Qwertyman No. 122: On Writing as a Profession

Posted on December 2, 2024 by penmanila

Qwertyman for Monday, December 2, 2024

FOLLOWING THROUGH on last week’s piece about the challenges faced by creative writers trying to make a living in this country, let me share some further thoughts on that topic that I wove into my Rizal Lecture last week at the annual congress of Philippine PEN. My talk was titled “The Living Is in the Writing: Notes on the Profession of Writing in the Philippines.”

Our writers of old made a profession of writing, often by working as journalists, speechwriters, and PR people at the same time that they wrote poems, stories, novels, and essays on the side. Some also taught, and of course some writing comes with that territory, but with teaching you get paid for your classroom hours than for your word count. (To which I should also add, so much of the writing that our literature professors do today is understandable only to themselves.)

Our best and most prolific writers lived by the word and died by it. The two who probably best exemplified this kind of commitment to writing—and nothing but writing—were Nick Joaquin and his good friend Frankie Sionil Jose. Both were journalists and fictionists (in Joaquin’s case, a poet and playwright as well). We can say the same for Carmen Guerrero Nakpil and Kerima Polotan, as well as for Gregorio Brillantes, Jose Lacaba, Ricky Lee, Alfred Yuson, Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo, and Charlson Ong, among others.

These were all writers whom you never heard to claim, as has been recent practice, that “I am a poet!” or “I am a fictionist!” They were all just writers, for whom the practice of words was one natural and seamless continuum, and a profession they mastered just as well as we expect doctors, engineers, mechanics, and lawyers to do. This was also when journalists could be poets who could also be politicians and even reformers, revolutionaries, and heroes.

This was paralleled in other arts such as painting, where artists such as Juan Luna, Fernando Amorsolo, and Botong Francisco routinely accepted commissions to support themselves and any other personal undertakings. (Of course, this was well within the old Western tradition of writers and artists having wealthy patrons to help keep them alive and productive.)

But then came a time when, for some reason, creative and professional writing began to diverge, as creative writing withdrew from the popular sphere and became lodged in academia, where it largely remains today. Professional writing, or writing for, money, came to be seen as the work of hacks, devoid of art and honor. Even George Orwell urged writers to take on non-literary jobs such as banking and insurance—which incidentally T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens did, respectively—rather than what he called “semi-creative jobs” like teaching and journalism, which he felt was beneath them. (Orwell himself worked as a dishwasher in Paris, where he wryly observed that “nothing unusual for a waiter to wash his face in the water in which clean crockery was rinsing. But the customers saw nothing of this.”)

An attitude of condescension soon emerged among poets and fictionists who looked down on journalists as a lesser breed—something I have always warned my students against, having been a journalist who had to turn in a story, any story, by 2 pm every day on pain of losing my job. Never knock journalists. Let’s not forget that when it comes to facing real dangers brought on by one’s written word, poets and fictionists have it easy. The last Filipino novelist who was shot for what he wrote was Jose Rizal; the only writers dying today are our journalists and broadcasters in the hinterlands offending the local poobahs. Governors and generals read newspapers, not novels; they are impervious to metaphor.

Professional writers, on the other hand, saw creative writers as artsy dilettantes enchanted by fancy words and phrases that no one else understood and very few people paid for. Creative writers took it as a given that they were wedded to a life of monastic penury, unless they had another skill or job like teaching, doctoring or lawyering, or marrying into wealth. It even became a badge of honor of sorts to languish in financial distress while reaping all manner of writing honors, in the misguided notion that starving artists produced the finest and most honest work.

The fact is, both are two sides of the same coin, which is the currency of public persuasion through words and language. One is an artist, the master of design; the other is the artisan or craftsman, the master of execution. Both can reside in the same person, unless you’re foolish enough to disdain one or the other. You can produce great art, if you have the talent, the discipline, and the hubris for it; but you can also live off your artistic skills, if you have the talent, the discipline, and the humility for it.

(That said, I have to report that in my forty years of teaching creative writing, some of the students who find it hardest to switch to fiction are journalists, who just can’t let go of the gritty and often linear reality they’ve been accustomed to; poets come next, those who feel preciousness in every word and turn of phrase, so much that they can’t move from one page to the next without agonizing, or, going the other way, without drowning us in verbiage.)

This was why, more than twenty years ago, I designed and began teaching an undergraduate course at the University of the Philippines called “CW198—Professional Writing.” Mainly intended for Creative Writing and English majors who had very little idea of their career options after college aside from teaching, the course syllabus includes everything from business letters, news, interviews, and features to brochures, scripts, speeches, editing, publishing, and professional ethics. The first thing I tell them on Day One is this: “There is writing that you do for yourself, and writing that you do for others. Don’t ever get the two mixed up.”

Qwertyman N0. 117: Our Best Books Forward

Posted on October 28, 2024 by penmanila

Qwertyman for Monday, October 28, 2024

NOW ON its 76^th year, the Frankfurter Buchmesse (FBM)—better known outside Germany as the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world’s oldest and largest such event—ended successfully last October 20 with a significant representation from the Philippines, which sent scores of authors, publishers, and book industry officials to the fair. All that was in preparation for FBM 2025, when the Philippines will be Guest of Honor (GOH), the country whose literature will be the focus of the fair’s attention.

