But time was when the writing fellows to the Dumaguete workshop arrived and left by slow boat, those creaky inter-island ferries that had an occasional stopover in Cebu, and where we crammed into whatever sleeping space could be found on board, from old army cots to lifeboats on deck under the stars.
Boat travel has improved some since then, what with the advent of the Super Ferry and Sharon C.’s sunny smile, although fellows in this age of the Internet and cellphones prefer to come and go by plane. The go-go attitude is tempered a bit as soon as they arrive in the city of gentle people, the slow lambent pace of Dumaguete reining in the urban dweller’s restless spirit for the next three weeks.
Three weeks of discussions and good old camaraderie over beer and tocino by the boulevard, outings by the beach with kinilaw amid tearing each other’s manuscripts apart, where perhaps one may even develop a latent lust for balbacua. No matter what the panelists say about the objective correlative or the persona, year in and year out, nothing can outweigh those things which occur to the writing fellow outside the workshop proper, where the real stories are most of the time anyway.
It must have been 1962. Doc Ed Tiempo is still very much around. A boy just out of his diapers and his older sister playing in a green swing; their father a panelist in the first workshop down south.
In 1973 Dr. Xawi is one of the fellows. Ditto Jolico Cuadra, Felix Fojas, Angelito Santos, Nena Benigno, Christina Ferreros, Catherine Salazar, Gemma Mariano and Mauro Avena. An outing on a small boat off a coastal town. Gemma putting a towel over her face; Dr. Xawi kissing her through the towel. Jolico and Felix in a karate demonstration on the beach; Jolico spraining a foot after a bad fall, and losing a shoe when he goes swimming fully dressed. Early mornings and late afternoons on Rovira St., and the scent of ylang-ylang wafting in through the blinds. An adolescent boy and his father in morning swims in Silliman Farm.
In 1978 that same boy who was a baby in the first workshop is now a young man; he submits a sheaf of poems which were also submitted a month earlier to the UP workshop, one of them described by NVM Gonzales as "odoriferous." That’s also another thing no longer done these days; there’s an informal ban on writers from being fellows to the UP and Dumaguete in the same year, the better to give more writers a chance, and in order to lessen the chances for one summer to be so overwhelming. One of the fellows is pilot Rene Saguin, and his story "Home to Arcturus" is one of the better received during the workshop. Later that same year Rene dies in a plane crash, finally making it home to Arcturus, in the manner of St. Exupery. One of the worst received in the workshop is a poem entitled "Pain in the Morning Sun" –more than two decades later, memory of that poem is still painful. Another fellow is Denise Chou-Allas, who hands the odoriferous poet an inscribed book of her own poems, Waystation Blues. Francis "Butch" Macansantos is one of the panggulos that year, and he coins the catchword for the batch: ara puchingkay, Chabacano for young female pulchritude.
Suddenly it is 1992, and the young man’s wife is pregnant and a panelist in the workshop, the very same workshop where they met 14 years earlier, and now they are expecting their second child. They stay at the Alumni Hostel, where keys to the rooms sometimes get mysteriously interchanged particularly when a full moon waxes over nearby Siquijor. Doc and Ma’am Tiempo argue over a story by Tim Montes that is very Borgesian. As usual on the last day there is a reading and piano recital at the End House on campus, home of the scholar Albert Faurot.
In 1997 Doc Ed is no longer around, the first Dumaguete workshop where there is only one Tiempo presiding. Among the fellows are May Tobias, Fran Ng, Jody Reyes, Gad Lim. Mickey Metalhead has a tape of Jesus Christ Superstar constantly playing; his friend Wolfling is trying to shake off the trauma of his having streaked one drunken night down Hibbard Ave., the dogs barking after him. Dr. Xawi invents a secret hand greeting to the town crazy whenever they run into each other on the street. Catchword of the workshop is wisdom, wisdom, this said while placing Ma’am Edith’s hand to the forehead as if asking to be blessed.
The catchwords and phrases through the years are an altogether different story, a number of them Chabacano due to the background of Dr. Xawi and Macansantos, the Alih brothers of Philippine literature: chiplate, mañana pamanggale, aqui sila tumba, no conozco contigo. There’s an entire and separate history to each of them, and more where they came from: ET Brutus, why not Nixon, wala-wala, alam mo naman tayo, and spiritually ugly, on and on like the buzz of tricycles and the body paint on a workshop facilitator once upon an afternoon in an art gallery on the outskirts of the city of gentle people.