Pinoy Penman

Penman for Monday, April 24, 2006


ONE OF the innovations we introduced into this year’s UP Writers Workshop in Baguio was the presentation and discussion of works of what’s been called “creative nonfiction.” I wrote about CNF in this column a couple of years ago, and just to refresh your memory—or to introduce CNF to absolute newcomers—it’s a kind of writing that uses the best of both journalistic and fictional techniques to present a story more dramatically than a straight factual report or something completely made up.

Let’s take a look at the Wikipedia definition of creative nonfiction, which pretty much sums up what this genre—not all that new, as it turns out—is all about:

“Creative nonfiction is a genre of literature, also known as literary journalism and narrative journalism, which uses literary skills in the writing of nonfiction. A work of creative nonfiction, if well written, contains accurate and well-researched information and also holds the interest of the reader. Forms of creative nonfiction can include essays, diaries, autobiography, biographies, magazine writing, travel writing, nature writing, science writing, histories, journalism, and the memoir.”

Hundreds of students—many of them mature ones—join writing programs every year not to write stories or poems, but to draw from their own lives and experiences, shaping them into the stuff of literature. That “stuff” is a personalized form of reportage, and it is this personal engagement of the author/narrator in the subject—something that “really happened”—that distinguishes CNF from other genres and accounts for its widespread appeal. The demands of CNF on the writer are no less stringent than those of other forms; everyone may have something remarkable and memorable to write about, but not everyone can write good CNF (for that matter, not everyone can write, period).

Our graduate writing program at UP has already produced prizewinning works of CNF—among them, Lourdes Montinola’s harrowingly subdued Breaking the Silence and Erlinda Panlilio’s Teacher to Tycoon. Anyone interested in learning the craft on his or her own would do well to consult Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo’s Creative Nonfiction (UP Press, 2003), a two-volume set comprising a manual and a reader.

In the Baguio workshop, both CNF pieces drew powerful emotional reactions. The first excerpt comes from Dr. Virginia Villanueva’s account of the bombing of Jolo in 1974. A physician, Ginia was born a Tausug princess but converted to Christianity later in life. Her unique position and perspective yield passages like the following:

“After the failed ambush of the plane, we return to our half-eaten breakfast with our ears buzzing. The coffee is still warm; it steadies our nerves. We barely finish when the throb of twin Huey helicopters draws us once more to our vantage point from the terrace. To get a better view this time, I stand on a marble bench connecting two corner pillars. These are broad and solid, made of poured concrete and finished with adobe. Ample protection from bullets, I think.

“The two helicopters slowly descend, making for the airport, following one another. Just as the lead Huey is over the runway and the other, hovering over the Cathedral, a concerted volley of shots burst from the ground. Simultaneously the helicopters do a vertical take-off but one falters in mid-flight, then slowly descends, a spiral of smoke in its wake, to the runway. The other, unharmed, whirls further up and turns on a dime towards our house, fifty-caliber machine gun spitting fire and cutting a wide swathe on Busbus Road. The stream of refugees on the road splits into two as they dive for the side ditches. Why, there was no one on the road when I opened the gate earlier!

“Too scared to move, I press my body to a pillar. The helicopter is now so close I can see the face of the young gunner: he looks as horrified as I. But his hands are glued to the machinegun. As the helicopter passes by the house, all the trees in the garden sway wildly. The coconut tree, standing less than ten meters from the house, is shorn of its branches like magic. The bullets thud into the front of the house and our glass jalousies rattle and splinter. I bury my face in my arms, crouching beneath the marble bench to where a force has knocked me down. Somewhere inside the house Dora cries out to her children to take cover behind the sofa as the shards of glass fall all around the living room. Were the curtains not drawn?”

For his part, writer and translator Dr. Mario Miclat told a sometimes poignant, sometimes droll story about his long years of exile in China—where he worked for Radio Peking—during the martial law period. Here’s one highlight, set in the euphoric wake of Edsa 1.