You can think of the Frankfurt Book Fair as the Olympics of the global book industry, with over 200,000 participants (book industry persons and the public) representing over 100 countries. However, there are no prizes for Best Novel, Best Nonfiction Book, Best Children’s Book, and so on. Everyone is effectively in competition with everyone else, but the real rewards are in the professional and personal connections made between and among authors, publishers, agents, editors, and translators at the fair, connections that materialize into deals for translation and publication rights. Although exhibited books can be sold at the close of the fair, the FBM isn’t meant to sell books, but rights to books, for which it has become the world’s oldest and largest marketplace. This means that, through the right contacts, Filipino books can be translated into and sold in French, Turkish, Spanish, and Urdu editions, etc. and vice versa.

Becoming GOH is a signal distinction—but it doesn’t come free. Nations vie and pay for the honor, which this year went to Italy and in 2026 will go to the Czech Republic. I’m sure that there have been and will be more criticisms of our participation in Frankfurt, chiefly of the costs of our foreign exposure vs. the local promotion of our literature, but it’s not a zero-sum game. We need both kinds of investments. We have impressive literary production from all over the country—much of it unknown even to ourselves—but we also need to share the best of it with the world, to raise their understanding of the Filipino above the stereotypes they know (Imelda’s shoes, Manny Pacquiao, DHs, cruise ship crewmen, etc.—not all of them bad, for sure, especially our OFWs, but in need of context).

If FBM 2024 was any indication, FBM 2025 will be an even more resounding success for the Philippines. All literary genres were represented this year in terms of books and panel discussions, and valuable connections were made with European publishers, translators, and agents. Philippine literature will never be the same after this. (This year’s upshot for me is that my novel Soledad’s Sister will be coming out soon in Spanish, after its versions in Italian, French, and German.)

Having followed trends in international publishing for some time, I’m particularly impressed by the way the FBM has helped to promote our new writing by young authors in literary categories that have traditionally received less attention compared to what I’ve called “the big white whale” of publishing, the novel. Approach most publishers and agents at the FBM, and what they’ll ask you is, “Where’s your novel?” For primarily commercial reasons, the novel remains the most saleable and traded commodity at book fairs. (I know many who will wince at my reference to books as commodities, but let’s be absolutely clear about this: the bottom line of book publishing and book fairs is business, not “Kumbaya”-type international peace and understanding.)

Sadly, however, Filipinos have historically not been a novel-writing, novel-buying, and novel-reading people. In this respect, Rizal’s Noli and Fili are aberrations, familiar to us only and thankfully because of the law requiring their study. That said, our writers are masters of the short literary forms—poetry and the short story in particular. I’ve often remarked that we Pinoys are world-class sprinters, not marathoners; our world-view is not Olympian, but pedestrian, formed close-quarters at street level.

This year, I’m told that over 70 deals were made between Filipino authors and foreign agents and publishers for the translation and publication of works that went well beyond the traditional novel, including children’s stories (another of our strongest suits) and genre and graphic fiction. These authors were young, and some had their works translated from languages other than English. If anything, this surge in translations, long overdue, is one strategic benefit that our FBM participation has enabled, and our GOH status next year should boost it even further.

According to FBM Director Juergen Boos, “I am very excited about the Philippines’ Guest of Honor presentation in 2025. The motto ‘The imagination peoples the air’ resonates with the universality of storytelling. Even though the Philippines is the world’s thirteenth largest nation with more than 109 million citizens, I believe for many of us in Europe, Philippine literature is currently still rather unknown territory. As the country steps into its role as Guest of Honor, we will learn a lot about the importance of storytelling and today’s cultural scene for Philippine civil society. With an incredible 183 different languages spoken on its 7,641 islands, the country’s diverse influences are one of the aspects I am looking forward to seeing in Frankfurt in 2025.”

I did say that there are no prizes awarded at the FBM, but I have to correct that to acknowledge the Diagram Group Prize for the Oddest Title at the FBM, given since 1978 and now voted upon by the public, and won by such books as Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice, The Joy of Chickens, How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art, and If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start with Your Legs. This is not a prize to which Filipino writers have so far aspired, but who knows? Pinoy wackiness (alongside wisdom) knows no bounds.

Many thanks to the National Book Development Board, the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, the German literary organization LitProm, culture champion Sen. Loren Legarda, and our other sponsors and supporters for this great opportunity to put our best books forward on the global stage. Mabuhay!

Penman No. 451: A Harvest of Books

Posted on June 4, 2023 by penmanila

Penman for Sunday, June 4, 2023

IF YOU’RE reading this on this Sunday morning, then it’s not yet too late for you to find a cab and get yourself over to the World Trade Center in Pasay City to catch the last day of the Philippine Book Festival, and have your favorite Filipino authors sign their books for you.

Organized by the National Book Development Board (NBDB) in partnership with the National Library and other agencies and organizations, the PBF will showcase the best of new Philippine writing and publishing, with the bonus of having most of the authors around for signings, chats, and the now-obligatory selfies.

Since the Internet took off thirty years ago, people have been declaring that “Books are dead!” (And even before that, “The Author is dead!”—although, of course, not quite in that almost literal sense). Well, guess what—both are very much alive, whole new generations of them, as if the Internet never happened. I don’t have the hard figures to show—I’m sure the NBDB has them—but just from what I’ve seen at the past Manila International Book Fairs (the next one of which will be held in September), there’s much more new writing and publishing happening now than there was before the Internet.

