Author: Pinoy Penman

Penman for Monday, July 11, 2011



BEFORE I go to the main subject of this week’s piece, may I please ask the people at the Office of the Presidential Spokesperson (it’s hard to tell these days who that person really is, but I’m guessing or hoping that I have some friends in that office) to stop spamming my mailboxes with their press releases and “good news” bulletins? Each one of those PDF messages is about 5 megabytes, or about a hundred times as large as this column.

In my UP mailbox alone—for which I, like all Dilimanians, have a measly 20 megabytes of total disk space to use—I get as many as five OPS messages in one day, which makes sure that nothing else gets in. In other words, my jdalisay@up.edu.ph address is now nothing more than a trash bin for Palace junk. Any kind of anti-spam filtering I do gets foiled by some OPS algorithm that automatically morphs, say, spokesperson.govph12 into spokesperson.govph13, ad nauseam. And nauseam is exactly what I feel, guys—I like your boss, but invading and overwhelming citizen’s mailboxes this way isn’t going to make him any cuddlier. So, please, OPS—stop the spam!


FROM THE Atlantic Magazine’s April 25 edition comes this sad bit of news—that, along with Kodachrome and other staples of the 20th century, the typewriter will no longer be produced, with the recent shutdown of the last typewriter factory in the world, in India.

Quoting the Daily Mail, the Atlantic reported that a company called Godrej and Boyce still produced up to 12,000 typewriters a year in India until 2009, serving the courts, the military, and other government offices. That inventory went down to 200 machines at closing time—the lowest point for a company that had been around for six decades, from the time when Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru called the typewriter a “symbol of India's emerging independence and industrialization”; up until the early 1990s, Godrej and Boyce were still selling 50,000 units a year.

The culprit, of course, was the personal computer and “word processing,” a phrase that I remember hearing for the first time in the 1980s and which I found rather strange until I ventured into WordPerfect and then Microsoft Word. Up until then, I still wrote most of my stories and plays in longhand—vigorously striking out long passages here and scribbling cryptic marginal notes there—before moving the text over and “finalizing” the manuscript with a typewriter. The typewriter gave the work a polished, formal, impersonal look that was supposed to be more objective and more believable than one’s own penmanship.

Among other writers, T. S. Eliot was fascinated by the typewriter and was acutely conscious of its effect on his work. In a letter much-quoted on the Internet, he told fellow poet Conrad Aiken in 1916 that “Composing on the typewriter, I find that I am sloughing off all my long sentences which I used to dote upon. Short, staccato, like modern French prose. The typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety.”

Speaking of the Internet, several sites like http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/26423 provide a list of famous writers and the typewriters they used—Hemingway and his Royal Quiet de Luxe, Steinbeck and his Hermes Baby, Updike and his Olivetti MP1, Orwell and his Remington Home Portable, among others.

There’s a whole cottage industry to be spun around writers and their tools—call it the fetishization of writing—encouraged by the appealing notion that if you use what they use (and maybe drink what they drink), you can write as well as Hemingway et al. Never mind the fact, of course, that for a century, masses of clerks and secretaries used Coronas, Underwoods, Olympias, and Remingtons without any one of them becoming an Eliot or a Flannery O’Connor. (O’Connor’s typewriter still sits on her desk at her farm in Georgia. Brad Gooch has a wonderful anecdote about O’Connor sitting at that typewriter for three hours a day; weakened by lupus, she reduced those three hours to one, and she would tell a friend that “I et up that one hour like it was filet mignon.”)

I’ve told a story or two about my love affair with the typewriter before (see Penman for November 16, 2009, where I rhapsodized over the Corona 3 folding portable typewriter that I dragged home to Manila with me from an antique mall in San Francisco). Until around 1988, the typewriter was my best friend; all my early stories, plays, and screenplays had been written on one. When I went off to graduate school in the US in the mid-‘80s, I handcarried an Olympia portable that had been a gift from my mentor Gerry Sicat; my first novel’s first lines flew off its keys.

I suppose I was lucky in a way to have been part of a generation that still used typewriters well into adulthood, and for whom the clackety-clack of the busy keyboard would become so hypnotic that, even when personal computers held dominion over our desks, we still looked for and employed software that mimicked the sound of the keys, and used a font called “American Typewriter” to pretend that little had changed.