“Beijing was covered with frost when I rose from bed and saw Alma off to where her office car fetched her the following day. I preferred to tarry, unsure how I would be greeted by my officemates at Radio Peking. Just a day before, I walked out from work. It was my turn to read the news. It headlined Marcos’ swearing in as reelected president, omitting the fact that Cory Aquino was also declared president by the People Power revolutionists. I had always edited the news, citing grammatical lapses on the part of the translators, to conform to reality as much as possible, to lessen the impact of blatant disinformation that Radyo Peking broadcast as the CCP’s propaganda arm. But this time, I could not do much about a one-liner bit of news. Our section chief, Li Lin, could not believe our officemates when they told him that I refused to record the day’s news. He phoned me at home. I told him I could not tell a lie.

“’What are you hinting at?’ he wanted to know, starting to raise his voice, the very first time he ever did, too. I said that I was doing something more than a hint. I now realized, more than ever, why the announcers were encouraged to read the news and features as if they were unfeeling voice machines. The colloquial writing and conversational reading style I had introduced was totally incongruent to a totalitarian set-up.

“’I often wondered how you could excuse yourself at night when you read the news that you would later claim were obvious fabrications of this or that party clique,’ I told him.

“’You can’t say that over the phone!’ he said. He remained quiet for a while before he added, “OK, when you come to the office tomorrow, be sure to bring your doctor’s certification that your were sick today.”

We look forward to the publication of these memorable—and true—stories in full.

Penman for Monday, April 17, 2006

WE LEFT Baguio at the end of the UP Writers’ Workshop last April 8, just in time to avoid the crush of about 150,000 visitors the city expects every Holy Week. But if we had nothing else to do—no work, no family, no meetings, no deadlines—I’m sure many of us would have stayed on for a few more days of real rest and rejuvenation, so intense was the workshop itself and the postprandial binges where some of the most interesting discussions typically took place.

We did manage to squeeze in a couple of evenings of blissful relaxation in the one place we can’t afford to miss in Baguio: Pilgrims Café, which has moved from its old location on Session Road to the corner of Leonard Wood and Brent Road. We were lucky to be there over a couple of weekends, so we caught the best crowd-drawers of the place, a trio going by the name “On Call.”

The name’s not surprising when you learn that the three of them—Jett Acmor, Mari Laoyan, and Ivan Cruz—all work in the medical professions, as does their brilliant musical director, Dr. Dennis Flores. On Thursday nights, Ivan does a Broadway program all by himself—and a great parade of showstoppers it is, too—but on Fridays and Saturdays, the highly talented and versatile trio does everything from “Cats” to Cayabyab. For sheer listening pleasure, I can’t think of many acts that can top On Call—all for the price of about three beers. Their arrangements are fresh without being strange; their voices blend effortlessly one into the other, and they can make even the saddest song sound hopeful.

We’ve always enjoyed the nightlife in Baguio—from way back in our high-school-conventioneer days doing the “sweet” with willing accomplices at The Basement to our more riotous years of second bachelorhood and then on to mellow middle age, these days of Michel Legrand and Burt Bacharach and Andrew Lloyd Webber. There’s something about the coolness of the air, the tang of Benguet pine, the sheer distance of the place from the clamor and the alarms of lowland life that makes music resonate even more warmly within you, like good wine swilling at the bottom of a glass.

There’s a fly in the ointment, however, and it’s Baguio’s own new ordinance that requires bars and other places of entertainment to close at 1:00 am. We heard that this was occasioned by a rash of juvenile violence and rowdiness in another of the city’s more popular hangouts. Certainly no one wants trouble like that to tarnish Baguio’s reputation (not just for the sake of visitors, but of the residents themselves). But wouldn’t you think that fielding more police patrols at night would be the better answer, than restricting bar hours in one of the country’s most popular vacation spots? Pity us poor pilgrims, who drive seven or eight hours from Manila for a little night music in the mountains, only to be sent home just when we’ve begun warming up to the songs.