There are many drivers for that, one of which has to be the proliferation of writing programs and workshops, whose graduates really succeed only when they come out with books. (Like I often remind Creative Writing grad students who take forever to “perfect” their thesis projects, “You’re writing for no more than five readers—your dissertation committee—and when you’re done, your thesis will be sitting on a solitary shelf. Just do what you need to pass the damned defense and focus on producing your first book out of that draft! Your real examiners will be your readers.”)

Another factor is the growth of the publishing industry, which has become much more diversified in terms of ownership, material, and audience. The long years of martial law drove much creative output underground, so to speak, with few available venues for literary publishing and only competitions like the Palancas providing incentives for continued production. (On the other hand, the government presses kept churning out books on the First Couple’s abounding wisdom.) Post-EDSA, the pent-up dam broke, and literature flourished, but still hardly on the scale we’re seeing today.

I suspect that’s because many new players have gone into publishing, finding niche markets for everything from religious and self-help books to graphic novels and high-end coffee-table books. Among these, I’d count Milflores Publishing, founded by the late Tony Hidalgo and now in the hands of the very capable Andrea Pasion-Flores. Balangay Books, focused on local literature, has been opening doors for new young authors, and belongs to the Indie Pub Collab PH, a group of independent publishers. Down south, Savage Mind Bookshop and the Ateneo de Naga University Press have made great strides in literary publishing not just in the Bicol region but well beyond. Emerging in the wake of the Pink Revolution, San Anselmo Publications has made a name for itself as a purveyor of progressive thought. A recent visit to OMF Literature’s bookshop and office along Boni Avenue showed me how Christian literature is flourishing, attracting both new authors and readers.

Let’s not forget self-publishing, which with such new technologies as print-on-demand and e-books has outgrown the stigma of “vanity” publishing and has produced both commercial and critical successes. While overall quality remains highly variable, the free Internet has empowered and enabled a new generation of young people to feel like they can become “writers” by posting on such sites as Wattpad—and some of them will be. (The irony here is that, as on Amazon, writers who succeed in their e-book debuts then get picked up by publishers of physical books.) Professional design and editorial outfits such as Studio 5 and Perez NuMedia also exist to help individuals and institutions turn their ideas into prizewinning books.

And then of course the long-established big-name publishers and academic publishers are still around: Anvil Publishing, UP Press, Ateneo de Manila University Press, UST Publishing House, and the University of San Carlos Press, among others. Vibal Publishing has produced impressive and sumptuously printed historical books—as has, let’s not forget, the National Historical Commission. They remain the publishers of choice for what might generally be considered prestigious but non-commercial projects, although their marketing savvy has vastly improved, from book design to distribution (much of the bookselling has moved online, to Shopee and Lazada). But since the wait at these publishing houses tends to be long, even established Filipino authors like novelist Charlson Ong (White Lady, Black Christ) have gone with such alternatives as Milflores (as did I, in its previous incarnation), which can often provide speedier results with no sacrifice of quality.

One more thing: more Filipino authors have begun to get published and noticed abroad, beyond America. Note the recent publication of Ulirát: The Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines, edited by Tilde Acuña et al., and the South Africa-based Jim Pascual Agustin’s Waking Up to the Pattern Left by a Snail Overnight, both by Gaudy Boy in Singapore. Singapore is also where Penguin Random House SEA is based, and from where it published Danton Remoto’s novel Riverrun and his book of stories The Heart of Summer(aside from his translations of our classic works in Filipino), and Maryanne Moll’s novel The Maps of Camarines. I’m also happy to report that my novel Soledad’s Sister just came out in a German hardcover edition (as Last Call Manila) from Transit Buchverlag, following earlier editions in Italy, France, and the US. A 15^th-anniversary edition of the novel, along with a new edition of my Voyager collected stories, are on sale at PFB—as are almost all of the books I mentioned here, with their authors on hand to sign them.

So wait no further and grab that ride to the WTC, for your share of this bountiful harvest of Filipino books. (Did I say that entrance is free?)

Penman No. 422: An Anti-Troll Army

Posted on August 30, 2021 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, August 30, 2021

DESPITE THE PANDEMIC, the UP Institute of Creative Writing (UPICW) succeeded in holding the 60^th 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. 401: A Workshop Against All Odds

Posted on November 23, 2020 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, November 23, 2020

THE UNIVERSITY of the Philippines National Writers Workshop has taken place every year—usually around Holy Week—since the mid-1960s, even during the years of martial law. For many young Filipino writers, it has been their initiation into the literary community, providing them with an opportunity to get their work read and critiqued by their peers and seniors.

For some time now, the UP workshop has been aimed at what we’re calling “mid-career” writers—somewhat older writers who’ve already published at least one book. As I’ve often remarked, the only thing harder than writing your first book is writing your second one, and that’s when struggling writers need some help and encouragement to get over the hill.

We were all set to hold the workshop last April in Baguio, our usual venue, when the Covid pandemic struck, rendering any kind of live meeting reckless and stupid. We could have just written this year off, but we decided to try and move the whole week-long program online, via Zoom, and see if it could work.