To be honest, however, it wasn’t always love. On a bad day, the typewriter could be the writer’s worst enemy—keys went limp, ribbons ran dry, carriages got stuck, paper got scrunched on the platen (that’s the large “rolling pin” in the middle of the thing). Even when it was you who made the mistake—like mistyping the last line on a long page with five carbon copies underneath—you cursed the machine. More likely than not, you were going to let that mistake stay, hoping no one would look too closely. And what about moving that paragraph on Page 16 to Page 2, where it more logically belonged? Forget about it.

This leads me to conclude that when we lament the passing of the typewriter, we’re bemoaning the loss of a “simple” past that was truly much more complicated and troublesome than we now like to imagine.


SPEAKING OF antiquated writing instruments, let me just note that our pen club, the Fountain Pen Network-Philippines, celebrated its third anniversary last Saturday. It's hard to believe that from an impromptu gathering of about a dozen people in my front yard back in July 2008—most of whom thought they were all alone in this inky madness—FPN-P has grown into a Yahoogroup with over 160 members online, about 40 of whom I’d call diehard fountain pen, paper, and ink addicts.

I’d like to thank our members and our sponsors (yes, can you believe it, we actually have corporate friends!), particularly Charlene Ngo of Times Trading and Marian Ong of Scribe Writing Essentials, for helping out with the celebration. Charlene took the opportunity to remind everyone that the new, gorgeous aquamarine Lamy Safari is now available at the Lamy stalls in National Bookstore Glorietta5, Greenbelt, Rockwell, Shangrila, Trinoma, Quezon Ave, North Edsa, Filinvest, Megamall and Scribe Writing Essentials. It comes with medium nibs, but you can get a broad nib as an extra purchase. Marian, on the other hand, was happy to share the vibrant colors of the new Pelikan Edelstein inks, which you can check out at Scribe’s shop in Eastwood City—and what about a Pelikan M215 pen to go with the ink?

Penman for Monday, July 11, 2011



BEFORE I go to the main subject of this week’s piece, may I please ask the people at the Office of the Presidential Spokesperson (it’s hard to tell these days who that person really is, but I’m guessing or hoping that I have some friends in that office) to stop spamming my mailboxes with their press releases and “good news” bulletins? Each one of those PDF messages is about 5 megabytes, or about a hundred times as large as this column.

In my UP mailbox alone—for which I, like all Dilimanians, have a measly 20 megabytes of total disk space to use—I get as many as five OPS messages in one day, which makes sure that nothing else gets in. In other words, my jdalisay@up.edu.ph address is now nothing more than a trash bin for Palace junk. Any kind of anti-spam filtering I do gets foiled by some OPS algorithm that automatically morphs, say, spokesperson.govph12 into spokesperson.govph13, ad nauseam. And nauseam is exactly what I feel, guys—I like your boss, but invading and overwhelming citizen’s mailboxes this way isn’t going to make him any cuddlier. So, please, OPS—stop the spam!


FROM THE Atlantic Magazine’s April 25 edition comes this sad bit of news—that, along with Kodachrome and other staples of the 20th century, the typewriter will no longer be produced, with the recent shutdown of the last typewriter factory in the world, in India.

Quoting the Daily Mail, the Atlantic reported that a company called Godrej and Boyce still produced up to 12,000 typewriters a year in India until 2009, serving the courts, the military, and other government offices. That inventory went down to 200 machines at closing time—the lowest point for a company that had been around for six decades, from the time when Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru called the typewriter a “symbol of India's emerging independence and industrialization”; up until the early 1990s, Godrej and Boyce were still selling 50,000 units a year.

The culprit, of course, was the personal computer and “word processing,” a phrase that I remember hearing for the first time in the 1980s and which I found rather strange until I ventured into WordPerfect and then Microsoft Word. Up until then, I still wrote most of my stories and plays in longhand—vigorously striking out long passages here and scribbling cryptic marginal notes there—before moving the text over and “finalizing” the manuscript with a typewriter. The typewriter gave the work a polished, formal, impersonal look that was supposed to be more objective and more believable than one’s own penmanship.

Among other writers, T. S. Eliot was fascinated by the typewriter and was acutely conscious of its effect on his work. In a letter much-quoted on the Internet, he told fellow poet Conrad Aiken in 1916 that “Composing on the typewriter, I find that I am sloughing off all my long sentences which I used to dote upon. Short, staccato, like modern French prose. The typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety.”

