A writer’s space

You won’t know this is a writer’s house until you reach the spacious attic – or more accurately, until you reach the stairs leading to the attic with the steps packed with manuscripts, envelopes, folders and books. Smelling of old newsprint, the attic is crammed with so many books, some of them on the shelves, others on the tables and chairs while others still are resting contentedly on the floor, coated very slightly with dust.

When the owner of the house tells you that there is order in this chaos, you challenge him: If we ask you for a title, can you tell us where it is right away?

He says he could have long ago, but once, when he was abroad, his wife tried to put some order in this library, and when he came home he couldn’t find anything anymore. The books used to be classified this way: On the right side were copies of the books he authored, edited or conceptualized, next to those were books by his close friends in the literary circle, and on to diminishing order of importance. Today, it’s Filipiniana on one side, foreign titles on the left side.

Writer and poet Krip Yuson is a packrat, a collector of all kinds of things – you gather this much from what you observe and from what his wife Bambi tells you. One day, she says, you just find a collection of Buddhas in one corner. This, in addition to his collection of artworks by friends, old printer’s drawers that are hanging in one corner of the wall, and another collection of elephants that he got when his mother Ellie died five years ago.

The attic has a small door that opens to a store room, which reminds you of that eerie door in Being John Malkovich, but most of the time things don’t make it through the door and instead remain in boxes on the floor. So now there’s one box of his second poetry collection that’s missing.

Except for his first three books, Krip wrote 16 books in this house. Specifically where? Everywhere, as long as there was floor space for his typewriter, later his Acer laptop, briefly his iBook (which has since been appropriated by his daughter Mirava) and now his eMac.

Krip likes to write hunched over his laptop on the floor. Nineteen books and he still has a straight back. More incredibly, even when he’s writing on a deadline, he hasn’t missed an important basketball game on TV. Thank God, he says, Lebron James and the Cavs didn’t make it to the playoffs, or else his writing would have been screwed for two weeks.

Why on the floor? "When I’m working at a desk, it feels like real work," he says. "Only now do I manage to do it because Butch Dalisay helped us get an eMac, but I can’t work on it too long because my back aches when I’m sitting on a chair."

For the longest time, Krip resisted technology and stuck to his typewriter. "I missed the pounding and the balling of paper. With a typewriter, you can see your poem in an entire sheet, you can see the configuration. With my first laptop, you could see only half of it on the screen. It wasn’t until I became more of an editor that I appreciated the computer," he says. "I read somewhere that the technological revolution was convincing a lot of people that they could write. You don’t realize that it’s a triumph of technology, not your writing."

Krip says that he’s always been "domesticated" and prefers to write from home – here and in their former house at Teachers’ Village. "I haven’t worked in an office for three or four decades except for that year and a half at The Evening Paper, but even then I still did my writing at home."

As for that often-used excuse writer’s block and how to get past it, Krip says, "When you’re young, you have so many rituals and kaartehan. You cannot start pounding on your typewriter unless maligo ka muna twice, light incense, etc. The beauty of journalism, of having weekly deadlines, is that the literary muscles are trained. I pride myself on being rather versatile, that I can produce on demand. Especially now with my latest commissioned work, di na puwedeng pa-arte-arte, waiting for the poetic mood to strike. Even with my poetry and fiction, I can work any time, even when the kids are around and they’re watching TV."

Krip is working on four commissioned works at the moment and he’s hoping he’ll find the time to do his own stuff later this year. "I’ve been turning a novel in my head for the last four or five years. I’ve another poetry book I want to write, and another collection of stories for which I have one or two stray ones that have not been included in a collection so it needs about five or six more. But really, it’s the novel that I want to write, hopefully by October when I’m done with my commitments and I can afford a month or two not to take any jobs."

During our conversation about favorite authors (his list at the moment includes James Hamilton Paterson and Steve Erickson; alas, Ian McEwan was banished after Atonement), we find out that his discipline, his writing pace is nothing short of amazing even though he says his novels have been few and far between. "I know I can do one in two or three months. The last, Voyeurs and Savages, was done fast. I finished it in a month and a half in time for the Centennial Prize."

His daily output when he’s working on a novel: six or seven pages rough, then he edits it down to three or four pages. "In a month, that’s 120 pages, in two months you have a full-blown novel. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t wait for the mood anymore and I’ve developed tricks like writing in advance. I don’t believe in getting stumped in one part. Take it up somewhere else and let them meet in the middle. You don’t know where you’re going? Go to another chapter. Develop another character. Play around a little."

The ground floor of the Yuson house tells you that a gardener lives here. As soon as you enter the main space, your eyes are drawn to the pocket garden that runs along the length of the living room and then to the backyard garden where a mound of soil is just sort of plopped on one side (long story short: After they destroyed the bahay anay, they discovered the mound had its uses).

The main floor is quite an open space, built seemingly with little concern for security. Krip says, "There’s really nothing to steal." When you point to the artworks, he says, "Would the akyat bahay gang be interested in art?"

All right, probably not.

But still… a well-read thief might happily cart away artworks done by Krip’s writer friends such as Erlinda Panlilio, Jaime An Lim, Cirilio Bautista and Offie Tequi. Or the photos of Eduardo Masferre, Nap Jamir and Jaime Zobel, the light boxes of Cesare A.X. Syjuco, and other artworks by Ibarra de la Rosa, Santi Bose, Rock Drilon, Pandy Aviado, Jeanie Pilapil, David Fowler, Bert Monterona, Nunelucio Alvarado, Tita Ayala, Agnes Arellano, BenCab, Beng Dalisay, Salvador Arellano, David Cortes Medalla, Jaime de Guzman, Manny Baldemor, Ramon Orlina, Sonny Yñiguez, Nonoy Marcelo, and Johnny Altomonte.

