one will be about noses as “Filipinos always talk about our flat noses”, and the other book will be a Filipino-American book.

“I do way better in the United States,” he revealed. Tigley travels to San Francisco, New Jersey, New York and Hawaii to promote and sell his books.

“I go everywhere the Filipinos are. I do way better there (in the U.S.) than here. I (get) more positive reception.”

When asked why, Tigley said it’s because the Filipino community in the United States is bigger.

“They have Filipino-American history. They’re so generational that you’ll have lolos and lolas (grandpas and grandmas) who don’t speak Tagalog. They’ve been there so long. So they need stuff like this. They’re finding back their heritage, they have money to spend, and they want it.”

Here in Canada, Tigley thinks that we’re still “finding ourselves. We’re not ‘there’ yet”.