Speaking of the Internet, several sites like http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/26423 provide a list of famous writers and the typewriters they used—Hemingway and his Royal Quiet de Luxe, Steinbeck and his Hermes Baby, Updike and his Olivetti MP1, Orwell and his Remington Home Portable, among others.

There’s a whole cottage industry to be spun around writers and their tools—call it the fetishization of writing—encouraged by the appealing notion that if you use what they use (and maybe drink what they drink), you can write as well as Hemingway et al. Never mind the fact, of course, that for a century, masses of clerks and secretaries used Coronas, Underwoods, Olympias, and Remingtons without any one of them becoming an Eliot or a Flannery O’Connor. (O’Connor’s typewriter still sits on her desk at her farm in Georgia. Brad Gooch has a wonderful anecdote about O’Connor sitting at that typewriter for three hours a day; weakened by lupus, she reduced those three hours to one, and she would tell a friend that “I et up that one hour like it was filet mignon.”)

I’ve told a story or two about my love affair with the typewriter before (see Penman for November 16, 2009, where I rhapsodized over the Corona 3 folding portable typewriter that I dragged home to Manila with me from an antique mall in San Francisco). Until around 1988, the typewriter was my best friend; all my early stories, plays, and screenplays had been written on one. When I went off to graduate school in the US in the mid-‘80s, I handcarried an Olympia portable that had been a gift from my mentor Gerry Sicat; my first novel’s first lines flew off its keys.

I suppose I was lucky in a way to have been part of a generation that still used typewriters well into adulthood, and for whom the clackety-clack of the busy keyboard would become so hypnotic that, even when personal computers held dominion over our desks, we still looked for and employed software that mimicked the sound of the keys, and used a font called “American Typewriter” to pretend that little had changed.

To be honest, however, it wasn’t always love. On a bad day, the typewriter could be the writer’s worst enemy—keys went limp, ribbons ran dry, carriages got stuck, paper got scrunched on the platen (that’s the large “rolling pin” in the middle of the thing). Even when it was you who made the mistake—like mistyping the last line on a long page with five carbon copies underneath—you cursed the machine. More likely than not, you were going to let that mistake stay, hoping no one would look too closely. And what about moving that paragraph on Page 16 to Page 2, where it more logically belonged? Forget about it.

This leads me to conclude that when we lament the passing of the typewriter, we’re bemoaning the loss of a “simple” past that was truly much more complicated and troublesome than we now like to imagine.


SPEAKING OF antiquated writing instruments, let me just note that our pen club, the Fountain Pen Network-Philippines, celebrated its third anniversary last Saturday. It's hard to believe that from an impromptu gathering of about a dozen people in my front yard back in July 2008—most of whom thought they were all alone in this inky madness—FPN-P has grown into a Yahoogroup with over 160 members online, about 40 of whom I’d call diehard fountain pen, paper, and ink addicts.

I’d like to thank our members and our sponsors (yes, can you believe it, we actually have corporate friends!), particularly Charlene Ngo of Times Trading and Marian Ong of Scribe Writing Essentials, for helping out with the celebration. Charlene took the opportunity to remind everyone that the new, gorgeous aquamarine Lamy Safari is now available at the Lamy stalls in National Bookstore Glorietta5, Greenbelt, Rockwell, Shangrila, Trinoma, Quezon Ave, North Edsa, Filinvest, Megamall and Scribe Writing Essentials. It comes with medium nibs, but you can get a broad nib as an extra purchase. Marian, on the other hand, was happy to share the vibrant colors of the new Pelikan Edelstein inks, which you can check out at Scribe’s shop in Eastwood City—and what about a Pelikan M215 pen to go with the ink?

Penman for July 4, 2011


WE SEEM to be in the season of centennials (and sesquicentennials, and quadricentennials), so it may not be all that novel to celebrate another one, but that’s what we did, anyway, last month at the Department of English and Comparative Literature in the University of the Philippines.

That’s where I work, and where I’ve spent most of my adult life. These days I wear the exalted title of “Professor,” and sometimes I still wonder if I deserve it, refusing to believe that it was that long ago when I was a wet-eared freshman trying to find his place (and many other places, in the typical freshman runaround) in Diliman.

I entered UP in 1970 as an Industrial Engineering major. I was a Philippine Science High School graduate, and while we didn’t have any contracts then to tie us down to a career in science and technology (on a side note, I firmly believe such contracts to be stupid and counterproductive, as many of these bonded teenagers then do everything they can to get out of it), I did want to become a scientist of some kind.