I’m happy to report that, against all odds, it did. From October 19 to 23, we on the teaching staff of the UP Institute of Creative writing engaged with 12 fellows chosen as among the best representatives of their generation: Kathleen Osias (Fiction, English), Herlyn Alegre (Creative Nonfiction, English/Filipino), Christine Lao (Poetry, English), Honeylyn Joy Alipio (Screenplay, Filipino), Emmanuel Barrameda (Novel, Filipino), Emmanuel Dumlao (Novel, Filipino), Maynard Manansala (Play, Filipino), Jonellie Santos (Fiction, English), Raissa Claire Falgui (Fiction, English), Fatrick Tabada (Screenplay, Filipino), Glenn Diaz (Fiction, English), and Johanna Michelle Lim (Creative Nonfiction, English).

I knew three or four of these names—Glenn Diaz’s debut novel, The Quiet Ones, began in my class and went on to win a raft of prizes, and I had written admiringly about the Fatrick Tabada-scripted movie, Patay Na si Hesus. But I was glad to encounter many other talents new to me, such as the Cebu-based Johanna Michelle Lim, whose essay about living with vitiligo (the condition of albinos) was written with deep insight and artistry, and to discover new facets in such writers as Christine Lao, a lawyer who had studied Fiction with me but has more recently been known for her poetry.

In the workshop, we ask the fellows to preface their works with a short essay on the why’s and how’s of their craft, and it was interesting to see how Christine approached her poetry from a lawyer’s point of view:

“One of the first things a law student in the Philippines learns is to produce case digests. A case digest is a summary of a court decision. There is a prescribed order in which information about the case is presented: first, a brief statement of relevant facts; second a statement of the disputed issue; third, the court’s decision; and fourth, the arguments in support of that decision. The practice of ‘digesting’ cases trains the student to think in a linear fashion—to recognize only those facts and arguments that support how the court disposed of—that is, terminated—the case. The student learns to follow the intricacies of a court’s legal argument, but at the expense of context or the consideration of counternarratives. Only those facts that are deemed relevant or material to the issue at hand are considered; those that are not are erased from the narrative. One learns that to win a case, one must excise certain details from the narrative, and enhance others that might allow for one’s cause to become legible to the court as a viable legal claim.

“The case digest, therefore, is form, a technology that allows students to recognize resemblances between cases, claims, and positions. But the form produces a particular product or end—one that is driven by the desire to win, even if this means erasing facts. What if, instead of using legal terms in the context of a case digest, I wrote them as, or in the context of, poems about the law?”

There are downsides, of course, to a workshop-by-Zoom. The fellows understandably lamented the loss of a chance to bond as a batch over beer under the pine trees, and as anybody who’s used Zoom for an extended period of time knows, talking to a gallery of two-dimensional faces isn’t exactly enlivening. But to be honest, I and a few others found the format adequate and even appealing, because it was efficient, and being-home-based, allowed you to get back to whatever else you were doing without having to travel and deal with hotels and such.

Whether we’ll need to do this again next year will depend on a host of larger factors, as will everything else in our academic and professional lives. But we have to count it as a minor triumph that we were able to pull this off at all—literature and good writing just won’t be locked down or quarantined.

On that note, I’d like to invite you all to a webinar on November 30, 1:30 pm on “The State of Philippine Literature in the Time of Pandemic,” sponsored by, among others, the Philippines Graphic. The keynote will be delivered by National Artist Frankie Sionil Jose, and literary editor and critic Lito Zulueta and I will give responses. It will be livestreamed on www.facebook.com/PhilippinesGraphic. See you next Monday!

Penman No. 387: Wallace Stegner in Manila

Posted on May 11, 2020 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, May 11, 2020

LIKE MANY of you, I’ve spent much of the lockdown opening boxes and sorting out files I haven’t touched in years. As a certified pack rat, I keep papers and other effects going back to my grade school years, so my periodic shakedowns inevitably turn up things I never knew I had, or that I’d completely forgotten about. Last month’s haul included our wedding pictures from 1974, a huge picture book of Paris from 1890, and prints from artist-friends like Orly Castillo, Joel Soliven, and the late Lito Mayo.

So amusing and engrossing were these finds that I almost missed a frayed copy of The Literary Apprentice1951, published by the UP Writers Club and edited by two young writers, Raul R. Ingles and S. V. Epistola. I had the privilege of knowing both men when they were still alive back in the 1980s, by which time they had become venerable professors in UP. In 1951, Ingles was only 22, Epistola 26, young bucks who were already rendering literary judgment on their peers and seniors (such as Ingles’ estimation of Zoilo Galang, our first novelist in English (Child of Sorrow, 1921) of whom he writes: “The other novel (of 1950) was For Dreams Must Die by Zoilo Galang, who blundered into the literary scene. Galang was a romantic novelist of the 1920s. His mushy prose dates farther back….” That pungent style of commentary was apparently the order of the day, as elsewhere in the issue we find Homero Ch. Veloso, touted to be “UP’s most renowned poet of the past decade,” being hacked at the knees by the expatriate Jose Garcia Villa, who writes that “I think he is completely valueless; however serious he was in his esthetic and intellectual life, his writing is utterly inchoate, unformed, and ill-written….”

But what really caught my eye in this issue (where also, incidentally, Villa’s “The Bashful One” appears, among other, uhm, essentially wordless poems) was a report on the recent visit to Manila of Wallace Stegner, who had been brought over by the Rockefeller Foundation in January 1951 to deliver eight lectures, one of which touched on his impressions of Filipino writing (but only in English, of course).

