Becoming Part of the Story: Ann van Wijgerden on Poetry, Nature and Belonging in the Philippines
In the green hills of Antipolo, Ann van Wijgerden's attention moved beyond the human world. Birds, insects and forest life changed the way she understood belonging—and revealed the deeper thread running through Dear Planet.
Words by Mye Mulingtapang
Photos courtesy of Ann van Wijgerden
After Tondo, there was Antipolo.
For most of the past eighteen years, Ann van Wijgerden and her husband Paul had a home in the hills on the eastern edge of Metro Manila. The distance between the two places was not simply geographical. In Tondo, much of Ann's attention was drawn towards people: students, families, colleagues, the inequalities surrounding them, and the questions that followed her home. In Antipolo, another world made itself impossible to ignore.
From the balcony, she watched birds. There were insects, reptiles and dense plant life around her. Sometimes she saw eagles. After hours spent confronting the realities of extreme poverty, she found herself listening to a landscape that asked nothing of her except attention.
At first, she understood what nature provided largely in terms of relief.
"The sights and sounds of the natural beauty around us, the birds, insects, reptiles, plant life—were profoundly refreshing and comforting," she recalls.
She believes that without this presence, she and Paul might eventually have been overwhelmed by the suffering and injustice they encountered through their work. Nature gave them somewhere to recover emotionally. But as the years passed, Ann's relationship with the landscape changed. What had begun as refuge became something closer to recognition.
The View From the Balcony
There is an easy way to describe a person watching birds: the human observes; nature is observed.
For a long time, Ann seems to have accepted that arrangement without questioning it. She stood on the balcony and looked outward. The birds flew through the trees. Insects moved through the vegetation. The hills stretched beyond the house.
Then, slowly, the separation began to trouble her.
"At some point it dawned on me that, as far as the natural world was concerned: I was not the outside observer I'd presumed I was. Instead, I am a member."
The word member changed the relationship.
It suggested that the natural world was not scenery surrounding human life. Nor was it something separate that people might choose to protect out of responsibility or environmental virtue. Human beings were already implicated in it, dependent upon systems of life they often behaved as though they owned.
For Ann, this realization did not arrive through environmental theory. It developed through repeated encounters with the living world around her home: watching, listening, breathing the relatively fresh air of the hills and noticing how deeply those surroundings affected her.
The idea also echoed something she had been learning elsewhere.
Years among Filipino families had already unsettled her assumptions about independence. In Tondo, she had encountered forms of interdependence that differed sharply from the British and Dutch cultures in which she had spent much of her life. People relied on siblings, parents, grandparents, relatives and friends. Resources moved through families because survival itself could be collective.
Antipolo enlarged the scale of that idea.
Interdependence did not stop with human beings.
"I am part of this wonderful planet Earth," Ann says. "Now the profound sense of kinship with my fellow humans is accompanied by a growing sense of kinship with the living world around me."
A Matter of Family
This is where the title Dear Planet begins to acquire another dimension.
The word dear can sound slight beside the enormity of environmental crisis. Ann uses it differently. Her relationship with nature is rooted less in abstract obligation than affection—in the recognition that care changes when what is being protected is understood as something to which one belongs.
"When I think of environmental care, it's not some dry matter of duty," she says. "It's a matter of love, a matter of family."
It is an idea that joins seemingly distant parts of her Philippine life.
The families who shared resources in Tondo had shown her one expression of interdependence. The hills of Antipolo revealed another. Both challenged the assumption that survival is primarily an individual achievement.
For Ann, social justice and environmental care therefore became increasingly difficult to separate. Her concern for people living in poverty and her growing attachment to the natural world did not occupy different moral categories. Both came from the same expanding understanding of kinship.
That shift helps explain why Dear Planet contains poems about human suffering alongside poems attentive to the non-human world. They were not assembled to demonstrate a theme. They emerged from the same life.
Some days that life placed Ann in communities where inequality was impossible to ignore. On others, she was back on the balcony, watching birds.
