Monthly Archives: August 2021

Penman No. 422: An Anti-Troll Army

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Penman for Monday, August 30, 2021

DESPITE THE PANDEMIC, the UP Institute of Creative Writing (UPICW) succeeded in holding the 60th UP National Writers Workshop from August 16 to 21, introducing 12 of the country’s brightest authors to each other and to their literary peers. The fellows for Filipino were Jerking Pingol (graphic fiction); Amado Anthony Mendoza III (novel); Edward Perez (play); Layeta Bucoy (play); Napoleon Arcilla III (short story); and Ma. Cecilia de la Rosa (poetry). Those for English were Joel Donato Jacob (novel); Maryanne Moll (novel); Maria Amparo Warren (short story); Alexandra Alcasid (short story); Mark Adrian Ho (poetry); and Louyzza Maria Victoria Vasquez (poetry). One of Switzerland’s best contemporary novelists (and a fluent speaker of Filipino, having studied here for her master’s), Annette Hug, also joined us for a talk about her current project.

For the second year in a row, the entire workshop was held online over Zoom and livestreamed on Facebook, allowing a much broader audience—some even tuned in from abroad—to follow the sessions. It was a big shift from the workshop’s traditional summer venue in Baguio, but contrary to many apprehensions, it went off smoothly and productively, thanks to the UPICW’s top-notch technical team which seems to have mastered the intricacies of online conferencing (the UPICW holds many other events online, including another workshop for beginning writers, an interdisciplinary book forum, and the annual Writers’ Night). By the end of the workshop, both fellows and panelists agreed that its objectives had been squarely met: to create a community of writers who would encourage each other to keep writing so that literature can train a bright light on the Filipino’s condition. 

Unlike other writers’ workshops, UP’s focuses on what we’ve been calling “mid-career” writers—those who’ve already published at least one book (or have had a play or film produced)—who may need that extra push to keep going, especially in an environment often indifferent if not hostile to creativity. At this level, we’re no longer talking about grammar and basic technique; instead, we discuss the larger issues of writing—social, political, philosophical, and professional—without the flogging and the ego-tripping that made a horror show of workshops in the old days. Writing is lonely enough for writers to make life difficult for each other. In this age of fake news, we need as many truth-seekers as we can find—an anti-troll army, if you will. 

Every workshop and every batch of workshoppers is different in some way (this year, we had a preponderance of fellows from Bicol and the Southern Tagalog region), so the complexion of our discussions can also change. What stuck in my mind from what I read of our fellows’ work (a sample of their current projects, prefaced by their personal poetics) was the strong undercurrent of pessimism, a deep-seated belief that things can only get worse. To be fair, not all of them—indeed just a minority—manifested this, but it’s been such a pervasive strain in literatures all over that I felt obliged to address it.

It’s totally understandable, of course, why people should feel pessimistic, especially in these times of global distress and anxiety. And if it’s the writer’s conviction that all is lost or soon will be, that’s his or her privilege to express.

I posited, however, that in spite and indeed because of these bad times, the greater challenge for writers and artists is to defy despair and find a way forward to hope and happiness. And by “hope and happiness” I don’t mean escapist confections or illusory promises, or tacked-on endings meant to force a smile, but true insights into what makes life worth living and fighting for—despite despotism, disease, and the constant degradation of one’s worth. The easiest thing to write today is another story about how miserable and unjust life is. Reading it won’t tell me anything new. I want to be surprised by someone who will persevere and fight for joy, beauty, peace, freedom, and redemption amid all this suffering. 

Psychologists talk of “cherophobia”—“fear of happiness” or “happiness aversion,” stemming from the expectation that happiness is fragile and fleeting, and will therefore only lead to unhappiness. True, that often happens, as our lives are always in flux, but since life can only lead to death, why are we alive at all? (Even our celebration at the end of the workshop was gutted by the tragic news that Kerima Tariman—our workshop fellow in 1999—had been killed in an encounter with the military; her poetry will live and fight on.) If we are to battle trolls with the truth, we have to believe in ultimate victory, no matter the costs until then, and shore up each other’s spirits.

I urge my fellow authors to look up and read Kelsey Capps’ essay “On Happiness, Literature, and Happy Literature,” where she argues that “The truth that happiness is defined and pursued by each of us, for ourselves, lies between the destruction of what society tells us will make us happy and the acceptance of our inherent need to seek meaning. Perhaps this airy freedom is too difficult to articulate in stories that lack tragedy as counterweight, but, as a writer, how powerful and radical it would be to tell stories that are positive and insightful and authoritative, and which give hope where there is little to be found.”

