Tag Archives: hope

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. 369: Meaning in the Many

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Penman for September 2, 2019

 

IN MY fiction writing classes, until I recently retired, I often began the semester with what I thought was a generous offer, or actually a challenge: I would give flat 1.0 to anyone who could submit a well-written story with a happy ending—not some contrived finale with God scooping the hero out of harm’s way on the last page, but something the reader could believe in, something that would give reason for hope in the human condition, or at least the human future.

How many students, do you imagine, found their way to that happy ending and to that glittering 1.0 all these years? None, not a single one. It wasn’t for lack of talent—I did hand out a few 1.0’s for other reasons—but it seems that a believably happy story has become the hardest thing to write in these times in which the political has compounded the personal. As my students’ stories keep repeating, people feel trapped in situations and relationships that diminish their self-worth. In the age of the Internet, which is supposed to connect strangers instantaneously across the planet, many feel lonelier than ever, unable to keep up or blend in with the crowd, which always seems made up of happier, smarter, and richer people.

Everyone says they want the truth, which others—including governments and peddlers of this and that—are laboring to obscure, but when they do find it, they can’t deal with the consequences. The only ones smiling are those in power, who feel they can get away with murder, because no one else is strong and whole enough to stand up to them. As someone else sagely noted, despots feed on people’s despair.

In recent conversations over coffee with friends—chats overcast by a spate of deaths in the literary family and by a growing despondency over our political situation—the question was inevitably asked: so what can we do? How can we recover and offer hope, and find some happiness amidst hardship and despair?

To cut a long and complicated discussion short, I’ve resolved that, at the minimum, my aim will simply be to survive all the bad people and the bad stuff. I shall keep myself healthy and sane, and do things that not only give me personal pleasure—an admittedly selfish but vital element of happiness and well-being—but also help others, which can yield even greater satisfaction, as you find meaning in the many.

I know that that’s easier for me to say and to execute, as a 65-year-old retiree who’s been through enough, has hit most of his life goals, and could croak tomorrow without too much commotion. Easier, that is, than a 22-year-old with a troubled home life, a shaky job that barely pays for gas and fares, and the crushing pressure to conform and be another nobody.

But it’s certainly true that for my generation, we were ever aware that the world was larger than ourselves, and that it didn’t owe us a living, so we had work and fight for everything, and while we bitched like hell about the general crappiness of life, we were thankful for every scrap that fell our way, and prepared to fight and bitch some more the next day. We sought out kindred spirits and sang songs together, finding solace in community and in the sobering realization that many others had it worse. We found relief from our personal troubles by relieving the greater needs of others.

That may all sound peachy and preachy, platitudes that roll smoothly off the tongue forty or thirty years after one’s last rolled papaya-leaf cigarette or shot of watery gin. But it’s true: we tried to be as strong and as tough as we could, individually, but didn’t mind admitting to a soft spot here and there, maybe even turning that into an affectation (dare we say an art) like poetry, or music, or, for others, activism and public service. Whatever we had, we shared with an audience. And if sometimes we didn’t even get so much as a thank-you or a polite couple of claps, well, we could always say we belonged to a cool and tight fraternity of the underappreciated, like Poe and Baudelaire. Misery loves company, but we didn’t just stay miserable—we made something out of it, something even approaching bliss.

So in line with my new mantra of starting local and starting small, Beng and I will devote ourselves to family and community, beginning with our apu-apuhan Buboy, who’ll turn three this month, working with his parents to ensure that he’ll get a good and sensible education while we can help it—not just in school, but around the house and at the dinner table. I’ll be telling him things like “Respect food, and finish what’s on your plate. Eat fish and vegetables. Love cars—toys or real ones—but respect pedestrians. Respect working people, your parents most of all. Do things yourself. Do the right thing even when no one’s looking, and even when everyone else is doing wrong.”

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There’s reason for hope if we each do the right thing in our own lives, and not yield too easily and too soon to the clamors of submission and self-annihilation.(There’s always somebody else who deserves to go before we do.) We are not alone.