The poems absorbed both.
Ann van Wijgerden and Dear Planet: What the Book Began to Do
By the time Dear Planet appeared as a collection, its poems had already travelled farther than Ann originally imagined.
Some had been published individually in literary magazines in different countries. Others had remained private until she began recognising, around 2023, that they belonged together. The book that followed was published by Fidessa Literary and later distributed in the Philippines through Balangay Books, part of Isang Balangay Media Productions.
But publication introduced an unexpected continuation to the story.
Fidessa Literary's relationship with Ann expanded beyond producing the book. At a Young Focus event in the Netherlands, publishers Anton and Suze brought copies of Dear Planet and proposed a simple arrangement: readers could pay what they wished, with the proceeds going to Young Focus.
The books sold out.
For Ann, what mattered was the connection it created between two parts of her life that had never felt entirely separate in the first place: writing and education.
The partnership later extended to Balangay Books in the Philippines. Its founder visited Young Focus in Tondo, and Ann began imagining other possibilities, particularly for students with ambitions of becoming writers themselves.
She calls what happened a "ripple effect."
The phrase is modest, which suits the book. Dear Planet did not emerge from a plan to change the world. It began with poems written because their author needed somewhere to put what she was noticing, grieving, questioning and loving.
Now those poems were creating relationships of their own.
The Country That Changed the Question
When Ann speaks about returning to the Philippines, she still describes herself as a foreigner. Decades of living and working in the country have not erased that distinction, and she does not seem interested in pretending otherwise.
What has changed is her understanding of what belonging requires.
The Philippines taught her, as she put it earlier in this series, "to look beyond the circumstances to truly see the people." That lesson began among human beings, but it did not remain there.
The longer she stayed, the wider the field of attention became.
There were the young people in Tondo whose futures could not be reduced to the poverty surrounding them. There were families whose generosity challenged her assumptions about what it meant to have enough. There were experiences of injustice she could witness and write about while recognising that they could never become hers to claim.
And then there were the hills.
On the balcony in Antipolo, the distinction between looking at a world and belonging to it began to dissolve. The birds were no longer simply something beautiful to watch after difficult days in Manila. The forest was not scenery beyond the human story. Ann's own life—like every human life—was taking place within the same living system.
It changes the way one reads the title Dear Planet.
The word planet suggests something enormous: oceans, forests, cities, climates, species. But Ann arrived at it through particulars. A bird outside a balcony. A young person carrying a schoolbag. A family sharing what little it has. A poem written privately and left waiting until, years later, it finds the others.
Her poetry began almost forty years ago as a way of making sense of herself. In the Philippines, the questions became larger than the self that first asked them.
The poems eventually found their home together.
Ann, too, had stopped standing outside and looking in.
She was a member.
About Ann van Wijgerden
British by birth, Ann van Wijgerden lives in the Netherlands and the Philippines. She’s had
nonfiction, poetry and fiction published in numerous magazines such as Orion, Orbis, The
Sunlight Press, The Wild Umbrella, Queen’s Quarterly, as well as with Yellow Arrow
Publishing, and was a 2025 Best of the Net nominee. Her debut poetry collection ‘Dear
Planet’ was published by Fidessa Literary in July 2025 and is distributed in the Philippines by
Balangay Books (Isang Balangay Media Productions). Ann co-founded and works for an
NGO called Young Focus www.youngfocus.org, in Manila.
Blogs at:
Cracked Ceiling: https://crackedceiling.blog
Substack: https://substack.com/@annvanwijgerden
Young Focus contact info
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/youngfocus.org/
Email: info@youngfocus.org
Dear Planet available via
Wijgerden/dp/B0FHPNPQ2K?source=ps-sl-shoppingads-
lpcontext&ref_=fplfs&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER
Philippines: https://balangaybooks.com
Manila International Book Fair; booths 2-104 & 2-115 – Isang Balangay Media Productions; September 9-13, 2026, from 10:00 AM - 8:00 PM @ SMX Convention Center Manila.
Comments