Because of this ordinance, singers like On Call can get only two sets into the evening’s program, when the more customary three sets could have brought in more people buying more food and drinks and boosting the city’s economy. It might be wise to reconsider this curfew, well intentioned though it may have been.

(And just for our online readers, here's me with the faintest of smiles, as a gray pall descends over the greenery in the distance, portending rain, and tribulations yet unborn.)




BEFORE IT'S too late, let me remind my fellow writers that the deadline for submitting entries to this year’s Palanca awards for literature is April 30, less than two weeks from now.

No, I won’t be joining—haven’t done that in six years, and I seriously doubt if I ever will, again—but I strongly urge new and young (and I should add talented) Filipino writers to take part in this annual contest, now on its 56th year. (For the rules and entry forms, visit http://www. panitikan.com.ph.)

Like all competitions that involve subjective judgment, the Palancas are hardly a foolproof gauge of one’s literary merit, and they aren’t meant to be the be-all and end-all of one’s labors.

They have, however, provided a fairly reliable indication of what and where the best of our literature is at a given time. It’s practically a cliché to call them a rite of passage for the Filipino writer (and quite a few good and great ones have never won a Palanca, nor sought one), but the fact is that most practicing Filipino creative writers today have been helped along by one or two (or a dozen) Palancas. Sure, it’s a boost to the ego—and who doesn’t need one?—but it’s also a challenge to produce more and better work, not so much better than the other fellow’s but better than your own from last year.

Let me say this again for the benefit of the fainthearted: I won my very first Palanca at the relatively young age of 21 (teenagers win them these days), making me feel like I was God’s own gift to Philippine literature—and then I lost for four straight years, sending me into as steep a tailspin of doubt and despair as you can imagine. But it was in those years of writing, joining, and losing that I think I learned my craft. You never really lose, if you write not just to win a prize but to commit a worthwhile thought to paper.

The contest sponsors—the Carlos Palanca Foundation, led by the indefatigable Sylvia Palanca Quirino—have suggested to me and some other Palanca oldtimers that a comprehensive review of the awards and its mechanisms may be undertaken soon. I can only agree that it’s about time this was done, to burnish the prestige of the awards and bring them up to the realities and artistic challenges of this new century. I’d be very happy to contribute my thoughts to that review.


LET ME end on a note of farewell and congratulations to someone who’s become as much an institution at the Institute of Creative Writing as any other writer who’s walked in and out of the ICW’s doors from back when it was still the old Creative Writing Center at FC 1003. I’m not talking about a National Artist, but about a guy who’s seen them all: Anthony Franklin V. Serrano—“Mang Tony” to generations of UP workshoppers—who’ll be retiring next month after a quarter-century of service as the CWC/ICW’s administrative officer.

Himself a published poet, Tony chose to lead a life of quiet clerkship—in the words of the citation we gave him in Baguio, “minding the memory of the place and enriching its character.” Tony certainly made the place a lot less forbidding to the young writer, whom he regaled with literary lore (all of it colorful, some of it probably and forgivably apocryphal). There was melancholy in his smile—or make that a smile to his melancholy—and he could always be depended on for faithful company, and for an introduction to arts as esoteric and arcane as old Tagalog and basketball statistics.

We’ll miss you, Tony—but now’s the time for that second book of poetry.

Penman for Monday, April 10, 2006



FRIDAY MARKED the end of the 45th UP National Writers Workshop, and I’m glad to report that it came off swimmingly well, despite some early apprehensions I must confess to having had over the new format of the workshop and the variety in terms of age and experience among the participants.