Very few people, even among writers, would recognize the name these days, but Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) was a renowned American novelist who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1971. His name rang a bell because of two things. First, starting in 1946, Stanford University has offered the two-year Stegner Fellowship in creative writing, among the world’s prize fellowships for writers, whose recipients have included at least three Filipinos: the poets Valdemar Olaguer (1950) and Fidelito Cortes (1985) and the Fil-Am fictionist Lysley Tenorio (2000). Second, as luck would have it, I actually met Stegner when he visited my graduate writing class at the University of Michigan in October 1986; sadly I don’t remember much of that visit beyond an old man in a tan overcoat, as our classes had barely begun and I was still dizzy with loneliness and awe.

Stegner’s 1951 sortie to Manila also fell in between visits by two other notable writers from America. The first was Ernest Hemingway, who came twice in 1941, in February and May, on his way to and from China with his third wife Martha Gellhorn. I received a note last month from my friend and fellow history buff in Washington, Erwin Tiongson, who found a report from The Tribune of May 13, 1941 about Hemingway being so moved by a huge fire in Tondo that he donated P500 to a fund for the victims.

Another prominent visitor was William Faulkner, who came to Manila in 1955. I recall a small poster commemorating that visit on the wall of the UPICW in the old Faculty Center before it burned down. There are records of what Faulkner did and said then—elsewhere, so I still have to find them. In the library of Stanford University is an 18-page illustrated document from 1956 published by the Philippine Writers Association titled “Faulkner on Truth and Freedom. Excerpts from tape recordings of remarks made by William Faulkner during his recent Manila visit,” but it’s only available on-site. More tantalizingly, there’s an article titled “Faulkner in Manila—1955” in Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926-1962 edited by James Meriweather and published by Random House in 1968.

So what did Wallace Stegner have to say to his Filipino audience in 1951? He deplored the lack of novelists, for one thing. “The situation is understandable because writing a novel requires the investment of about a year’s labor, the loss of productive activity in other directions, and an attendant publishing risk,” noted the article, which went on: “The Filipino short story, Dr. Stegner observed, is more on the side of the sketch: it is a slice or cross-section rather than a well-rounded whole. Sometimes the story ends; sometimes it just stops…. The Filipino writer rushes to print because he has no other alternative. He gets published easily, even on the second draft, and gets paid just the same. The result is an early sense of maturity which deceives the writer: there is nothing more to test him, to give him obstacles to get over and sharpen his writing ability. Thus, currently published stories need to be run ten times more through the typewriter to straighten out the diction and the style, to fill out the sketchiness, to clarify the characters and the moods, to smooth out all the things that make a short story.”

Funny, I thought, finding that in a 70-year-old journal, when I’d been telling my students the same thing.

Penman No. 381: The Best of New Writing in English

Posted on February 17, 2020 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, February 17, 2020

ONE OF the things we’ve been proudest of doing at the University of the Philippines Institute of Creative Writing (UPICW) has been to encourage new writers in both Filipino and English—whether through workshops, grants, or publishing opportunities. Sometimes all writers really need is a bit of recognition from their masters and their peers, some formal acknowledgment of their talent to spur them on in a career with few rewards beyond the smiles and the sighs of their readers.

For nearly two decades now, thanks to the generosity of Atty. Gizela M. Gonzalez, herself a gifted writer, the Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Award has honored its self-described winners—the best first publication in book form by a writer in Filipino or English for the past two years (alternating between the two languages every other year). A cash prize of P50,000 accompanies the award. Entries are submitted by publishers, for whom victory lies in discovering the next new literary star. It’s a safe bet: previous winners have included such luminaries as Sarge Lacuesta, Luna Sicat Cleto, Ichi Batacan, and Kristian Cordero, among others.

The 19^th MGBFBA was given out at Writers Night last December in UP. I was in Singapore for another ceremony but was very interested in who would win (a surprisingly well-kept secret that even UPICW fellows are not privy to until the night itself). Only later did I hear, happily, that the winner was a former student of mine, Glenn Diaz, for his novel The Quiet Ones (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2018), described by the judges as “a tour de force, an awesome game of fictional juggling, mastering multiple narratives that cascade, skim and collide, leaving the reader breathless, wondering if that was a whodunit, a philosophical foray into globalization, or a poignant story of love.” Well done, Glenn! But let’s give a shout out for the other finalists as well.

Jude Ortega’s Seekers of Spirits (UP Press, 2017) “opens up to readers a world of spirits, ancestral yet ever present, unseen yet all too powerful. They are constantly in the lives of humans, offering succor or malice. Yet, these stories suggest that, whatever power these spirits possess, no terror may be worse than that we inflict upon each other.”

Manuel Lahoz’s autobiographical Of Tyrants and Martyrs: A Political Memoir (UP Press, 2018) is “a riveting political memoir… of martial law in the Philippines and its many victims… a record of Lahoz’s own apotheosis from priest to social activist to political prisoner and participant in the political underground. In his personal transformation we sense as well the coming of age of an entire generation.”

Francis Quina’s Field of Play and Other Fictions (Visprint, 2018) displays “the sensibility of a poet as well as the rigor of the literary scholar and writing teacher. He seeks to dissect both the intricacies of the human heart and the manner by which these are re-enacted in art. His is a new, vibrant voice in fiction.”

