Look, she can read

This year’s recipient of the Silliman University Outstan-ding Alumnus Award in Literature and Creative Writing is Rowena Tiempo-Torrevillas. Her husband is my brother, Lemuel, a videographer and facilities manager, School of Film and Broadcasting, The University of Iowa: thus Rowena is the most gifted of the Torrevillases around the world. And she is the daughter of the renowned literary and creative writers, the late Edilberto K. Tiempo and National Artist Edith L. Tiempo.

Rowena writes poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, for which she has received National Book Awards, the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, and the Gawad Balagtas from the Writers’ Union of the Philippines.

Her works have been published in various languages, including Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, Bengali, Ibo, and several European languages including Bulgarian, Croatian, and Romanian.

She is the author of several books: Sea-Gypsies Stay, Selected Works (poetry, fiction, nonfiction, University of the Philippines Press, 2000); Flying Over Kansas: Personal Views (Giraffe Books, Manila, 1998), Mountain Sacraments (poems, De la Salle University Press, 1991); Upon the Willows and Other Stories, (New Day Publications, Quezon City, 1981) , and she co-edited The World Comes to Iowa (Iowa State University Press, 1987) with Paul Engle.

She holds a Ph.D. in English and Literature from Silliman. She teaches writing at the University of Iowa, where she administered the International Writing Program for nearly two decades. She is currently writing a nonfiction work, as well as a collaborative collection with her mother, Edith, and her daughter, Lauren Maria Torrevillas Seamans. The book is tentatively titled Three Times Three: Genres and Generations of Tiempo Women.

How Rowena came to discover she could read – the first step in her journey to the world of words – is so neatly told in her story in Erlinda Enriquez Panlilio’s book, Comfort Food (Anvil Publishing Inc., Pasig, 2003). This is a collection of stories by well-known writers on their particular comfort food. According to Erlinda, "For many of them, writing of their comfort food has been act of remembering, of retrieving the memory of their childhood and growing-up years, with mother cooking dishes that made them feel cosseted and loved. For others, it was the recollection of times alone, perhaps, away from home and hankering for food that gave them solace and somehow filled the void."

I’ve taken the liberty to print a portion of Rowena’s story, as follows:

"My first independent entry into the world of words, through reading, is associated inextricably with the cookies my mother used to bake when we were in Iowa. I acquired the written word more or less on my own; one might say I taught myself to read, although the groundwork was already laid for that grand activity upon which civilization is built. My earliest memories of toys are the alphabet blocks I played with. At the time when I discovered how to read, my parents – both writers five years out of the Iowa Writers Workshop – were finishing their Ph.D. in English in Denver, where, leery of babysitters, I tagged along to their classes under John Williams, Harold Priest, and Joe Billings.

"Unlike the eager-beaver, well-intentioned but somehow too urgent yuppie parent that I was in my turn – reading to my infant daughter until, in self-defense, Rima was reading at age two – my father and mother did not sit down to teach me to read. When I was yet preliterate and very little, linking letter to sound to the printed page seemed easy enough: sounding out the street signs, the letters on the milk carton. ‘What are we having for dessert?’ Dad would ask over the dinner table. And Mom, not wanting, as she thought, to keep me from finishing what was still on my plate, would spell the answer over my head to him: ‘We’re having c-a-k-e and i-c-e-c-r-e-a-m.’ After a moment, I’d ask, all innocent-sounding, ‘Are we having cake and ice cream?’

"Thus it was, when our Danish landlady in Denver, elderly Mrs. Wetzel, brought over a little red Gospel of John that she had found on the bus on her way to the house on Colfax Avenue, I was ready for The Word. It seemed propitious and right, that, just turned five, the first passage on which I would discover I could read should be from the author of the lines, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh. I stood behind the kitchen door and looked at the words where the page had fallen open, and I ran over to where Mom was cooking dinner. I held the little book up to her. ‘Look, Mom! Does this say, ‘For Jesus is the Christ, the son of God?’

"As my mom tells me now, she ‘nearly jumped out of her skin’ in startlement. She hurried over to the bedroom where Dad was poring over his comps review. ‘Ed, Ed, Rowena is reading!’

"From then, it was unstoppable. Early in the morning, before anyone else was up, I’d be sitting at the kitchen table among my folks’ piles of Baugh’s A Literary History of England and History of the English Language and Sturtevan’s Introduction to Linguistics, devouring A Little Treasury of Children’s Stories and Book One of A Family Treasury before Mom put my bowl of cornflakes on the table."

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