Held at the new Pines View Hotel on Legarda Road—I must say the best accommodations we’ve ever had for this annual event—this workshop was different in that we (meaning the Institute of Creative Writing) actively sought out more advanced practitioners of the craft instead of novices, to enable us to dwell on issues in writing beyond the mechanical details of writing. The relatively new and extremely popular category of creative nonfiction was also added to the list of workshop genres.

Twelve fellows were chosen (down from the usual 20; the workshop itself was cut down to a week from the usual two): Bernice C. Roldan (UP Diliman, fiction in English); Jimmuel C. Naval (UP Diliman, fiction in Filipino), Zosimo E. Quibilan, Jr. (AdMU, fiction in Filipino); Raymond John A. de Borja (UP Diliman, poetry in English), Joel M. Toledo (UP Diliman, poetry in English), and Lourd Ernest H. de Veyra (UST/UP Diliman, poetry in English); Ariel Dim. Borlongan (FEATI University, poetry in Filipino) and Paolo M. Manalo (UP Diliman, poetry in Filipino); Allan B. Lopez (UP Diliman, drama), Lisa Magtoto (UP Diliman, drama); Mario I. Miclat (UP Diliman, creative nonfiction in English) and Virginia M. Villanueva (UP Diliman, creative nonfiction in English).

As an added feature, a parallel CHED-accredited seminar was held by the ICW staff for teachers on the teaching of writing and literature at UP Baguio.

Another new feature of the workshop required the fellows to make a brief presentation on a work-in-progress, or an explanation and exploration of their poetics—why they write what they write. Most impressive in this harvest of new voices were the presentations of a vibrant generation of young Filipino poets, among them the jazz/rock musician Lourd de Veyra, fiction editor and professor Paolo Manalo (crossing over into Filipino), engineering student Emong de Borja, and last year’s Palanca first prize winner for poetry in English, Joel Toledo. I’d like to share with you some excerpts of what they said.

LOURD DE VEYRA: “What I look for in poetry is an uneasy kind of energy. An energy that is already beyond the configuration of words and then assumes a density that is akin to music.

“At the heart of it all is jazz. Jazz, the manipulation of breath— the unleashing of breath, the holding of breath, the destruction of breath. The most basic unit of jazz is the swing and the breath. My primary influence is the Beat movement and I think my initial fascination for them was rather hinged on the wrong reasons: the radical visual arrangement of lines on the page, the profanity and the absurdity that struck my mind as a welcome relief from the stultifying archaisms of 17th-century English poetry force-fed on us by high school teachers. Here was, at long last, literature that spoke to me. It was in sympathy with the energy of free jazz and punk rock records that I was listening to at that time. Through the lyrics of punk rock and hardcore records, I had an inkling of how words can be more powerful than a guitar amplifier cranked up all the way to ten.

“My exposure to the poetry of Ginsberg and Kerouac opened me up to the world of possibilities. And I am obsessed with the idea of ‘possibility’. ‘Possibility’ is what art is all about. It is the constant wrestling with forms, styles, and structures. It is the idea that something better is always out there. It is about discontent. It is about discontent with the safe, the middling, the accepted, and the acceptable.

“I celebrate febrile aesthetic ambitions, unsatisfied with poetry that is naïve and comfortable—poetry that rests on an easy chair and sips iced tea. The poetry I want to read is the kind that slams you in the face like a rock-and-roll chord. This does not necessarily require a healthy degree of hysteria and profanity; even a quiet Zen haiku about a frog and a pond can achieve the same effect.”

PAOLO MANALO: “In (my writing in) Filipino, the concept of linguistic personalities came from Vim Nadera’s fastening of these personalities on the page. You cannot imagine the impact on me the first time I read his poem ‘Caritas.’ This complex ‘pasyon rap’ makes use of several collisions: the language games of the Pasyon, Tagalog rap, the news item epigraph, the collisions of the parentheticals with the rest of the text. For those few minutes reading the poem, you are led to believe that monster of a disease, HIV—can be captured. ‘Poetry almost resisting the intelligence almost successfully.’