I’d grown up on Tom Swift books, and the McGraw-Hill documentaries on space travel and marine research that we were shown in school whetted my appetite. For a while back there, I thought that the coolest thing anyone could wear on the planet and beyond was a space suit or at least a laboratory smock; in bed, I dreamt of making wild discoveries with Bunsen burners and pipettes (assisted by a curvy aide with a sharp resemblance to Rosanna Podesta).

Unfortunately, my aptitude (or rather the lack of it) in mathematics refused to cooperate with my ambition. My shimmering halo as the entrance-exam topnotcher in my PSHS batch dissolved quickly with a “5.0” in Math in my freshman year, and only a written appeal kept me in school, on probation. With some help from my dad, I pulled out all the rhetorical stops and poured my 13-year-old heart into a document that began grandiosely with “At the outset, let me state that I bear malice toward none…” It must have worked, because they let me hang on, and I even became editor in chief of the school paper not long afterward.

I guess that was my personal initiation to the power of the written word: the words you chose to put on a piece of paper could change your life, create happy outcomes, and even get you girlfriends, plane tickets, and wads of cash, never mind changing society and improving human lives beyond your own.

So I straggled on to UP as an IE major, and this time hubris did me in. Having taken and miraculously passed such esoteric subjects as integral calculus in our accelerated high school, I felt insulted to be taking up Freshman Algebra again (there were no advance placements then), and skipped my classes, earning me another “5.0.” This must have eased my decision to drop out of college altogether just before martial law was declared, to work as a journalist on the one hand and to pursue my activist agenda on the other.

To cut to the chase, I was out of school for ten years, during which I went to martial-law prison, met and married Beng, got a government PR job (former activists made good propagandists), and started a family. But I longed to go back to school, not just to pick up the diploma my own father never got but also to indulge myself in what I really wanted to do, which was to immerse myself in the heady stuff of prose and poetry. I’d kept on writing plays and stories and started picking up Palancas, but it was nothing like waking up in the morning to read Shakespeare or Marlowe, with Arcellana or Brillantes in the afternoon and Neruda or Dylan Thomas in the evening. That’s what I imagined the life of an English major to be, and I wanted to be one, especially after spending a summer in Dumaguete with the Tiempos, who urged me to “save my soul.”

So I applied for readmission to UP as a returning freshman in 1981 (I had quit UP with just 21 units in tow). For a moment, I dithered between English and History as my major—history continues to be a keen private passion—but settled on the original and more practical option.

For the next three years, I reveled in my second life as a UP undergraduate, and the English Department became my second home. The names on the department’s doors at the Faculty Center were those of a gallery of icons in literature and its teaching: Francisco Arcellana, Leopoldo Yabes, Damiana Eugenio, Concepcion Dadulfalza, Alejandrino Hufana, Gemino Abad, Wilhelmina Ramas, Amelia Lapeña Bonifacio, and Nieves Epistola, among many others.

I was thrilled to study with Sylvia Mendez-Ventura, who walked us through the English Renaissance, and also led me on my first systematic study of the short story. Her closed-books, spot-passage exams were excruciating for many, but I must have been a masochist, because I loved these guessing games. When I couldn’t for the life of me remember the answer to one question—very likely because I never knew it in the first place—I quoted a line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“So quick bright things come to confusion!”) and escaped with a 1.25.

Indeed, to be an English major then was to worship at the altar of agony, whose votive fires were kept burning by such avatars as Prof. Ramas (whose five-hour exam on “The Idea of Tragedy” was the very demonstration of the subject); Profs. Eugenio and Filonila Tupas, whose objective quizzes were legend; and Profs. Yolanda Tomeldan and Dionisia Hermosura, whose survey courses toured us around the English landscape. (Many years later, living and working in England, these landscapes would come alive for me, as would “Beowulf” in the British Library.)

But I drew comfort from the company of fellow writers and English majors—our seniors like Franz Arcellana and Alex Hufana, and fellow juniors like Charlson Ong, Gina Apostol, Isabel Banzon-Mooney, Ramon Bautista, Judy Ick, and Luisa Mallari. We’d sneak beer and gin into the old Creative Writing Center office, and get drunk on liquor and literature (alcohol was officially prohibited on the premises, but the dean himself, the late Pablo Botor, often tippled with us). Franz sort of took me under his wing, encouraging me to produce new work and eventually writing the introduction for my first book in 1984.