Christine Lao’s Musical Chairs (2017) is a “small and compact chapbook… (of) stories in the way they were first invented: as lore, as fable, as stories of good and evil but, in this collection, rendered with the complexity of the modern world.”

Johanna Michelle Lim’s What Distance Tells Us: Travel Essays About the Philippines (Bathalad, 2018) covers “twelve Philippine destinations, from Batanes to Sitangkai, from Sagada to Siargao… (and) lures us with language, entices us into the territories of enchantment not always of the exotic but also the local and commonplace. In these peregrinations… she evolves en route: in the various guises of the traveler, artist, and activist she aspires to be, but also the one she was never ready for.”

Sarah Fernando Lumba’s The Shoemaker’s Daughter (Visprint, 2018) consists of “tightly woven tales, narratives sewn together with the deliberate shoemaker’s art, with the rough edges shaved off as if with a leather skiver—these are what make The Shoemaker’s Daughter an important contribution to new Filipino fiction…. (They) take us through Marikina shoemakers’ country, with its achingly familiar small-town complexion and its river changing from a benign periodic visitor to an existential threat.”

Marichelle Roque-Lutz’s Keeping It Together (Roque-Lutz Publishing, 2018) “traverses what might be called an intercontinental trampoline that stretches from Manila to Nigeria and America, which need not be only geographic because the memoirist from the start is a soul-in-search, ever moving through time and into herself. Most memoirs are helped by faithfully kept journals. Keeping It Together is directly helped by a copious streaming from the heart, a first book by an able and polished author, a fully evolved, mature soul.”

It was a strong batch, all told, which can only bode well for the future of creative writing in English in the Philippines, fraught as it has always been with political and aesthetic challenges. As the late NVM Gonzalez used to put it, “I write in Filipino, using English”—a formula that seems to be working just fine.

Penman No. 363: A Singapore Swing

Posted on July 22, 2019 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, July 22, 2019

I’VE BEEN visiting Singapore nearly every year for one reason or other, usually for a conference or at least passing through Changi on my way elsewhere, but this month Beng and I decided to fly there just to have a little fun.

I did have an official excuse, sort of, for this particular swing—the 3^rdSingapore Pen Show held at the Marina Mandarin on July 13, which brought together the country’s and region’s premier sellers of pens and related products. I thought I would drop by for a look-see as the “old man” of Philippine fountain pen collecting, and happily I was accompanied by a small but very knowledgeable Pinoy contingent that included adwoman and artist Leigh Reyes (who also happens to be the new president of our Fountain Pen Network-Philippines), medical executive Joseph Abueg, and avid collector Micah Robles, among others. We were all proud to see two major Filipino companies represented at the Singapore show and generating brisk sales and inquiries: Jillian Joyce Tan’s Everything Calligraphy, which was showing off its new line of Philippine-made Vinta inks, and Arnold Ang’s Shibui leather pen cases, which can easily compete in quality and design with the world’s best.

I’ve been to many other pen shows around the world, chiefly in America where they happen year-round, and while Singapore’s may be relatively smaller because newer, it also showcased Asia’s strengths as the producer of some of the world’s finest pens—the high-end Japanese Nakayas, for example, which are rarely seen in the West. Eurobox, which has a formidable collection of vintage pens, came in from Tokyo; and André Mora of the renowned Mora Stylos flew in all the way from Paris with a bevy of their coveted Oldwins. Pen shows are as much about people as they are about pens, and I was delighted to see some old friends like Lai Kim Hoong of Malaysia’s PenGallery, as well as make some new ones like Tan Fong Kum of Singapore’s Aesthetic Bay and Ng Lip Sing of Singapore’s Straits Pens.

So did I buy anything? I normally step out of pen shows with a wild man’s stare, clutching four or five precious finds in my fists, but the great thing about having too many pens is that you know when to stop and to just enjoy the scenery, which is what I did. I came to Singapore to talk pens with kindred spirits, and brought a selection of 12 of my most interesting vintage and modern pens, and had lively conversations about a few of them. Unlike our Manila Pen Show—the next one of which will take place November 16-17 this year—which is far busier and which features more side events like lectures and demos, Singapore’s was still more of a market than a community, and I would’ve liked a longer chat over coffee with our local counterparts, but maybe next time.

Our other objective for this Singapore trip was to visit the National Gallery, which somehow doesn’t figure on most tourist itineraries like the Marina Bay Sands or the Gardens by the Bay. Built where the old City Hall and Supreme Court stood, the National Gallery is both an imposing but also welcoming structure, with guides and docents ready to walk you through the exhibits. Aside from Singaporean art, of course, the gallery’s strength lies in its collection of Southeast Asian art, which is breathtaking in its range of styles as well as in its commonality of themes—nation, nature, people. Filipino talent is well represented throughout the exhibit—from the ground floor, where Mark Justiniani’s mind-blowing (and, for the vertiginous like me, unnerving) “Stardust” bridge obliges the visitor to take a literal walk through bottomless space, to the succession of galleries on Levels 3-5 where “Between Declarations and Dreams: Art of Southeast Asia since the 19th Century” is on show.