“In another poem ‘Binalagtasan,’ Nadera uses the forced juxtapositions of the of specific voices competing for the reader’s attention. This Amado V. Hernandez epigraph juxtaposed with the three other voices of Filipino writers from different periods in history: Gaspar Aquino de Belen, Julian Cruz Balmaseda and Alejandro G. Abadilla. ‘Binalagtasan’ is Nadera’s ‘Dream Song.’

“It’s not that I can’t write in straight English or Filipino, but that the aim is to fasten the heard utterances (those in the collisions of languages) on the page to make written or read sense of them. The simplest way of saying this is that each language is a character, much like Berryman’s Henry and Mr. Bones. Now think of these languages as ‘X number of characters in search of a poem.’ Maybe they’re interactions of Kurimaw and Sexbomb, offscreen noise and on screen chanting to produce something harmonious as Tinio’s ‘pagbeblend’ in ‘Sa Poetry.’ Maybe they’re pronounced interactions of comic book caption over word balloon, or one language to rewrite another as in this comic book page, or this poem called ‘Bowl Limn Yeah’ which follows this English spelling of Filipino language. You see it in English, you hear it in Filipino. The lyric moment might as well be ‘schizophonic’ in the way Filipino rap artists sample some English lyrics and reconfigure it in a spunky Tagalog.”

EMONG DE BORJA: “I won’t blame Alfrredo Salanga, the sciences (by this I mean the pure and applied) have always been associated with a seeming rigidity, a certain blunt directness. And although I am from the field of engineering, I confess that I too have associated science with such exactness and solidity.

"Perhaps, this is due to the training an engineer undergoes. In engineering, one is expected a result, a practical solution. So I turned to poetry for a break from this ‘end-oriented-ness.’ Poetry for me is an escape. The poems I used to write contained trivial or no scientific concepts at all.

“But a time came when I realized that although poetry can be used as evasion, its power lies in its ability to confront. I thought that by using poetry as an escape, it could be that I am running away from the possibility of a voice. With these things in mind, I took the challenge of intermeshing the language of poetry and the language of science.”

JOEL TOLEDO: “In my childhood evenings, home was a forbidding place mostly devoid of light. I was raised thinking 8 o’clock is already an unholy hour to still be awake. There was no TV, no radio, no power, even. We didn’t have electricity in the house until I was about eight years old, and only because we needed it for my grandmother’s wake.

“Night was severely unfriendly. The kerosene lamps brought a certain haunted glow to everything; objects become sinister, dominated more by erratic shadows than friendly light. Ghost stories became terrifyingly real, with creatures lurking beyond the poor vision and comfort of oil lamps. I couldn’t sleep without any light for a long time, even after I entered college and moved to well-lighted Metro Manila.

“What there were in abundance, though, were early mornings. Or mushrooms in July, a sea of coffee in full bloom come September, a faraway brook for fetching water, baseball with tennis balls during summer. A lot of my early poems resonate with the voice of a child, according to the people who’ve read them. I guess I have a lot of memories and stories that need to be told in that voice, otherwise the poems will lose their honesty and authenticity. Louise Glück once said that truth comes closer to sincerity than to insight.

“I guess while I believe in ‘other-ness’ when writing, the driving force of most of my poems is not the invention, but the memory: some of them filtered, some captured.

“To say my life has drastically changed since then is not an exaggeration. I came to Quezon City only after high school, armed with nothing but a blunt sense of grammar, a shaky command of the English language, a thick Caviteño accent. For years I couldn’t write about childhood simply because I didn’t have the vocabulary to tell those stories. Maybe this is why I’m writing about childhood and the old places only now.

“A poet-friend once told me that the basic experience of modern life is irony. I have to agree. The ironic situation, in the very least, is especially true for me, having grown up in a place hungry for lighting and now raising my own family under the concrete LRT pillars and neon-blazed billboards of Quezon City.

