Stories that move hearts.
Strategies that shape conversations.
I’m Renato Gandia — a Filipino‑Canadian writer and communications strategist. Through my creative work, I explore memory, identity, and love. Through my communications practice, I help organizations find clarity, build trust, and tell their stories with impact.
Writing
Novels, memoir and short fiction exploring complicated relationships, faith, belonging and love.
Anatomy of Compersion
A 92,000‑word literary novel about a woman, her bisexual husband, and his lover—asking whether love can stretch wide enough to include someone else’s happiness.
Anthologies & Beyond
Published short fiction & essays in Magdaragat, Yay Queer All II, Beyond the Concert Hall, and more.
Gandia Media
Stories that Connect. Strategies that Deliver.
I help organizations craft clear, purposeful stories that connect with people and drive action. With nearly two decades of experience in journalism, government communications, and strategic storytelling, I know how to turn complexity into clarity. Let’s tell your story in a way that resonates.
From the blog
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When “alignment” means silence
A Freedom to Read event was cancelled in Calgary because it was deemed too political. That is not a metaphor. That is the logic offered. During Freedom to Read Week, an event co-organized by the Writers’ Guild of Alberta and The Writers’ Union of Canada — a public reading and discussion about censorship and book banning — lost its venue…
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Between shores, between weathers
We worked remotely from Vancouver for a week, and I carried an umbrella everywhere. Not because it was always raining — but because it might. The sky revised itself daily. Sun in the morning. Grey by noon. Wind that arrived without warning. I stopped trying to predict it. I simply adjusted. There is something honest…
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The first story
The first short story I ever wrote was typed on a manual typewriter my mother bought me when I was in college. Think early 90s. I suppose that sentence alone already dates me. It places me in a time before laptops were ubiquitous, before writing felt weightless and endlessly correctable. The typewriter was heavy in…
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Shortlisted is a strange kind of winning
When I learned that I had been shortlisted for the Open Season Award in Poetry by The Malahat Review, my first instinct was not to celebrate. It was to stay quiet. Not in a dramatic, vow-of-silence way. More in the practical, self-protective way writers learn over time: if you don’t tell anyone, you don’t have…
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Monstress asks: Who gets to create? Who pays the price?
Early in Monstress, a question is spoken that refuses to stay contained. “Am I the monstress?” The line lands not as a confession but as a challenge — one that echoes through the rest of the play and lingers long after the final blackout. Now onstage at Vertigo Theatre, Monstress is written and directed by…
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Not burning the house
It had been more than a year since my husband and I last went to the cinema together. Not the distracted kind of watching—paused scenes, phones within reach—but the deliberate ritual of leaving the house, buying tickets, and sitting in the dark with strangers, allowing a story to have us fully. Somewhere between work, exhaustion,…
About
Calgary‑based writer and communications professional. Former journalist, government spokesperson, and energy‑sector strategist. I write about memory, migration, queerness, and the complexity of love—and I help leaders make clearer, kinder decisions in public.
Published in Magdaragat and Beyond the Concert Hall. Currently finishing Anatomy of Compersion and revising my memoir Unpriesting.
Renato Gandia 