How I learned to write

In my life, I have had the great opportunity to be mentored by many loving teachers.

Party to my being a writer now was my late Grade 2 teacher at Gulod Elementary School, Mrs. Lydia Refrea. She was a short lady who would step on a stool to write on top of the pisara, her usual term for the blackboard. Her balance was perfect — more balanced was how she handled her class. Strict and sweet, never demeaning.

She did her lectures with her ubiquitous slender stick in hand that she hit against the table when the class became unruly. But when everything in the classroom was in order, she was the sweetest teacher on earth.

She sang in class even if it was not yet time for our Music session, which she also taught. She would sing: “How do you like to go up in a swing? Up in the air, so blue…” She hummed it all day long. To this day, I still know the song. I still remember Mrs. Refrea’s lyrical voice.

Apart from teaching us English in the morning, she also taught Reading and Writing in the afternoon. I looked forward to the afternoon class — partly because of the writing exercise and also because I was privy to the simple, fun-to-watch vanity of Mrs. Refrea.

Mrs. Refrea had curly fine hair. She would put on moss-green Velcro rollers during lunch break. The rollers on her head looked like small logs or green jumbo hotdogs cut in half. When we heard the snapping of the Velcro, that meant three things: the curling was done, she had achieved her desired volume and our class would resume soon. She would run her fingers through her hair, making sure every strand was in place. On her small teacher’s desk was a small mirror that shared space with her chalk box. With all the rollers neatly in her drawer, she began to line her lips with shy red Avon lipstick. She had a sweet, reddish smile on her face when she left her table to go to the front of the class.

One day, she asked her students to write a short essay titled “My Pet.”

“Ma’am,” I told her, “I don’t have a pet.” Tiny as I was at eight years old, I was seated in front, Row 1.

“No problem. Imagine you have a pet and write.”

I gave her a blank stare. “Imagine you have a pet. And you will have one,” she repeated.

So I imagined a brown and white spotted dog that I called Tagpi in my short story. From there on, that exercise gave birth to me being pregnant with ideas all the time.

Imagination is important in creating a story of fiction. I give credit to Mrs. Refrea for helping me open that creative part of my brain. Some friends told me the creative gene to be a writer was already in me but I did not believe them because in my family, when I did “contact tracing,” nobody was a writer.

I only began to realize that if my parents were writers they would pen beautiful, melodic prose because both of them were natural raconteurs. My father was an expert storyteller, with emphasis on punchlines. My mother on the other hand was good in details — dates, colors of clothes, time and feel of the day, down to exact quotes — when she told a story.

And when they would lull us to sleep, they did not read us bedtime stories. Instead, they told us of tales of manunupot, that of a deranged man who picked on mischievous children loitering on the streets and put them in a jute sack. Their blood, according to my mother’s retelling of that barber’s tale, would be used to fortify the bridges being built around town. It was a gory story but we would always be past asleep before we heard its ending.

We never had bad dreams even if we heard macabre tales at bedtime from our parents. Instead, we dreamt of better days to come. We never forgot to pray before we dozed off. And as I always say, God heard our prayers. What we have now is more than what we prayed for.

The discipline of reading is factored in how I learned to write. Reading and writing are fraternal twins. The progress in each is predicted by the ability of the self to be attentive to both. In the exercise of reading and writing, the reach of the imagination runs wild. In reading and writing, inference is needed. Imagination, too.

The reach of my imagination, modesty aside, helped me win a short story writing contest in 1981 when I was in Grade 4, under Ms. Zenaida Lorenzo, my adviser and Filipino teacher.

Ms. Lorenzo wanted a volunteer student to join the municipal Christmas story writing contest. She gave me the mechanics and with it was my freedom to write a story.

My story was entitled “Ang Pasko ng mga Bata sa Negros,” a tale of children suffering from famine in that region.

Because Mrs. Refrea told me to read all the time, I followed her advice. And it was through reading that I chanced upon the hunger experienced by the people in Negros in the early ‘80s.

In the foyer of the house of a well-to-do couple Nanay Rosie and Tatay Ben, I would always see the day’s issue of People’s Journal lying on a glass-top table. I would frequent their house every afternoon because I was assigned by my father, a farmer, to sell his sakate to the couple. A sakate, loaded in a makeshift trolley, is a mound of freshly reaped grass bound by dried wedges of banana trunk. The grass, cut using a scythe, was fodder for the carabaos of the couple. A mound of sakate, taller than me that time, cost P5. That amount was more than enough for the daily school allowance of my two elder brothers and me.

I would push the trolley of sakate to the house of the couple in the neighborhood late afternoon. For 30 minutes, I would wait for either of the couple to come out of their house to pay me the amount. And for 30 minutes, as I waited by their foyer, I would read the day’s paper. That’s how I managed to read the series of reports about the plight of the people in Negros. I remembered the details. The same details I used when I imagined the Christmas of the children in Negros.

I remember using three pieces of intermediate pad in writing my story. Before Christmas, I submitted “Ang Pasko ng mga Bata sa Negros” to Miss Lorenzo, who subsequently submitted it to the organizing committee. It was when classes resumed in January of 1982 when she announced in class I won first prize in the short story writing contest. I was thrilled to receive the cash prize of P50.

It was my first writing win. And to this day, I remember Mrs. Lydia Refrea who challenged my young mind to use the reach of my imagination. *