Alias Denise Chou

It’s been three years since last I visited the adopted hometown in the south, Dumaguete City, so there must be a few changes in the city’s landscape waiting to be discovered by the intermittent traveler. Last we were there a number of multinational fastfood restaurants had already set up shop, and the latest word is that there’s now even a National Book Store near the Silliman University portals right across Scooby’s, that fixture of a merienda place cum Internet cafe on the second floor.

The likes of Jollibee and Shakey’s are of course safely ensconced in their busy nooks, slowly easing out faded landmarks that old-timers were more familiar with: Dainty’s with its trademark halo-halo with corn flakes, real fruit and tapioca bursting in the mouth, and possibly even Oriental Panciteria with its gaggle of Peranakan cabinets with the lighted incense sticks in front of portraits of the owner’s ancestors, in whose second floor we consumed many a beer and noodle dish before setting out for the boulevard at sundown.

Funny but first we set foot in the place was in the early ’60s, tagging along as a toddler with his parents in the very first national writers workshop at Silliman presided by the Tiempos, during which we stayed in a house on campus that had a green swing at the front porch, which me and an elder sister imagined to be a storm-tossed ship at sea.

The primary mode of transport to get to the Visayan islands has always been by boat, because it was as if something was missing if one went there any other way. The view of the islands and the sunset on deck followed by a dizzying star-filled sky was part of the adventure, part of the vacation, important aspects of the journey that would be missed if one traveled by plane.

We’ve been back there countless times since then, including in the late ’70s when we were already a fellow in the selfsame workshop, and the horse-drawn tartanillas were still very much around and the drone of pedicabs was not as endless as it seems now, though the beach at Silliman Farm remains as always a tricycle ride away.

Among the fellows in 1978 was a young poet by the name of Denise Chou Allas, who had already published a chapbook of poetry called, if I remember correctly, Waystation Blues, copies of which she had given away to co-fellows with the appropriate inscription, my own quoting from lines of one of the poems I had submitted for the workshop.

She had a husband and son waiting in Manila, and months later back in the urban jungle of our common city during a reunion of workshop fellows I noticed she had lost some weight, and she said matter of factly, “Masaya kasi,” she was happy. We all had a night out on the town and it was the last time I saw the writer pilot Rene Saguin, who died a few months later in a plane crash, of a sudden he was home to Arcturus.

Then the batch of ’78 drifted apart, except for maybe a handful who still kept in touch by letter or telegram, no cell phones back then.

About 30 years later the workshop is now in its 48th year, and the salimpusa in the maiden edition is making a comeback as a salimpusa in the panel, that will discuss stories, poems, essays of young writers from Ateneo, different branches of UP, La Salle, UST.

We had wished to reserve our comments until we were put on the spot, for which a crash course on public speaking would have served in good stead, but after having browsed through the manuscripts let’s just say that today’s writers have all the tools at their disposal.

It’s fairly obvious that no one writes in long hand anymore, revision and the possibility of revision are second nature to them, no need for the blue pencil. Or even the red one for that matter.

Then the facility of language is striking. Very fluid; you’d think that they were writing in their first language. On the other hand maybe English is the first language for some of them.

The material also is a varied, kaleidoscopic lot, with traces of Harry Potter and the graphic novel, Anais Nin and Nina Simone and where melodrama potboiler meets obscure folktale, the far side of Da Vinci code. It goes without saying that hardly anything shocks the jaded workshop reader anymore, and it would take more than the usual to cause a scandal.

In a documentary me and Krip Yuson did on my father a year before he died, the old man had remarked about how the workshop itself has become the thing, the focus was no longer on the individual writer, which he said was a sad thing. Eight years after that documentary came out, and seven years after Franz Arcellana’s death it is only lately that I am beginning to understand what he meant: it is the writer that makes the workshop and not the other way around. Which could be short of saying that we panelists are mere fodder, though many of us wouldn’t be where we are without having gone through that summer rite of passage.

A veteran of the workshop Cesar Ruiz, gave this sage advice: “Basta tawa ka lang ng tawa at sabihin mo na kinikilabutan ka sa tula ko hanggang mawalan ng hininga ang mga ibang panelists sa tindi ng pagkasuklam sa ’yo.”

That expression of loathing I remember on the face of Denise Chou one morning when we were discussing a poem or was it a non-poem, but which many years later we could all share a good laugh over.

Last I heard Denise had migrated to Australia, adopted a new name, though I hope that she has kept up with her poetry even under a new alias, and whatever waystation blues she’s now in.