That year, 1984, would mark not only the publication of Oldtimer and Other Stories, but also my graduation with an AB English degree and my entry into the teaching staff of the department as Instructor II. Soon my own shingle went up on one of those brown doors, and I felt like I had just been given a new mission in life, to awaken in my students the same wonderment at words that had set me on this path.

Penman for June 27, 2011


EVERY NOW and then, I get asked about the purpose and the value of writing workshops. Quite a few people—notable writers among them—have dismissed writing workshops too easily, pointing out (correctly) that writers like Jose Rizal, Leo Tolstoy, and William Shakespeare never went to one, and (incorrectly) that writing can’t be taught, and that workshops only end up creating technically perfect but unexciting and insubstantial works catering to the tastes of an academic cabal.

Facing another such question in an online forum a couple of weeks ago, I felt obliged to respond that what you get out a workshop depends to a great extent on what you bring into it—your work and your expectations.

People often go to workshops aware that their work is encountering a problem, and are therefore open or should be open to suggestions. Some others attend workshops in search of an audience to appreciate what they think is already polished, superlatively good work—and when they catch flak, they react and resist, and the workshop turns into a fruitless and ugly experience for everyone. Some people expect writing workshops to be therapy sessions or support groups; writing can be tremendously cathartic, and sharing one’s deepest hurts with others can be a good way of exorcising them.

Experienced writers don’t need workshops, because they’ve internalized its principles, and are in constant dialogue with themselves. Some others—perhaps less confident and craving the company and attention more than the instruction—might go workshop-hopping, gaining a bevy of e-group and Facebook friends.

Workshops can serve these needs, but that's not their primary purpose. Workshops are meant to help writers—especially those just getting started—with their attitude and technique. A good writing attitude is one that knows how to accept and dispense criticism, and also to determine what the core of one’s own writing is, and to discern which comments help that core, and which don’t. While I suspect that insight and linguistic brilliance come with the person, I believe that writing technique can certainly be taught, and those who think otherwise need only ask why piano teachers and voice coaches exist. At a certain level, a workshop will also raise more philosophical issues—whom do we write for, and why? How does our writing relate to the life of the nation?

Much depends on the workshop director or facilitator—usually, a person who is not only a credible writer himself or herself, but someone who knows how to manage people and expectations. Good facilitators keep their own egos in the background and lead discussions gently but firmly, steering them toward important learning points (say, point of view, dialogue, characterization, description, etc.). They should tread a fine line between candor and crudeness, and always seek to maintain civility in a potentially explosive situation, mindful that—no matter how badly done—a creative work is an extension of the writer’s person. The useful question to ask isn't really "Do you like it? Do you hate it?" but "Why?" A good facilitator will not seek to impose his or her own critical standards on others, but will offer up many ways of looking at a work; he or she will also not seek to create clones or carbon copies or his or her own work and style among the workshoppers.

In almost every workshop, some people will talk more often and more loudly than others—and quite often, the best talkers aren't necessarily the best writers. Speaking of talking, in my workshops, the writer whose work is being taken up doesn't speak until everyone else has spoken, so the discussion doesn't become unnecessarily defensive early on, and people don't clam up when they sense resistance from the author.

For me, one of a workshop's best values is that it gives the author a sense of how his or her work is going over with ordinary readers, a chance he or she will never get in the open market—and you spoil that chance by intruding too soon into your reader's responses. Let them speak freely—and then make your clarifications afterwards (in a good work and to a sharp reader, the clarifications will be embodied in the text.)

While it's important to listen keenly to what people are saying and to their suggestions for improving the work, the author should feel under no obligation to accept them all. They will often be varied, if not at cross-purposes. So a workshop teaches the author discernment, and encourages him or her to develop his or her own critical faculties. Eventually, the workshop will end—euphoria for some, torture for others, a bit of both for most—and the participants will have to go home to face the blinking cursor all by themselves, keeping whatever they learned in mind.


FROM A former student of mine and a UP workshop alumnus, Carljoe Javier, comes the good news that his book And the Geek Shall Inherit the Earth, originally published by Milflores, has come out in an e-book version on Amazon. You can download it for $2.99 at (http://www.amazon.com/Geek-Shall-Inherit-Earth-ebook/dp/B0053ZJ2P6). This is a boon for all Filipino writers, as it opens the door wide to global publishing and distribution, without all the complications that come with finding an agent who then finds a publisher, and so on. I asked Carljoe how he did it, and this was what he told me:

“I submitted my book to local digital publisher Flipside (www.flipsidecontent.com) and they took care of digitizing the text for iPad and Kindle versions. They are registered with both iBookstore and Amazon (Flipside is a Filipino company that works as a BPO digitizing books for the likes of Barnes & Noble, and they've branched out to offer new local content).

