More on the Palancas

Last week’s piece on the Palanca Literary Awards (and about losing in them) provoked a number of responses from readers who were curious about the judging process. One reader hinted at the possibility of collusion or favoritism, whereby a judge might favor an entry submitted by a friend or a protégé.

I wasn’t really surprised by the questions or suspicions. I’d heard them before — more often than not (in the case of the reader I mentioned above, not) from people who’d joined and lost and who were wondering if they’d been cheated out of a prize they felt they deserved.

All I could truthfully say in response to those questions was that, in the 25 years that I actively joined the Palancas and even afterwards, I have never encountered a brazen and provable case of favoritism to the point of cheating. I’m not saying that it’s never happened. When you run an annual competition for almost 60 years in over a dozen categories with three judges per category, it’s almost statistically impossible for everything to run perfectly aboveboard, despite the best efforts of the organizers (whose representative sits in on every deliberation of every panel). But I’ve yet to see or hear of a case where three judges criminally conspired to make a patently bad work win.

Here’s how it works: the organizers invite and empanel three judges for each category (say, the short story in English), chosen from among accomplished and respected writers, critics, scholars, and previous winners in that particular genre and language. The judges meet three times over a month or so to bring the entries down to a shortlist, from which they select the winners at their final meeting. Depending on the mix of judges and on their preferences and predispositions, the process can be long and arduous or short and sweet.

Sometimes, the best pieces stand out head-and-shoulders above the rest, making long arguments or even a third meeting superfluous; in the more usual case, the judges will debate passionately among themselves over their respective shortlists and their choices’ merits and rankings. In extremely tight cases, we ascribe points to our ranked finalists, and the numbers break the impasse for us. There have been instances when — even as the senior member and chair of my particular panel — I’ve been outvoted by my fellow judges; in that event, I smile and give way and keep my reservations to myself.

Can a judge know whose work it is that’s being scrutinized? Possibly, yes. The entries are submitted anonymously and are number-coded, but since some entries have been previously published or submitted to workshops, they can be recognized by judges who, after all, are supposed to be on top of the current literature. Does this mean the judges will favor their peers and protégés? A few might — I wouldn’t be a writer if I didn’t acknowledge human frailty — but they’d have to ask themselves if it’s worth risking one’s reputation for. Besides, three different judges, not just one, choose the winners, and an indefensibly bad work will not go very far. (This isn’t to say that all Palanca winners have been good and great; some years, in certain categories, the pickings can be lean, and the judges elect to hand out prizes when perhaps they shouldn’t.) In my case, if and when I learn that my best and current students are joining the Palancas, I simply don’t judge, so that if they win — as many have — they can savor their triumph knowing that I had nothing to do with it.

By and large, it’s a fair process, even accounting for all the biases and blind spots that every judge will bring to the table. It’s the sore losers who’ve cried “Foul!” the loudest, the self-acclaimed geniuses who can’t believe that three dumb people passed judgment on their work and found it wanting. Quite a few of them have written me with a vehemence, and all I can tell them is, if you can’t afford to lose, don’t join; if you think you were cheated, don’t join again (and then denounce the Palancas and their winners as some kind of literary cabal); if you think you’re that great, forget the Palancas and send your work straight to Alfred Knopf or the Oxford University Press. Shakespeare, Milton, Poe, Rizal, Rilke, Brecht, Plath — heck, none of them won Palancas, so why should you?

The strangest case I’ve heard of doesn’t even involve laxity of judgment but rather its opposite extreme — one judge came to the meeting with a ruler to measure the margins of the printed entries, to make sure they all abided by the one-inch margin rule. Thankfully, he was overruled by his fellows, who probably remembered Emerson’s admonition about “a foolish consistency (being) the hobgoblin of little minds.”

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Speaking of writers, let me devote the rest of this week’s column to a letter I received from the noted broadcaster Ray Pedroche, who wrote me to take note of his late father’s centenary this month. That father was writer Conrado V. “CV” Pedroche, a stalwart of Filipino fiction in English in his time. Ray writes:

“I thought I should write you about the l00th birth anniversary of CV Pedroche. ‘Who he?’ your young readers might ask. Before he died in the ‘80s he said that no one would remember who he was in fifty years. I am afraid that he was right. But I am saddened, my being the eldest son aside, that a noted Filipino writer like CV would soon be forgotten.

“There was a time when almost every week he would have a short story published in the Sunday Times Magazine or the Philippines Free Press. And to a son like me, being the eldest and the superboy in his Ray stories of which there are about 30, he was a hero in our household. Pardon the immodesty. Anyway, since this is his centenary, I am going out of my way in writing you to pay tribute to this simple man who saw ‘beauty in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour.’ An artist to the core, he was the humblest man I have ever seen. He was quiet and unassuming, never raising his voice except when he came upon an affirmation of his art whether in books, his short stories, his attempts at painting and sculpting.

“He was always a boy at heart, never ceasing to wonder and discover and, to a fault, never sauntering even in fantasy, from being the original Adam. It might interest you to know that he had written two books in his lifetime — Full Circle and Gingerbread Girl. And if you never had heard of them, that is not at all surprising, for writing was all he was concerned about, and marketing his works never was his mettle. I don’t even have a copy of his books. I am sure he did not care if one kept them or not. Creating them was all that mattered. I suspect that creating us, his children, four boys and a girl, was all that mattered for he was sure that each one knew how to live. And he was right.

“He raised us in a world of books and a fairyland of art. Even the war (he was 30 during WW II) did not embitter him. He wrote a diary with a pen he fashioned out of a young bamboo twig with an embedded lead which he used in day-to-day account of how it was like to be almost bombed out of a dug-out, and how a writer like him saw the war, through his eyeglasses not so darkly. I have the manuscript of that diary and it is my favorite since it reflects the good heart of a man amidst the chaos and cataclysm and devastation brought about by war.

“Butch, I hope you will pardon me for writing about my father which some might misconstrue as self-serving. But I say that in this world of fleeting fancies, the old verities must hold. I am much obliged.”

And so are we, Ray. Many thanks for writing about this extraordinary man.

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