Good news for writers

On behalf of the University of the Philippines Institute of Creative Writing (UPICW), I’m very happy to announce the names of the 12 fellows who will be joining us in Baguio this April for the 47th UP National Writers Workshop. The fellows are: (Fiction in English) Tara  Sering, Luis Katigbak, Ian Casocot; (Poetry in English) Ana Maria Katigbak; Vincenz Serrano; (Creative Non-Fiction in English) Rica Bolipata Santos; (Drama in Filipino) Nicolas Pichay, Rodolfo Lana Jr.; (Poetry in Filipino) Roberto Añonuevo, Frank Cimatu; (Fiction in Filipino) Abdon Balde Jr., and Allan Derain.

They were chosen by the associates of the UPICW through a selection process that combined direct nominations and invitations by the Associates with open applications. As in the past two years, the workshop — one of the major annual projects and the most important outreach program of the ICW — will engage writers in mid-career who have already published or are about to publish their first books, and who have received previous writing awards and distinctions.

It was actually five years ago when the UPICW first tried out this approach, with a stellar batch of “Kumustahan” workshop fellows that included standouts such as Sarge Lacuesta, Paolo Manalo, and Allan Popa. We decided to implement it for good when we saw how many new workshops were coming up to serve beginning and student writers, which led us to focus on more advanced writers who might still need some encouragement and feedback to sustain their commitment to writing.

The fellows will be making a presentation of their respective works-in-progress during the workshop, based on a manuscript to be submitted to the ICW.

I’ve agreed to be this year’s workshop director, and assisting me on the panel will be the usual suspects: ICW director Vim D. Nadera, National Artist and Dean Virgilio S. Almario, National Artist and Professor Emeritus Bienvenido Lumbera, university professor emeritus Gémino H. Abad, Dr. Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, professor Jun Cruz Reyes, and Charlson Ong.

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I had a pleasant chat last week over merienda with Sylvia Palanca Quirino and her daughter Atty. Christine Pacheco, who wanted to show me the new website they’re setting up for the Palanca Awards. Much of the site is still under construction (you can preview it at http://www.palancaawards.com.ph), but it promises to be an important addition to the roster of websites that are creating an impressive presence for Philippine literature on the World Wide Web. I, among others, had long urged the Palancas to go online, since they have the largest repository of contemporary Philippine literature in their library, and are directly responsible for many annual additions to that trove.

The details are still being worked out, but I think we can now look forward to seeing and downloading the works of Palanca prizewinners from 2006 onwards, once copyrights and permissions issues are sorted out. (The Palancas do have the right to publish winning work, but are being careful not to deprive Filipino authors and publishers of their commercial prospects.) Once the modalities are resolved, the Palanca website will be a great help to readers, researchers, students, and teachers interested in the best of new Philippine writing. It will also do much to promote Philippine literature abroad — and be, in effect, an annual online literary journal and permanent portal, complementing other sites such as our own www.panitikan.com.ph.

Our chat spilled over to an informal discussion of the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, now on their 58th year, which the family continues to sponsor through the Carlos Palanca Foundation, of which Sylvia is the director-general. The two ladies sounded me out on some possible refinements to the contest rules — in my capacity as an institutional friend, an oldtimer by now to the competition and its processes — and I was glad to give them my opinion. (I’ll leave it to the Palancas to announce whatever changes or improvements they deem worthwhile — nothing too big nor too different, we can be assured.)

By the way, the CP Group — which includes the Palanca Foundation — has moved to new offices at One World Square Building, 10 Upper McKinley Road, McKinley Town Center, Fort Bonifacio, Taguig City, tel. no. 856-0808, fax 856-5005. This means another change of venue for all the writers who like to hang out on the foundation premises — less for companionship, I suspect, than for ritualistic reasons bordering on voodoo — on the very deadline of the competition on the 30th of April.