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A trio of less-known 1940s Amorsolos is flanked by the orchestrated chaos of a Purugganan; an early and dark Edades exudes primal energy; elsewhere are exemplary pieces by Galo Ocampo, Arturo Luz, Anita Magsaysay-Ho, Napoleon Abueva, Bobby Chabet, Ray Albano, Santy Bose, and Imelda Cajipe. But the piece de resistanceof Filipino modernist representation is H. R. Ocampo’s Dancing Mutants, encountering which made our whole Singapore trip worth it. And the curators themselves must have been aware of the specialness of this stunning work from 1965, according it its very own corner in the gallery, almost altar-like. I’ve seen many Ocampos (with Beng restoring quite a few of them), but this one made me want to fall on my knees in praise of its creator.

And purely by serendipity, when we stepped out of a mobile-phone shop on North Bridge Road, I noticed that the building across the street was none other than the National Library, which I’d visited as a journalist on a previous assignment. Let’s go in, I told Beng, I want to show you something. So we did, and there on the 11^thfloor was a permanent exhibit on “Singapore’s Literary Pioneers”—featuring not only the books of the country’s best writers, but also their pens, typewriters, and even their eyeglasses. This, I told Beng wishfully, is how writers should be revered. Always better than a pen show is seeing what comes out of those pens, at their very finest.

Penman No. 362: Writers in Progress

Posted on July 15, 2019 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, July 15, 2019

I’M ALWAYS happy when people who were my students rise up in their careers and begin to find their own voice and footing—especially as writers, good ones among whom remain few and far between. Each year, the University of the Philippines Institute of Creative Writing gathers the best of these young writing talents under one roof and around one table for the UP National Writers Workshop, the 58^thiteration of which took place last week in its traditional venue in Baguio City.

Two of the 12 fellows—each of whom qualified for the advanced workshop by publishing at least one book—were Francis Quina and Sarah Fernando Lumba, both of whom had studied withme at one point or other, and whose thesis defenses I had sat at; both now teach at UP Diliman’s English department.This year’s batch was formidable, with some well-established names on the roster, but I kept an eye out for Francis and Sarah, to see how they were doing after all these years.

All workshop fellows were required to send in a short essay discussing their poetics (what, why, and how they write) along with short excerpts from their works in progress.

Francis said: “Recently, when my first short story collection was picked up by a publisher, the reader who had endorsed my manuscript to be published noted that I wrote about strong female and queer characters…. I’ve only known strong women in my life. And strong queer men and women, too. So I only write what I know. This also is true of the fallible male characters that I write about.”

His project Window on the World brings two sisters together—each of them trapped and unhappy in their respective situations—on a plane for a holiday in Korea.

“I’m scared,” Janine confessed, after they had stowed their bags in the overhead compartment and found their seats. She fumbled with the buckles of the safety belts. Maya knew what Janine meant. She had never been a good flyer, and perhaps because of what had happened to their mother, she never would be.

“We’re going to be okay,” Maya said, feeling her heart beat faster as the plane began the pre-flight sequence. In front of them, two stewards—a man and a woman—demonstrated how to deploy a life jacket in case of emergency landing at sea.

“Maya fell asleep before the demonstration ended. She didn’t feel Janine take her hand and squeeze it nervously as the plane roared and slowly tilted upwards as they began their ascent. She didn’t feel the sensation of falling, as her mother did, the moment they left the ground and fate took hold of their future.

“Somewhere between the 1,623 miles between Seoul and Manila, Janine nudged her sister awake and told her to look out the window just once, to see how endless the world was. Maya, groggy from her medication and nervousness, obliged and got up from her seat. With her sister, she finally looked at the world the way their mother used to.”

Sarah, on the other hand, is working on a comic novel titled Twisted Sisters about martial law and revisionism (our dismaying tendency to forget history and repeat it all over again) set in her hometown of Marikina. “There are two main points that I wish to explore in this novel,” she says. “First, the reasons behind the significant support that Ferdinand Marcos continues to enjoy despite empirical data showing that much oppression had been committed by his regime; and second, the extent to which comic and humorous writing could help a people come to terms with—and even come together after—a collective trauma such as martial law.”

She writes: “Metro Manila traffic is a hundred ways to die. You can get hit by a car as you cross the crosswalk. Be dragged to death by a motorcyclist careening through the sidewalk. Squished by two bullish buses. Knifed by a strangler as you wait for a jeep. Knifed inside a UV Express by a smartphone snatcher. Have a heart attack just by watching the taxi meter running continuously even if traffic hasn’t budged in the last thirty minutes. Drop dead just waiting for your Grab ride to arrive. Get choked by fumes inside your car because it’s summer and your AC’s busted and you kept your windows up just so you wouldn’t look poor. Get choked in your car by your husband who snaps because of, well, the traffic. Get choked by a druggie whom you meet in prison after you snap and kill your wife in the car because of, well, the traffic. Drown inside your car because flood levels in the streets rise faster than your speedometer. Get squashed by a derailed train coach overhead. Get assaulted with that mandatory lead pipe under the driver’s seat. Assaulted with an empty My Shaldan Lime canister. Shot by a policeman. By a car owner with a licensed gun. By a car owner with an unlicensed gun. Beaten to death by a pack of heat-stroked, smog-coated, PNP-wannabe MMDA enforcers. By a pedicab driver whose ride you scratched. By a congressman because, wala lang, he’s bored and has clout, and you’re there. Metro Manila traffic is death by asphyxiation. By exhaustion. By utter frustration. You can have an aneurysm just by staring at license plates or the sunburned napes of other passengers for two hours straight. You have become a human pipe bomb, a government imprimatur-ed minefield of nasty. One tiny fuse, one small misstep—ka-boom! Road rage. You are better off taking up smoking as your vice.”