“And while ways of life and tongues can always be straightened, some things never really change, never really go away. My life, in a way, continues to be haunted the irony and paradox of the concurrent existence of the present now and the memory past.”

And just for you online Penman readers, click here and here for some interesting sidelights.

Penman for Monday, April 3, 2006


I WAS DOWN in Quiapo the other day, on my way to a meeting in the Luneta area, when I passed by Raon—one of those sidestreets on your right that cuts a narrow path between Quiapo Boulevard and Rizal Avenue. Most urbanites these days—especially those below 50—won’t even know it’s there or know its name; and even if you did, you’d have to ask yourself “So what? Tell me one good reason why I should go to Raon rather than, say, Greenbelt or Rockwell?”

And of course I can’t, beyond saying that back in the ‘60s, this was our Greenbelt, our Rockwell—Raon, Avenida, Sta. Cruz, Recto (then Azcarraga), and the whole downtown district. It was raucous and in parts smelly even then, with vendors of every stripe and calling hawking all kinds of plastic utensils and amusements, from pails, fly swatters, funnels, and tablecloths to squirt-guns, baby rattles, swords, and dolls. (In some corners of Plaza Sta. Cruz, stranger implements were on sale, featuring goat’s hair and some Spanish alchemist’s concoction.)

How did a 14-year-old who went to high school in Diliman and lived in Pasig find himself in Quiapo? Simple: we chose to take the long route home, my friends and I. I could’ve taken a jeep to Crossing via Cubao and then another one to Pasig, but it made for a more interesting ride to take the JD or Halili Transit bus to Quiapo and then the Mandbusco to Pasig, or else that other liner that made an even longer detour through Sta. Ana.

It wasn’t that I hated home, or was looking for excuses to stay out as late as I could. I loved Pasig and the vast ricefield in our backyard that turned into a coffee-colored ocean in the typhoon season; I looked forward to 15-centavo halo-halo in the summer afternoons, to English-language twinbills in Leleng Theater behind the public market, to the latest issue of Boy’s Life in the public library. I enjoyed dinner with my folks and siblings after Oras ng Ligaya, even if the only thing to go with rice was pinangat na sapsap or that quintessential Pasig tandem, tulya and biya.

But going downtown was something else. My parents, to my eternal gratitude, trusted me with my time and money, and while I can’t say I spent them too wisely, I didn’t waste them in the sticks, either. We literally went to town, for the big fat burgers at the Goodwill bookshop and the chicken sotanghon soup at Good Earth Emporium (everything in this neighborhood seemed to be “good”). We scoured the bargain bins at Alemars and National Bookstore on Avenida for my first copies of John Updike, W. Somerset Maugham, and Ian Fleming and, less loftily, the nondescript bookshops along Recto for racier reading fare, which we promptly covered in kraft paper: Fanny Hill, Candy, anything by Henry Miller, and such other truly educational references. We took in The Graduate at Maxim’s Theater (thank God I looked bigger than my 16 years) and Woodstock at the Galaxy.

Downtown wasn’t always a safe place to be, which was, I suppose, part of the excitement. When we took to smoking (don’t do it, boys and girls) and moved up from Monopols and Ronsons to cheap butane lighters—which quickly conked out—we got them fixed by some sidewalk whiz, who invariably turned his back to you just as you leaned over to see what the trick was; it only took a second for him to work ten-peso wonders, but you paid up, no questions asked.

In those pre-credit-card, pre-Internet days, the shopper’s nemesis was the pickpocket and the snatcher, and a trip to Quiapo wasn’t complete without the shrill blast of a patrolman’s whistle announcing yet another fruitless chase across the cut flowers and the vegetables and the Golden Delicious apples on the open street. In her lifelong quest of scandalously great bargains, my mother routinely came home with a slashed bag and another woeful tale of delight and distraction. Sometimes I fared worse. Quiapo and Avenida also being shoe country, I went on a hunt for loafers once, all by my groovy lonesome, and ended up being cornered by two burly men into buying a pair of clunkers with cardboard soles for the princely sum of P80. Welcome to the City.

