Creative writing in academia
Before anything else, I’d like to express my deepest thanks to the many readers who wrote in to extend their sympathies on the recent passing of our pet cat — and the only other boy in the family — Chippy. Many generously shared their own agonizing stories of losing their pets, some all too suddenly. We had the benefit of a bit of preparation, so we should be thankful for such small but valuable graces. Like I told friends who commiserated with us, a loss like this challenges my agnosticism, and makes me realize that we don’t humanize our pets — they humanize us, reminding us of our responsibilities to the world at large. I can already thank Chippy for helping me firm up my resolve to get going on my bucket list, particularly one item: to learn how to boogie and hustle, so I can spin Mrs. Boss around on the dancefloor, at least a few times before we croak.
And to those who were wondering, we had Chippy cremated by Rainbow Bridge Pet Aftercare Services, a business run by a very nice young man named Angel Oda, who also has a kennel with a hundred dogs and who treated both Chippy and the family with much attentiveness and respect. They performed the cremation in Pila, Laguna (local regulations apparently disallow it here in the city) but the whole process was documented, and Chippy’s fine white ashes were returned in a paper box the next day. For his urn, on my last day in the US, I found and brought home a small glass canister with a pretty pewter top. You can learn more about the service at www.rainbowbridge.ph.
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Like I noted last week, I was in Chicago recently to give a report on creative writing programs in the Philippines, particularly in UP, before the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), the world’s oldest and largest such organization. The following figure boggles the mind, but more than 10,000 attendees — students, teachers, and professional and aspiring writers — signed up for this 20th annual conference, which tells you something about the enormous interest in creative writing within academia itself. I kept asking myself, where do all these people come from, and why do they all want to be writers? Of course, the same thing could have been asked of us, and I was there to provide some answers. Here’s part of what I said in our panel on “Internationalizing the MFA.”
As an academic discipline, creative writing is fairly new, compared to other branches of instruction in the arts, say painting or music, which have had a long and unquestioned tradition going back centuries. Schools of music and fine arts have proliferated around the world, the best of them attracting top-quality students in the same way that MBA programs have become de rigueur for talented and ambitious business professionals.
For writers, however, graduate programs and degrees have often been seen as a non-essential option, something that very good writers did not need to do, arising from the common impression that writing is largely self-taught, self-sustained, and does not need the supervision and guidance of a mentor. Even within departments of English and languages, where creative writing may have been taught as an elective subject and where CW programs remain subsumed, creative writing has suffered under the suspicion of being a frivolous, easier way to a diploma, in contrast to the presumably more honest labors of traditional research and criticism.
More recent theory and practice, however, have rescued creative writing from its seeming illegitimacy. Increasingly, universities have become aware of the value of artistic creativity, embodying creative writing into their offerings as a discipline on its own — in many cases, from the undergraduate to the doctoral level.
The best established and most popular CW degree for many schools and students appears to be the Master of Fine Arts or MFA in Creative Writing, a degree that recognizes creative writing as something best undertaken in the environment of an arts studio — again, much like music and painting — with a substantial body of publishable creative work, say a novel or a collection of prose or poetry, to be offered up as one’s thesis in lieu of a product of research or critical analysis.
By the AWP’s account, in 1967, there were 32 MA, 15 MFA, and 5 PhD programs in Creative Writing, mainly in the United States. By 2010, those numbers had risen dramatically to 116, 184, and 36, respectively. The figures prove the growing popularity and sustainability of CW programs, and will no doubt be larger if non-AWP members from around the world were to be counted.
Indeed one of the more remarkable growth patterns of CW in the academe has been its expansion beyond America and the United Kingdom, even beyond English itself. While the template for graduate programs and workshops may have been set by such places as the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Breadloaf Writers Conference which both began in the US in the 1920s and 1930s, today creative writing programs, workshops, fellowships, and residencies of every sort can be found all around the world, including Southeast Asia and the Philippines.
As an American colony for the earlier half of the 20th century, the Philippines has been particularly open to American educational models, and creative writing has been no exception. English instruction and English departments have been hallmarks of the Philippine educational system — not only in colonial times, but more so today, with the resurgence of English as a basic requirement of entry into the cash-rich business-process-outsourcing or BPO industry.
For many decades, creative expression in English was a sign of noble achievement, the zenith of which was publication in America itself. Not surprisingly, many of our best writers flew off to America from the 1940s onward to attend the Iowa workshop and to get their MAs and PhDs in US universities. When they returned, they brought not only New Criticism with them, but also a resolve — as with Edilberto and Edith Tiempo — to replicate their American experience and teach creative writing to succeeding generations of Filipinos they way they had learned it in the American Midwest. Then followed creative writing workshops—in Silliman, UP, Iligan and Bacolod, among many other places and universities, developing writing not only in English but in Filipino and other Philippine languages as well.
These workshops, which typically took in no more than 20 writers in every batch, served as the precursors of formal, full-blown academic writing programs, helped along by the fact that they were being led and implemented by writers already in academia, who had the prestige and the position to influence academic policy.
Today, creative writing programs leading to degrees can be found in a number of Philippine universities, most notably at the University of the Philippines, which offers a BA, an MA, and a PhD in Creative Writing. Ateneo de Manila offers a BFA in Creative Writing, Silliman University a PhD in Creative Writing, and DLSU an MFA and DFA in Creative Writing.
This surge of interest in creative writing as a field of study in the Philippines is remarkable, especially considering that hardly anyone makes any real money from writing or publishing in the Philippines. We are a country of 93 million people, mostly literate, and many in more than two languages, including English; but it’s still a pain to sell even 1,000 copies of a new novel within a year. For historical reasons — some of our revolutionary heroes were also excellent writers — we hold writers in high esteem, but we don’t read them or buy their books. So there’s a romantic cachet to becoming a Filipino writer, but part of the romance is the almost inevitable penury attendant on the choice.
So why do Filipinos persist in writing, and in going to graduate school for writing? It may have to do with our natural expressiveness as a people. We can’t help expressing our sense of the passing scene and of life itself, a sense deeply imbued with romantic fatalism. Let’s put it this way — those who can, sing; those who can’t, write.
While I’m grossly generalizing, I might as well venture to say that Filipinos are culturally predisposed — perhaps more than other Asian peoples — to workshops of the American MFA kind. We brook no censorship, we speak our minds freely, and while we respect our elders, the mentor-mentee relationship in Philippine academia is fairly loose and informal. Democracy in the streets has gone hand in hand with democracy in the classrooms, which allows for the freewheeling discussions vital to successful workshops.
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Email me at penmanila@yahoo.com and check out my blog at www.penmanila.ph.
