On March 27, 2026, I joined Manuel Noel Ferrer on Level Up over Radyo Katipunan 87.9 FM, together with filmmaker, poet, photographer, and author Nic Deocampo. What began as a conversation about two very different books became a wider discussion about culture, identity, memory, and the stories people carry.
The episode was presented as a book conversation featuring Nic Deocampo’s Shards of Desire: A Collection of Queer Poems & Photographs and my book, Culturally Intelligent Storytelling for Southeast Asian Creators. Although the books emerged from different creative traditions, both examine how stories carry culture and how personal and collective identities shape what audiences understand.
The full conversation is embedded below so visitors can watch it directly on nedlegaspi.com without leaving the C3 Journal.
Watch the Full Conversation
Level Up with Noel Ferrer, streamed on March 27, 2026, on Radyo Katipunan 87.9 FM. The video is embedded using YouTube’s privacy-enhanced player.
About the Conversation
Noel Ferrer guided the discussion across the distinct but intersecting worlds of Nic Deocampo’s poetry and photography and my work on culturally intelligent storytelling. Nic’s book is rooted in queer experience, personal memory, and visual expression. Mine proposes a framework for understanding how stories travel across cultures and why some narratives resonate more deeply than others.
The conversation moved beyond conventional book promotion. It became an exchange about the cultural responsibilities of artists, the relationship between identity and form, and the different ways creative work can hold memory, challenge assumptions, and create connection.
One question remained central throughout: Not all stories that travel actually connect. What allows a story to move beyond reach and achieve resonance?
Stories today move faster and farther than ever. But moving far is not the same as connecting deeply.
Key Ideas from the Conversation
Several themes connected the two books and the wider discussion:
- Stories do not become global by becoming generic.
- Cultural specificity can create deeper universal resonance.
- Poetry, photography, and narrative frameworks can illuminate the same human questions from different directions.
- Stories carry culture whether they are written, photographed, performed, or taught.
- Reach gets a story out into the world, but resonance is what makes it matter.
Why This Conversation Matters
This appearance became an important public articulation of a principle that continues to guide my work: stories are never culturally neutral. They emerge from particular histories, languages, relationships, and experiences, even when they eventually travel far beyond their place of origin.
Placing Nic Deocampo’s deeply personal and visually rooted work beside a framework for cross-cultural storytelling showed that creative works do not need to resemble one another to belong in the same conversation. What connected them was a shared belief that stories carry culture and that authentic connection begins with understanding where a story is rooted.
Why It Belongs in the C3 Journal
The C3 Journal brings together written reflections, audio conversations, and video appearances because knowledge does not live in only one format. Some ideas are best developed in essays. Others become clearer through dialogue.
By embedding the full video here, the original broadcast remains accessible while also becoming part of a wider knowledge archive around culture, communication, connection, storytelling, and the public life of ideas.
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