Raon was a special corner even in this cornucopia. It was Music Street, with store after store selling guitars, harmonicas, records, transistor radios, “songhits”, chord books, and sheet music. Back in the ‘60s, mind you, any self-respecting teenager knew how to play the guitar, and a Lumanog (or, God willing, a Guitarmasters) piece was de rigueur. I had one of these Lumanogs, whose soundboard I promptly painted over with psychedelic whorls a la Peter Maxx. But as smart as it looked to strum a samba or the latest Monkees tune within ten feet of a pretty girl, it was just as much fun to listen to my little orange plastic AM-only radio, yes, the one with the orange plastic wrist strap and the pull-out antenna and the mono earphone that looked as large as an acorn. The transistor radio’s screech often felt like fingernails on a blackboard, but it was the iPod of our age, matched in coolness only by an Instamatic camera, with which we faithfully recorded our lakwatsas to the Luneta on 3R glossies.

I’m no audiophile—I can’t tell a woofer from a Dalmatian—but these days I can afford something more pleasant in my ears, and almost as soon as I got an iPod I also splurged on a pair of high-end earphones (Shure e3c’s is what they’re called); they produce sound so pure that you remember life before them as walking in a myopic haze and then suddenly wearing prescription glasses for the first time. Every chord of Earl Klugh’s guitar sounds golden, every whiffle of Toots Thielemans’ harmonica, every quiver of Barbra Streisand’s nose. Every now and then, as I jog around the UP oval, I scroll down to my “classic pop” playlist to something like “Satisfaction” by the Stones or “Bad to Me” by Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas or “Downtown” by Petula Clark, and I tell myself that the ‘60s never sounded so good.

I wonder, though, if some visual equivalent of these Shures, even if they existed, would be as kind to Quiapo and to my memories of it. Perhaps it’s just as well that my car sped past Raon that afternoon, straight into the inscrutable future.



I'D LIKE TO make a plug here for the new website that’s just been put up by Likhaan: the UP Institute of Creative Writing on behalf of all Filipino writers, thanks to support from the NCCA. The site’s called panitikan.com.ph, and yes, it can be found at that same address on the Web.

The site “(Your Portal to Contemporary Philippine Literature”) features literary news and announcements, a growing compilation of literary works in several languages and genres, writers’ biographies and contact information, writing from the regions, literary contests and rules, links to other literary websites, and articles on topics of current interest.

It’s still very much a work in progress, and as one of the people in charge of making sure that it meets our readers’ needs, I’d be glad to receive feedback and suggestions from you to make it even better. Just send me an e-mail at my address below.


WE WERE up in Baguio for the annual UP Writers Workshop by the time this took place, but I’d like to welcome another novelist into the fold—speculative fictionist Dean Francis Alfar, whose Salamanca (grand prize winner for the novel in the 2005 Palancas) was launched last Saturday at Fully Booked in Greenhills by the Ateneo University Press.

The book, says its press release, “is a powerful love story that unfolds in the mythical town of Tagbaoran in Palawan, between Gaudencio Rivera, a writer whose prodigious sensuality fuels literary feats, and Jacinta Cordova, whose transcendent beauty ignites passions in the unlikeliest individuals but ironically discourages the townsfolk from bearing children of their own.”

Kyoto-based critic Caroline Hau writes of Alfar’s first novel that “This audacious work of imagination takes the reader on a magical excursion into Philippine life and history while setting new standards for the Filipino novel along the way.”

Salamanca will be available at the Ateneo University Press (4265984; unipress@admu.edu.ph), all branches of Fully Booked (7244057), Aeon (9269406), Bound (4117768), Popular (3722162), and Solidaridad (5230870).