The view from the hilltop

We were up in Baguio last week for the 46th edition of the University of the Philippines National Summer Writers Workshop, and this year we had 12 fellows not just from UP, but also from the Ateneo, La Salle, UST, and other universities.

As I mentioned here last February, the fellows in English were Daryll Delgado and Katrina Tuvera (fiction); Conchitina Cruz and Mark Anthony Cayanan (poetry); and Adam David, Sandra Nicole Roldan, and Lawrence Ypil (creative non-fiction). In Filipino, they were Eros Atalia and Honorio de Dios (fiction); Edgar Samar and Jerry Gracio (poetry); and Jose Dennis Teodosio (drama).

The UP Institute of Creative Writing has redesigned the workshop so that it no longer caters to neophyte writers but to people who’ve already put some work behind them — in a first book, or a manuscript fit for one. We even invited several former UP workshoppers to join this one, to check up on how they were doing and to give them a fresh boost in mid-career, knowing how solitary the writing life can get for most young people after college and in the thick of a career and family concerns. We asked the fellows to present and to speak on an ongoing writing project — to share with us (their literary elders, and in many cases their classroom mentors) their current anxieties, their plans and hopes for the future, and their take on the literary situation in the Philippines and in the world.

Not surprisingly, the fellows responded with great alacrity, reporting on their progress (and occasional and inevitable missteps) in their writing and raising some very basic but also very difficult questions about the writing life.

For example, Katrina Tuvera — the daughter of the renowned fictionists Kerima Polotan and Juan Tuvera, and author of the recently-launched The Jupiter Effect, a novel on the martial law period — battled with the desire to write more fiction about that time from the point of view of a family whose fortunes were tied to those of the Marcoses, without being seen to be autobiographical or privy to some information she simply didn’t have.

Larry Ypil contended with being gay, being Cebuano, and being middle-class — and with the transition from poetry to autobiographical prose. He noted that "While my problems in terms of craft will certainly present themselves in the workshop of my essay, and of the short pieces that I’m working with, and from, (and maybe the stranger-reader’s eye would be sharper by far to determine and name these numerous lapses), perhaps it would be more productive to end with some theoretical issues which I continue to grapple with as a ‘creative nonfiction,’ ‘autobiographical’" writer.

"How does one possibly avoid the inherently indulgent method of talking about one’s life? When I am half-tempted to both stare at my ‘navel,’ and pretend it isn’t there (in a fit of self-consciousness), how does one possibly balance the excesses of self-referentiality and the ‘universality’ of all powerful artforms, especially in what seems to me to be an extremely ‘masturbatory’ genre? Upon what kind of validity is the creative non-fiction autobiographical writer built on? Is my navel your navel, too?"

Playwright J. Dennis Teodosio — who writes plays with gay themes — confessed that "I’m not ‘out’ as a writer yet, not to my family. They know very little about my writing. Because I’m the head of the family, nobody demands an explanation for what I write and why I write. All they know is, I earn from my writing and I must’ve achieved something because of all the certificates of recognition I’ve had framed on Recto. When my mother saw Gee-Gee at Waterina, she asked me how I could have possibly written about gay characters. I told her that I conducted interviews and did some research. She was so happy. So that’s why the dialogue was so natural, she said — so very, very gay."

For poet Mark Anthony Cayanan, "My persistent devotion to the sort of writing that is intensely informed by autobiography… was a personal reaction drawn from a more fundamental source: my need for identification. I was (and still am, occasionally), in the presence of these poems, my younger self: the 11-year-old kid whose life was quickly reconfigured the moment he saw Michelle Pfeiffer, in shiny black leather, crack her whip in Batman Returns (1992)…. Poetry, like all art, is a gesture towards the immortal, one made by the writer who so painstakingly affixes his/her thoughts onto paper. That the poet occasionally seems to announce this intention — and his/her degree of involvement in it — so willingly does not strike me as an unpleasant idea."