Penman No. 421: Giving Spirit: A Requiem for Riel

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Penman for Monday, August 16, 2021

WHEN I woke up to the sound of my wife Beng crying as she clutched her phone, I knew instantly what had happened in the night: “Riel is gone,” she said. “Riel” was Ronald Jaramillo Hilario, a sculptor and fellow alumnus of the UP College of Fine Arts. 

No institution in this country has been spared by Covid—every school, office, factory, and hospital will have more than one sad story to tell of unexpected loss and bereavement, of someone who was there with them one minute, laughing and shooting off on the issues of the hour, and then gone seemingly in the blink of an eye.

For the UP College of Fine Arts, it has been an exceptionally terrible year. One after the other, it lost artists and faculty members such as Jak Pilar, Leo Abaya, Joey Tañedo, and Neil Doloricon, and alumni Virgie Garcia and Riel Hilario. The arts community was still reeling from the passing of Neil—one of the stalwarts of social realism in Philippine art—when news of Riel’s death came through, and as she had done much too often since the pandemic began, Beng wept again.

Oddly, neither Beng nor I had actually met Riel—he lived in Lucban with his muse Joyce Campomanes—but he had quite a large digital footprint, from which I gleaned enough, and Beng became a kind of tita figure to him, always ready to lend an ear, albeit online. He was one of those rare artists (Neil Doloricon was another one) who was extraordinarily articulate, and who didn’t hesitate to let the world know what he thought. 

“Art is my religion, and I am a priest of that faith,” he asserted, and his life offered ample proof of that sacerdotal devotion to art—to its creation, its study, and its promotion in a society threatened by destructive and diabolical forces. 

Indeed he looked every inch the part of an avenging angel (and his name summons those winged, sword-bearing creatures), bearded and muscular, with piercing eyes that seemed like they could see right through falsehood and deception. (Lorenzo Gabutina described him as “warrior, sultan, larger-than-life… a Pinoy Thor.”) His sense of mission, his critical intelligence, and his expressiveness may not have made him the easiest person in the room to sit with, but his seriousness was a reminder that art involves far more than decorating the homes of the rich, even as he created playful objects and rebultos that drew on native folklore and religion.

His formal résumé was more than sufficiently impressive. Coming out of the woodcarving tradition of Ilocos Sur, Riel went on to the Philippine High School for the Arts and UP, transitioning from painting to full-time sculpture in 2008. He undertook residencies and explorations in the US and Europe and served as curator for the Boston and Pinto art galleries. He also co-founded Artinformal, an art-education collective. In 2012, he was the winner of the Ateneo Art Awards-Fernando Zóbel Prizes for Visual Art, and in the same year was named one of the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Thirteen Artists. 

Wood sculpture, he told Glenn Martinez, “served as my self-directed therapy following a debilitating episode of manic-depression in 2007. I had schizoid visions and dreams that were terrifying and disturbing. I felt the need to find an outlet that was more tactile than painting or writing. The following year I started carving wood sculptures based on the tradition of the rebulto, but following the urgings and suggestions of my visions. The practice had a cathartic effect and also helped me refocus my cultural work to do research on the craft.”

But as brilliant and productive as his own art was, Riel was also appreciated by his fellow artists for his advocacy of artists’ rights and his generosity toward others. A Facebook page dedicated to his memory and maintained by his relative and close friend Paul, “The Feathered Angel: A Tribute to Riel Hilario (1969-2021),” is full of testimonials to that giving spirit. Riel was on a mission to make sure his fellow artists were never taken advantage of by galleries and dealers, and for them to get their due recognition and respect. (In one recent episode, he recounted how he and Joyce had been turned down by a prominent bank’s branch in Antipolo when they tried to open an account, allegedly because artists can’t show proof of regular income; outraged, he recalled how solicitous the teller was in New York when he presented a $50,000 check for deposit.)

He was still brimming with ideas and plans for the future—having taught at PHSA, he was thinking of teaching at UP—when both he and Joyce were stricken by the virus. From Lucban came desperate calls for help—especially for oxygen—to friends like Glenn Martinez, Jason Moss, and Ricky Francisco. Glenn did what he could from Metro Manila to coordinate assistance, and Riel and Joyce were brought to a hospital in Lucena. But it was too full to accommodate them, and they were sent home. 

