More on that Dumaguete jaunt

Our column last week gained a number of positive reactions, especially having to do with the lovely essay we allotted much of our space to, “Moments of Unexpected Sweetness” by Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas.

“Love this title, Krip,” our friend Chit Villegas e-mailed. “’Moments of Sweetness’”... I think I will sit down and think back... and journal those moments... By the way I have a mental photo of Rowena Torrevillas’ last lines about the Amish scene. She described exactly how I felt too when I had that same moment passing by Pennsylvania.”

Then came this reverie from our long-lost bro John Altomonte, painter of the first water, who was based in Sydney for years until he and his dear Amal decided to move north to Darwin early this year:

“Ahh, am now a fan of Rowena’s hauntingly beautiful penmanship... Ahhh, that lovely lass, once your muse, is still in there living now in words that have the power to enchant. Why did I get so many flashes of the old Silliman while reading that piece? Memories and dreams and moments of sweetness, like a sheer white curtain playing with an afternoon breeze. Thanks for the piece, Krip.”

John had visited Dumaguete way back in 1971, on a painting-jaunt from Bacolod, together with the now late, lamented Ibarra dela Rosa. They stayed with me for a week, in my rented apartment close to the sunset-scenic esplanade that is Rizal Boulevard.

It was my first teaching stint, thus a new life, taking a lease on my adopted hometown. “Mom” Edith Tiempo had convinced me to stay on when I suddenly popped in from Manila around November of 1970. The second semester was about to start, and she needed someone to handle a poetry course, three times a week. 

Initially she set me up with the excellent writer Tony and his musicologist-partner Joy Enriquez at their pond-side cottage in Banilad, in the DYSR compound by the sea. It was lovely there, but too many semplangs while riding pillion on Tony’s motorbike as we wended our way home at night after a drinking session in town soon had me deciding to get my own digs within walking distance to Silliman.

A pool villa at Antulang Beach Resort offers a grandstand view of the blue blue sea, sunrise to sundown and all night long.

Junix Inocian, now one of our top-rate theater artists and still in London after Miss Saigon, boarded with me together with his buddy, a student from Manila. Then John and Ibarra came to share my room for a week, and it was all so idyllic in our Big Bro pad, with five guys beer-ing nightly and sharing yet-budding artistic sensibilities.

Oh so long ago, nearly four decades. So that every time I revisit DumasGoethe, I can’t help but go through that long procession of reveries featuring the sweetest moments.

Only over a week ago it was to conduct a daylong literary seminar arranged by SU English department chair Evelyn Mascuñanas. I was to critique and workshop three essays submitted by graduate students in my buddy Cesar Ruiz Aquino’s class, then make a presentation on the writing of the Essay.

I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the manuscripts:

“The sleep-deprived wakes up” by Parts Partosa, “Saturdays are dangerous days” by Alana Leilani C. Narciso, and “Whatever After” by Misael Ondong. Each one naturally partook more of the elements of creative non-fiction, as most informal essays do nowadays, with the “I” persona taking a central seat as fount of personal experience, discovery, and insight.

The three essays only needed relative degrees of tweaking, as I pointed out, in terms of language use as well as structural considerations — especially with regard to the rather ambitious thus difficult construct being attempted by Alana, having to do with convincing her four-year-old daughter to submit to delousing with the help of a bogeyman story that turns even more mythic as the “I” mother is herself racked with psychological concerns.

A tough one — the conceptualized double-paralleling device, as she also harks back to how her mother had invented the original scarifying fable. But her own little girls put everything to rest with her words of reassurance at the end: “But Mom, it’s only a story.”

Some essays do tell stories, while others are formalist and engage strictly with ideas or arguments. In my presentation I offered samplers that represented the wide range of essay-writing, from my buddy Jimmy Abad’s ars poetica, “The Poem is to Live,” to Dr. “Sawi” Aquino’s informed yet ludic literary critique comparing Nick Joaquin’s and Carmen Guerrero Nakpil’s takes on the Maria Clara image, “Sex in the Time of Maria Clara,” Sylvia L. Mayuga’s personal odyssey with a language, “English Hot and Cold,” to “Purboy: Merienda in the Time of Crisis” — winner of last year’s Doreen Gamboa Fernandez Food-Writing Contest, by the pseudonymous “Green Mango.”

We also took up excerpts from Nakpil’s “A plot to kill a general” (on Antonio Luna), as well as J.K. Rowling’s 2008 commencement address at Harvard, titled “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination.” Then the wonderfully eloquent extended piece by premier poet Jane Hirshfield, “Language Wakes Up in the Morning: A Meander Toward Writing” — even if we could only pick at its nuggets for lack of time. 

And to round it off, Patricia Evangelista’s “Mere anarchy” and Jessica Zafra’s “Occam’s Razor does not cut here” seemed fit to inspire the young people to get into the genre with more spice and attitude. Yeah.

On dramatic rock cliffs on the southernmost tip of Negros Island nestles Antulang’s collection of top-rate suites and pool villas, with a solar lighthouse thrown in.

Part of the audience was a Dumaguete reading group that meets weekly under sage Sawi’s guidance. A member is our friend Annabelle Lee Adriano, who turned out to have won one of Jessica’s kinky writing contests, with a piece on tennis, but couldn’t claim her prize that was a coffee date with La Zafra. We promised Annabelle that we’d try to have our common icon-dominatrix mail her the coffee, perchance with her signature in the 3-in-1 packet.

We owe Annabelle so. Ever gracious to lodge us in a splendiferous venue, Antulang Beach Resort which her family owns and she manages, she has spoiled us beyond redemption. Now every trip to our hometown must include at least a day in the scenic resort in Siaton, an hour’s drive south from “Daguet.”

But two weeks ago our two nights there, again at a pool villa named Gumamela — for hibiscus or “antulang” (also the name for a giant clam) — once again proved memorable, inclusive of a sunset cruise around Tambobo Cove of the hundred international pleasure craft, onboard the 65-foot trimaran Annabelle Lee, and a wild-looking, wonderfully desolate stretch of beach pummeled by amihan winds.

Felt so recharged. Truly a kingdom by the sea it is. And truly a most charming family Annabelle has, with her hubby Edo filling us in on football exploits by Pinoys during his time (he was a star booter at Silliman, thus a heartthrob, heh-heh), and their now 14-year-old daughter Anna Joaquina a.k.a. Suyen, whose last poem, titled “Deception,” we workshopped one-on-one at Gabby’s Bistro (a must-dine when in Duma).

So recharged that we thought we managed to pass off some of the good energy to Mom Edith, whom we called on briefly at her Montemar haven in Sibulan. She had put on weight since last May, and but for a cough seemed strong enough for a lecture, what with a still clear and resonant voice, even as she kept apologizing for tiring out so easily.

We posed together with her latest title, Commend, Contend — a collection of poems published by UP Press. And we felt so good. As Sawi would say, “So darn good.”

BTW, Happy Burpday to him, this Sawi, tomorrow. It’s his 65th. A good age. Between us girls, I must say: Take it from me.