Most provocative was Adam David’s presentation titled "DAZZLE THEM WITH BRILLIANCE, BAFFLE THEM WITH BULLSHIT! Or DON’T BE SO HUMBLE, YOU’RE NOT THAT GREAT!: Perplexions on Brief Exercises In Youthful Blasphemy." Throughout his piece, this angry young man inveighs against the "elitists" with the earnest contempt Holden Caulfield had for the "phonies," but Adam’s disgust is leavened by humor and a touch of self-deprecation. He was, he said, in the workshop not so much for validation but for an audience — and he got one, even as the Tatay-from-Elitist-Hell in me wondered with some amusement what song Adam was going to be singing in 20 years, not that it particularly seemed to matter to him at the moment.

Among most of the fellows slithered the snake of doubt about what exactly they were doing and how they were managing the transition from this genre to that. I suspected that their apprehensions — couched in aesthetic and ideological questions — more simply had to do with the transition from one’s literary youth to incipient middle age (something that comes earlier in a writing career than it does in real life). How was one to find one’s own voice? What was one’s definition of a successful career in writing? Was there a formula or well-trodden path to follow to literary prominence, or should one just go on writing one’s own way regardless of the consequences?

This led me and my closest friends and colleagues among the panelists — Charlson Ong, Jimmy Abad, Jing Hidalgo, and Ricky de Ungria — to muse about our own lives in writing.

We began writing at a time when there were no Creative Writing programs to attend or degrees to be had. We didn’t know too much about and therefore couldn’t be bothered by what other writers were doing, apart from what swatches we’d read of their work. We didn’t even think of ourselves as "poets," "fictionists," "playwrights," "writers in English," "regional writers," or "critics." We wrote all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons — money was a good one — so sometimes we were newspaper reporters, sometimes we were copywriters, sometimes we were editors, and sometimes we were all of the above; the category didn’t matter. We were driven and fascinated by writing, not by being or becoming writers.

When contests like the Palancas and the CCP awards came along, we joined them with gusto and enjoyed competing with each other, because there wasn’t much else to be excited about — there wasn’t much literary publishing under martial law — but we didn’t think of them as the be-all and end-all of writing. (Today, when some writers all-too-stridently denounce these contests and their joiners as a sell-out and swear never to join them — or join them again, in the case of at least one perennially loud whiner — I want to tell them to put on some shorts, take a walk, drink some buko juice, and get back to their own writing.)

At some point we realized that what mattered most, in practical terms, was to write and publish books — that you could talk about writing and literature until you were blue in the face and lead the most Byronically riotous life, but ultimately you would be remembered and valued for your words on the open page.

So we wrote and we wrote — as I keep doing from week to week — despite and against the claims of life and livelihood, trying to produce a page for ourselves against the 10 pages we wrote for others. I sympathized the most with fellow Jerry Gracio, a fine poet who’s had to pay his dues by writing scripts for such sex sizzlers (the vegetal monologues, you might say) as "Talong," which I happened to see and to review on my homepage, a coincidence over which Jerry and I had a few good laughs.

Ultimately, every literary life fol-lows its own trajectory. You can take the safe and proven path by going to writing school and maybe taking an MA or an MFA in creative writing abroad; you win a few Palancas, publish a couple of books, teach a course or a workshop in creative writing, and then one day you wake up to find someone asking you to write a blurb for the back of his or her first book. You have arrived — somewhere, somehow — slightly dazed, vaguely unhappy, but gratified to have a family, a house, and maybe a car you can call your own.

Or you could choose the rebel’s way, slaying every literary father and every literary dragon you encounter, piling on the inevitable welts and bruises, refusing to accept a peso you didn’t bleed for, embracing struggle and suffering with a martyr’s passion. And then you wake up alone, embittered and unloved, wondering if anything you ever said made a difference to the world, or even to someone else.

One afternoon last week — on a break from the workshop and quite without intending to — some of us who had our jogging shoes on took the Eco-Trail up and down a series of hills in Camp John Hay. It proved a murderous trek for the uninitiated, but we were rewarded with a spectacular view of a sunset swathed in fog; a daylong brownout had hit the city, but in the distance twinkled gaslight and candlelight, and the faint possibility of a cold bottle of beer salvaged from the heat of the afternoon.

No workshop can plot or promise the future, but one could bring you to some hilltop for a view of the other side.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at http://www.penmanila.net.