Joyce survived; Riel did not. But as one of Riel’s favorite sayings (and mine, from Hippocrates) goes, “Ars longa, vita brevis”—art is long, art endures, as short as our lives may be.

(Images courtesy of Joyce Campomanes)

Penman No. 420: Highlights and Shadows

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Penman for Monday, August 2, 2021

SOMETHING VERY unusual happened to me about a week ago. Driving my little Jimny on my way home to catch a Zoom meeting, I came literally the closest I’d ever been to a quick and fairly simple death.

I was following a student driver who was plodding along at a turtle’s pace. It was a busy street so I couldn’t overtake him, and I resisted the urge to honk my horn, remembering how it was when I was learning how to drive in my Beetle ages ago. We stopped at a corner a couple of blocks from my place, about to go into a main street. The student driver either stalled or stiffened, because he simply didn’t move. I felt my patience wearing thin; my Zoom meeting was about a commercial book project that would earn me some tidy cash (enough to pay, beyond the groceries, for my old books, rusty typewriters, and other toys), and I didn’t want to be even one minute late. 

The left side of the street was open, so I could overtake, but it was a streetcorner and I hesitated. That pause saved my life. 

The student driver inched forward and made a right turn. I drove up right behind him, but had to brake at the tall hump just at that very corner. From my left I saw a big delivery van hurtling down the main street. Its driver had lost control; the van fell on its side, rolled over, and slid straight toward me. I didn’t move forward because I would have been hit if the van hadn’t braked, and I would have even more surely been demolished if I had tried to overtake earlier. Strapped into my seat, there was no time to jump. 

As it was, I froze and, in a cinematic cliché, watched everything happen in slow motion—the van coming, braking, rolling, and coming at me. Strangely I felt very calm. “So this is how I’m going,” I remember thinking, just waiting for the impact. One, two, three—and then the van stopped, a few feet away. I saw the driver raise and wiggle his hand, and then people rushed over. I exhaled a prayer of thanks, parked the car, hurried back to make sure the driver was okay (he was), and then went to my Zoom meeting.

I didn’t tell anyone at that meeting what had just happened to me. We had a very engaging conversation, during which we established that I was not the best fit for the job (nothing to do with money but with stylistic preferences), and I bowed out gracefully, possibly to the surprise of my chatmates, who probably expected me to be more vocally disappointed by the news.

In truth, I felt liberated. For a long time now, I had felt a gnawing urge to put everything else aside and return to my own fiction, to remind myself that I still had a few good stories to tell before I croaked. At 67, I’ve begun to feel my age, in my bones and, more distressingly, in my memory and my reflexes. When I read authors and look up their lives, I can’t help noting the ages at which they published their major works, when they died, and for what reasons. (And no one beats Jose Rizal in these departments.)

That same afternoon, with nothing else on my plate for the first time in a long time, I opened a new document in Word and typed down the first thing that came to my mind, a snippet of a conversation between a young man and an older woman, set in Manila on New Year’s Eve, 1936. I didn’t know these characters or where the story would go, but that’s how I’ve always worked, which sometimes leads to dead ends but always gives me a heightened sense of discovery and anticipation. I don’t want to know what the next page will be like; that’s why I’m writing it, making things up as I go along, looking into the highlights and shadows of the scene for clues and possibilities.

Before I knew it I had started a new novel—the literary form which, I’ve often said, I least enjoy. Each of my past two novels took me years to finish. The first was done for graduate school, the second completed for a competition—neither reason, it seems to me, the best one for writing, although practical necessity can do wonders. To some writer-friends like Charlson Ong (whose White Lady, Black Christ just came out with Milflores Publishing) and Gina Apostol (starting on a new historical project), novel-writing—and doing it well—comes almost as second nature; for me it has been hard labor, because not enough of my true heart was in it. I began a third novel many years ago, and about half of it is done, but I haven’t felt like picking up the pieces just yet.

So I’m starting a totally different one, and to keep from jinxing it I’ll only say further that it will be one that will require common intelligence and not academic cleverness to figure out, that would make a good play or movie for more people to enjoy (take the illustration above as a hint), and—most of all—that will make me feel like my own writing self again, before the next delivery van turns up at the corner. Wish me luck.