“We could always go directly to Amazon and Apple and publish through them, but the registration, taxes, and other hassles were too big for me to think about, so I outsourced all the worry to the digital publisher.

“As someone trying to get read by a larger audience, I've published with two digital publishers already. Vee Press publishing Kobayashi Maru of Love, and now Flipside is publishing And the Geek Shall Inherit the Earth.

“I believe in Chris Anderson's Long Tail, which says that if it's on the Net, someone will download it. I don't hope to be a big hit like Rowling or Meyer, but I do hope to get enough of a readership, a niche readership that's larger than the one I have in print here in the Philippines.”

All the best of luck to you, Carljoe—the rest of us won't be far behind. By the way, another Javier book—Geek Tragedies, for which I wrote a blurb sometime back—will be launched by the UP Press on July 1. This guy’s on a roll!


AND HERE'S another UP Press plug—an appeal, actually. My UP colleague and good friend Dr. Gemino “Jimmy” Abad would have been distinguished enough if poetry were all he did, but Jimmy is also fast shaping up to be the most important Filipino literary anthologist of our time. After completing a monumental series of anthologies covering Philippine poetry in English over the past century, and picking up where the late Prof. Leopoldo Yabes left off by selecting the best Philippine stories in English of the past six decades, Jimmy is about to complete the final volume of his story series. This book, Hoard of Thunder, will cover the best stories of roughly the past two decades.

Jimmy needs permission from several authors he can’t reach, for him to publish their stories: J. A. Romualdez, "The Apartment," 1994; Carmelo Juinio, "The Fairy Prinsoid," 1996; Merlinda Bobis, "White Turtle," 1998; Iris Sheila B. Crisostomo, "Passage," 2000; Rhea B. Politada, "The Epic Life," 2008.

If you know these authors or have their email, please let them know about this call. Jimmy also wants the authors to know—with some sadness, I’m sure—that “The UP Press, as it is subsidized, can afford only a 20% discount for authors included in the anthology.” Thanks, all!

Penman for June 27, 2011


EVERY NOW and then, I get asked about the purpose and the value of writing workshops. Quite a few people—notable writers among them—have dismissed writing workshops too easily, pointing out (correctly) that writers like Jose Rizal, Leo Tolstoy, and William Shakespeare never went to one, and (incorrectly) that writing can’t be taught, and that workshops only end up creating technically perfect but unexciting and insubstantial works catering to the tastes of an academic cabal.

Facing another such question in an online forum a couple of weeks ago, I felt obliged to respond that what you get out a workshop depends to a great extent on what you bring into it—your work and your expectations.

People often go to workshops aware that their work is encountering a problem, and are therefore open or should be open to suggestions. Some others attend workshops in search of an audience to appreciate what they think is already polished, superlatively good work—and when they catch flak, they react and resist, and the workshop turns into a fruitless and ugly experience for everyone. Some people expect writing workshops to be therapy sessions or support groups; writing can be tremendously cathartic, and sharing one’s deepest hurts with others can be a good way of exorcising them.

Experienced writers don’t need workshops, because they’ve internalized its principles, and are in constant dialogue with themselves. Some others—perhaps less confident and craving the company and attention more than the instruction—might go workshop-hopping, gaining a bevy of e-group and Facebook friends.

Workshops can serve these needs, but that's not their primary purpose. Workshops are meant to help writers—especially those just getting started—with their attitude and technique. A good writing attitude is one that knows how to accept and dispense criticism, and also to determine what the core of one’s own writing is, and to discern which comments help that core, and which don’t. While I suspect that insight and linguistic brilliance come with the person, I believe that writing technique can certainly be taught, and those who think otherwise need only ask why piano teachers and voice coaches exist. At a certain level, a workshop will also raise more philosophical issues—whom do we write for, and why? How does our writing relate to the life of the nation?