Francis and Sarah, you’re well on your way to authorhood.

Penman No. 354: A Scottish Sortie

Posted on May 20, 2019 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, May 20, 2019

AS UNLIKELY as it may seem, many Filipino writers have a special affinity for Scotland, that northern country (yes, it is one) bound up into the United Kingdom with England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. That’s not only because of our passing familiarity with the likes of Robert Burns and Walter Scott, but because, over the past three decades, more than a dozen Filipino writers—among them Krip Yuson, Eric Gamalinda, Ricky de Ungria, Marj Evasco, Rofel Brion, Danton Remoto, Mia Gonzalez, and myself—have been fellows at the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, about half an hour by bus in Midlothian, just outside of Edinburgh.

That was where, in 1994, I wrote much of what became Penmanship and Other Stories, including the title story, which came out of a serendipitous purchase of a 1938 Parker Vacumatic at the Thistle Pen Shop in Edinburgh. Indeed, two literary anthologies have emerged from the Pinoy-Scottish connection: Luna Caledonia, a poetry collection edited by Ricky de Ungria and published in 1992, and Latitude, a fiction collection co-edited by Sarge Lacuesta and Toni Davidson and published in 2005.

I returned to Scotland in 2000 with my wife Beng and daughter Demi in tow; I was a writing fellow then at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, and Demi was visiting us from Manila. As it happened, a local radio station was offering free train tickets to Scotland to whoever could dial in and answer some simple questions at 5 am, so for three consecutive mornings, I woke up early and did just that, and soon we three were rolling away to Glasgow, taking the scenic route along the western coast (and being feted on the train by a kindly Pinoy attendant).

That was 20 years ago, and since then Beng and I have expressed a more than idle longing to revisit Scotland—especially Beng, an unabashed fan of Braveheart and Outlander. In the meantime, Demi got married to bright young fellow from California named Jerry, and in 2014 Demi and Jerry treated us, on our 40^thwedding anniversary, to a tour of Spain, following Rizal’s footsteps in Madrid and Barcelona, and Anthony Bourdain’s in San Sebastian.

We wanted to repeat that this year to mark our 45^th, so it was no huge surprise that we settled on Scotland where Jerry—who likes his single malts—had never been. After meeting up in London, we took a train to Edinburgh and lodged in the shadow of its imposing castle, to which we paid the obligatory visit. I treated our small party next to a day tour of Stirling Castle, Loch Lomond, Deanston Distillery, and Doune Castle, before moving on the next day to Glasgow and its more down-to-earth, industrial vibe.

I wanted to record this not to bore you with the details of another family sortie, but to remark on what impressed us most, outside of the often desolate beauty of the Scottish highlands and our comic encounters with the “hairy coos” (the Highland cattle probably fattened by tourist feedings).

For me, a retired professor who can’t help being interested in a country’s educational and cultural infrastructure, the question was, how could the Scots have done so much with seemingly so little?

Pop stars like Sean Connery, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, JK Rowling, and Annie Lennox aside, Scotland has produced engineer James Watt, inventor Alexander Graham Bell, penicillin discoverer Alexander Fleming, social philosopher Adam Smith, and explorer David Livingstone. A book by the historian Arthur Herman titled How the Scots Invented the Modern World asks: “Who formed the first literate society? Who invented our modern ideas of democracy and free market capitalism? The Scots…. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Scotland made crucial contributions to science, philosophy, literature, education, medicine, commerce, and politics—contributions that have formed and nurtured the modern West ever since…. John Knox and the Church of Scotland laid the foundation for our modern idea of democracy; the Scottish Enlightenment helped to inspire both the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution; and thousands of Scottish immigrants left their homes to create the American frontier, the Australian outback, and the British Empire in India and Hong Kong.”

This from a country of less than 6 million people (that’s right, six), whose influence extends far beyond their shores. While wives and widows everywhere may bemoan the loss of their husbands to golf and whisky, both industries annually contribute £1 billion and £6 billion, respectively—about P500 billion combined—to the Scottish economy, which is also driven by oil and gas, a £12-billion industry. (To put things in perspective, you can add up those three for a total contribution of £19 billion or about US$25 billion, which is what Philippine BPOs generate, as well as OFWs—but with a much smaller denominator.)

What was most telling to me was how Scotland, despite its plethora of warriors, politicians, engineers, and industrialists, valued its writers, who in turn valued Scottish national pride. The 200-foot statue of Walter Scott in Edinburgh is the largest in the world of any writer’s, and in Glasgow, Scott’s monument also towers over those of others in George Square.

Of course we can argue that we venerate Jose Rizal—only to elect his intellectual and moral opposites. As the Scots might put it, “A nod’s as guid as a wink tae a blind horse.”

Pinoy Penman 3.0

The continuing chronicles of Jose Dalisay Jr., aka Butch Dalisay, a Filipino collector of old fountain pens, disused PowerBooks, '50s Hamiltons, creaky cameras and typewriters, VW spare parts, poker bad beats, and desktop lint.

Tag Archives: writers