I remember when the Palancas were still headquartered at the old La Tondeña Bldg. on Calle Echague in Quiapo; some writers were reported to have been seen typing out their manuscripts by the foundation door in a mad dash to beat the deadline, or maybe to impregnate their manuscripts with a whiff of the winning spirit. (In one recent and important change to the rules, the Palancas now accept entries by e-mail — except, this year, for the novel and the full-length screenplay, which could bankrupt the foundation if it had to print out and reproduce four copies of every entry; so take note, novelists and screenwriters — don’t throw out that inkjet printer yet.) Sylvia spoke enthusiastically of other possibilities, beyond the contest, made possible by their new offices — of readings and writers’ gatherings, tertulia-style. We may yet see a new cultural oasis emerge in this part of town.

(And let me just correct an announcement I made weeks ago about three major novel-writing competitions — the Palanca, the UP Centennial, and the Man Asian — sharing the same March 31st deadline. The Palanca deadline falls a month later, on April 30.)

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Speaking of workshops, here’s another one from our friends at the UP Department of Filipino, which will hold its 2008 Creative Writing Workshop on May 15 to 18 in Angono, Rizal.

This workshop is open to college-level, beginning writers in Filipino who write in one or more of the following genres: poetry, short story, story for children, play, or creative non-fiction (essay).

Applicants should submit five copies of the manuscript in 12 points, double-spaced, 8 1/2 x 11 bond-sized paper, along with a digital file. The manuscript may consist of at least one of the following: five poems, two short stories of at least 10 pages each, two stories for children of at least five to seven pages each, one short play, and one creative non-fiction of at least 10 pages. Also, a short essay about the author and photo must be submitted along with the manuscripts.

Application forms are available at the Department of Filipino and Philippine Literature, College of Arts and Letters, UP Diliman. Deadline of submission is on March 31. For further details, please get in touch with Prof. Jimmuel Naval or Prof. Vlad Gonzales at 924-4899, e-mail them at palihanan2008@yahoo.com.

A group led by prominent writers has just been organized to protect the intellectual property rights (IPR) of Filipino writers. It’s called the Filipinas Copyright Licensing Society (Filcols), and what it aims to do is to collect manage arrangements for copyright licensing, marketing, and distribution of the members’ works, and enforce their IPR. Filcols will handle, among others, the collection of royalties for its members.

This is great news for writers, as it will help professionalize writing as an industry, and secure writers their legal and moral due. There’s nothing wrong with writing for the sheer love of it — the original and valued meaning of the word “amateur” — but anyone who’s written long enough will know that writing is also a form of labor whose dignity, as such, should be recognized by fair wages, among other means.

Writers and artists, unfortunately, often make for the worst businessmen. We don’t know what to charge, we work without contracts, we don’t know where to go or whom to get in touch with for our royalties and, in many cases, we don’t even know what we’re owed by our publishers. Our stories and poems get published in anthologies and textbooks that make fortunes for their authors and publishers — without our permission, without our knowledge, and without any royalties paid.

(When we do get paid, our standard royalties of 15 percent are actually quite high, compared to 10 percent in the US, but that’s a bigger slice of a much smaller pie, since local print runs rarely exceed 1,000 copies. In other words, if your magnum opus of a novel sells out at P200 a copy, you stand to earn P30,000 for a few years’ labor — barely enough for a high-end cell phone.)

Thankfully, in my experience, respectable publishers such as Anvil, the UP Press, and Milflores are very professional about these things, and send royalty checks and sales reports out to their writers without even being asked. But I suspect that they’re the exception rather than the rule.

Filcols will now do for writers what the Filipino Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (Filscap) has done for music composers, with resounding success; Filscap collects many millions a year in royalties. The market for Philippine literature may never grow as large as that for music, but every peso will help. Filcols is being supported by the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IP Philippines), led by its director general, Atty. Adrian S. Cristobal Jr. Through its Copyright Support Services Unit, IP Philippines aims to facilitate the creation of four collecting societies by 2009 to cover not just literature and music but also fine art (photography, paintings, sculpture) and technology-based works such as computer programs. National Artist and poet Virgilio S. Almario is Filcols chairman.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/MyBlog.html.