Much depends on the workshop director or facilitator—usually, a person who is not only a credible writer himself or herself, but someone who knows how to manage people and expectations. Good facilitators keep their own egos in the background and lead discussions gently but firmly, steering them toward important learning points (say, point of view, dialogue, characterization, description, etc.). They should tread a fine line between candor and crudeness, and always seek to maintain civility in a potentially explosive situation, mindful that—no matter how badly done—a creative work is an extension of the writer’s person. The useful question to ask isn't really "Do you like it? Do you hate it?" but "Why?" A good facilitator will not seek to impose his or her own critical standards on others, but will offer up many ways of looking at a work; he or she will also not seek to create clones or carbon copies or his or her own work and style among the workshoppers.

In almost every workshop, some people will talk more often and more loudly than others—and quite often, the best talkers aren't necessarily the best writers. Speaking of talking, in my workshops, the writer whose work is being taken up doesn't speak until everyone else has spoken, so the discussion doesn't become unnecessarily defensive early on, and people don't clam up when they sense resistance from the author.

For me, one of a workshop's best values is that it gives the author a sense of how his or her work is going over with ordinary readers, a chance he or she will never get in the open market—and you spoil that chance by intruding too soon into your reader's responses. Let them speak freely—and then make your clarifications afterwards (in a good work and to a sharp reader, the clarifications will be embodied in the text.)

While it's important to listen keenly to what people are saying and to their suggestions for improving the work, the author should feel under no obligation to accept them all. They will often be varied, if not at cross-purposes. So a workshop teaches the author discernment, and encourages him or her to develop his or her own critical faculties. Eventually, the workshop will end—euphoria for some, torture for others, a bit of both for most—and the participants will have to go home to face the blinking cursor all by themselves, keeping whatever they learned in mind.


FROM A former student of mine and a UP workshop alumnus, Carljoe Javier, comes the good news that his book And the Geek Shall Inherit the Earth, originally published by Milflores, has come out in an e-book version on Amazon. You can download it for $2.99 at (http://www.amazon.com/Geek-Shall-Inherit-Earth-ebook/dp/B0053ZJ2P6). This is a boon for all Filipino writers, as it opens the door wide to global publishing and distribution, without all the complications that come with finding an agent who then finds a publisher, and so on. I asked Carljoe how he did it, and this was what he told me:

“I submitted my book to local digital publisher Flipside (www.flipsidecontent.com) and they took care of digitizing the text for iPad and Kindle versions. They are registered with both iBookstore and Amazon (Flipside is a Filipino company that works as a BPO digitizing books for the likes of Barnes & Noble, and they've branched out to offer new local content).

“We could always go directly to Amazon and Apple and publish through them, but the registration, taxes, and other hassles were too big for me to think about, so I outsourced all the worry to the digital publisher.

“As someone trying to get read by a larger audience, I've published with two digital publishers already. Vee Press publishing Kobayashi Maru of Love, and now Flipside is publishing And the Geek Shall Inherit the Earth.

“I believe in Chris Anderson's Long Tail, which says that if it's on the Net, someone will download it. I don't hope to be a big hit like Rowling or Meyer, but I do hope to get enough of a readership, a niche readership that's larger than the one I have in print here in the Philippines.”

All the best of luck to you, Carljoe—the rest of us won't be far behind. By the way, another Javier book—Geek Tragedies, for which I wrote a blurb sometime back—will be launched by the UP Press on July 1. This guy’s on a roll!


AND HERE'S another UP Press plug—an appeal, actually. My UP colleague and good friend Dr. Gemino “Jimmy” Abad would have been distinguished enough if poetry were all he did, but Jimmy is also fast shaping up to be the most important Filipino literary anthologist of our time. After completing a monumental series of anthologies covering Philippine poetry in English over the past century, and picking up where the late Prof. Leopoldo Yabes left off by selecting the best Philippine stories in English of the past six decades, Jimmy is about to complete the final volume of his story series. This book, Hoard of Thunder, will cover the best stories of roughly the past two decades.

Jimmy needs permission from several authors he can’t reach, for him to publish their stories: J. A. Romualdez, "The Apartment," 1994; Carmelo Juinio, "The Fairy Prinsoid," 1996; Merlinda Bobis, "White Turtle," 1998; Iris Sheila B. Crisostomo, "Passage," 2000; Rhea B. Politada, "The Epic Life," 2008.

If you know these authors or have their email, please let them know about this call. Jimmy also wants the authors to know—with some sadness, I’m sure—that “The UP Press, as it is subsidized, can afford only a 20% discount for authors included in the anthology.” Thanks, all!