Your first guess that it’s his wife Bambi who’s the gardener would be wrong. Krip is the gardener; she’s the farmer. He’s the collector; she’s the handyman. Bambi manages the family farm in Cavite left by her father, the late Catalino Macaraeg, executive secretary during Cory Aquino’s administration.

As with most of the artworks, the plants are from and traded with friends. Krip likes to take care of the plants himself though there’s a regular gardener who comes on weekends to do the trimming. It’s a good arrangement, except that the gardener sometimes acts on his own and doesn’t consult Krip, which pisses him off.

"I like esoteric, uncommon things," he says. "I travel a lot, so when I go, say, to Davao and I see something uncommon I bring it home."

One of the plants that gives him great pleasure is the monstera deliciosa, a plant whose leaves are filled with holes, as if insects had bitten through them. It makes you wonder what kind of evolution it went through to be this way. "Recently I traded some monstera with Sonia Neri. I also manage to get a lot from friends, like from Maningning Miclat’s mom who has specimens that I don’t have."

Krip says they used to have what’s commonly called the "miracle tree" whose fruits, when eaten, make everything else taste sweet for a few hours. They also have ginger plants, bamboo, papaya, and Mickey Mouse which Bambi grows on the farm, and many other species.

The dining room, directly opposite the living room, has views of the gardens. An old slot machine opens up to reveal a bar, while one wall is a tribute space to artist Cesare Syjuco with three of his light boxes from his last show and a much older artwork.

"Cesare and I are old friends and kumpares. We hadn’t seen each other in a decade because he hibernated, and then suddenly he had a grand show at the CCP last year," Krip explains. "I was very impressed and I did a review. He asked me to choose one of his works, and then he asked Bambi to choose and she chose a pair. So now we have three."

Many of the artworks in the house are hung in groups – by artist or theme. A collage of old Igorot prints by Eduardo Masferre in the foyer greets visitors. "They’re old prints that Santi himself colored. I worked on a book of his a long time ago and I treasure these photos."

It’s obvious that Krip values his friendships deeply. He mentions his friends frequently in our conversation like his old buddies at the Philippine Literary Arts Council – Gemino Abad, Cirilo Bautista, Ricky de Ungria and the late Freddie Salanga. When a blogger disses any of his friends, Krip takes the time to answer back and defend them.

"I tell them off. A lot of people feel they have to kill somebody to build themselves up. I tell them magsulat muna sila ng mabuti before they start attacking somebody’s work," he says. "I really like having been in the literary arts more than, say, music. We’re very supportive of one another."

What do poets talk about when they gather for a drinking session at some bar? Krip laughs out loud and says, "Diana Zubiri, Viva Hot Babes and nostalgia songs –hardly ever literary stuff."

Bambi interjects, "At the end of the day, they’re drunken old men."

At 15, Krip Yuson became an agnostic, and then an atheist. Somewhere along the way, he also became a poet and fictionist, then a husband to Bambi and father to Alyosha Skywalker, Alaric Riam, and Mirava Coree. He "got trapped" into teaching, which he doesn’t really enjoy except for the national workshop in Dumaguete. He complains that even his students at the Ateneo don’t know the difference between "you’re" and "your," "they’re" and "their." But on those rare occasions that he finds a promising writer in a class of 40, he gets a high.

On his atheism, he says, "I’ve always asked myself whether it was an extreme reaction to the fact that at San Beda I was an altar boy for years, and when I got to UP parang nakawala sa koral and I discovered the library" – Krip’s tree of knowledge, so to speak.

"I certainly don’t believe in traditional religion. Well, I believe in it for certain people – opium of the masses. People who are weak emotionally need religion. I have not prayed except for a single time. The moment overcame me. It was in the 1990s, our daughter was one or two years old and she was born with a deformed ear. I found myself at the Sacre Coeur Basilica in Paris. I couldn’t help myself, I knelt and prayed for her. That was the only time I ever did – a moment of weakness. People feel that sometimes they need to reach out to something."

Yet Krip reveals with a laugh that he believes in astrology and divination. "It’s organized religion that I don’t understand – it’s caused so many wars."

Naturally, at UP, Krip was a hippie. "Pinagtatawanan namin yung mga Marxists. When Kabataang Makabayan was newly formed, they’d be marching across the library and singing their Internationale, and me and my crazy writer friends would sing America’s national anthem."

"I’ve always been into liberalism, basically. A lot of things are wrong in this country because people have a label for everything. I don’t think anything per se is immoral – even killing is not immoral if you do it in self-defense or in defense of country. Nene Pimentel and everybody else have no right to say that gambling is immoral; there is use for it, just like prostitution."

Bambi says that as far as raising kids, "discipline comes from the mother. I prefer that I take charge of the kids. He’s very liberal, I’m more structured."

In the meantime, there are still novels to be written in this house, more poems and short stories.

Krip lets it slip that in the near future he’s going to write a detective novel, "one that spans the Southeast Asia I know – Manila, Singapore, Macau…"

You can imagine him sitting on the floor or perhaps in front of a low Japanese table, having surrendered to the call of a desktop Mac, surrounded by unlabeled boxes, books, magazines and the broken chair salvaged from his sister-in-law’s garage sale. Perhaps he’ll have time to have all this fixed.

But then again, it doesn’t really matter.