First books
November 13, 2006 | 12:00am
For the past five years, the UP Institute of Creative Writing has recognized and honored the best first book of the year with the Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Award. The award actually covers the preceding two years, alternating between English and Filipino. Previous winners have included Life After X, a story collection in English by Angelo R. Lacuesta (2001); Paghuhunos, a novel in Filipino by Ellen L. Sicat (2002); Smaller and Smaller Circles, a novel in English by Felisa H. Batacan (2003); Makinilyang Altar, a novel in Filipino by Luna Sicat-Cleto (2004); and The Sky Over Dimas, a novel in English by Vicente Groyon (2005).
It’s a unique award in this country. In the UK, the Guardian newspaper has been sponsoring a similar award since 1965, starting out with fiction and eventually encompassing all genres. There are several such awards in the US and Canada.
As a teacher and promoter of creative writing, I put more value on distinctions like this than on the usual prizes, because they encourage the production of books, beyond individual stories or poems. Like I often remind my graduate students, it all comes down to books: if you think of yourself as someone seriously committed to writing, you’ll inevitably have to think in terms of coming out with your first book, and then your second one – "the book with your name on the spine," I like to tell them.
It’s easy enough to churn out a poem or even a story overnight, but a book challenges the writer to demonstrate both a certain breadth of vision and a consistency of style (or a range thereof). When you’re a young writer who can barely finish that 15-page short story or those 10 poems the teacher expects by semester’s end, a book seems the farthest object on the horizon, or a cruel mirage. But you’d have to wonder how all those people who wrote books ahead of us (you know, people like Rizal, Faulkner, Woolf, Mishima, and so on) managed to pound out all those volumes despite the lack of computers, Google, Starbucks, Red Bull, and the other support systems – not to mention the workshops and fellowships – we have at our fingertips today.
A first book is the writer’s announcement of his or her presence, and a great one often presages even more wonderful things. T.S. Eliot’s first book was Prufrock and Other Observations (1917); Ian Fleming’s was Casino Royale (1953). In the early ’70s, an alcoholic teaching high-school English started his first novel, only to toss it into the garbage; his wife retrieved the manuscript and urged him to get back to work. The book became Carrie, and the author was Stephen King. And it was only in 1997, can you believe it, when an unknown writer named J. K. Rowling got her first book – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – published by Bloomsbury, which turned out an edition of a measly 300 copies (any one of which is now worth at least 10,000 pounds to collectors – that’s a million pesos to you and me).
This year, two fiction books and three poetry collections are on the short list for the Madrigal-Gonzalez award. The fiction books are Iskrapbuk (UP Press) by Allan Derain and Pangangaluluwa at Iba Pang Kuwento (UP Press) by Jimmuel C. Naval; the poetry collections are Mga Tulang Tulala: Mga Piling Tula sa Filipino, Bikol at Rinconada (Goldprint Publishing House) by Kristian Sendon Cordero; Order of the Poets: Poems in English and Filipino (Akdang Bayan) by Jaime Dasca Doble; and Ibang Daan Pauwi: Mga Tula (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House) by Manolito Sulit.
The winner will be announced on Dec. 8, after a book forum with the finalists at 2 p.m. Both will be held at the Pulungang Recto, Bulwagang Rizal, UP Diliman, Quezon City.
The winner will receive a cash prize of P50,000. The award was established in February 2001 and sponsored by the Madrigal and Gonzalez families through Atty. Gizela Gonzalez Montinola, writer and granddaughter of Bienvenido Gonzalez, former UP President, and daughter of Gonzalo Gonzalez, former member of the UP Board of Regents. This year’s members of the board of judges are prizewinning writers Malou Jacob, Luna Sicat-Cleto, and Rene O. Villanueva.
Incidentally, with my former student and sometime badminton and poker buddy Joel Toledo placing second in the international quest for the prestigious Bridport Prize, it can’t be too far-fetched to imagine that a Filipino can win yet one more important prize we haven’t claimed: the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, administered by the University of Pittsburgh Press, that pays the winner $15,000 plus publication by the press. The prize is open to writers of collections of fiction in English, no matter where in the world they come from. For more information, check out <http://www.upress.pitt.edu/renderHtmlPage.aspx?srcHtml=htmlSourceFiles/drueheinz.htm>.
Speaking of first books, I’m pleased to announce that the editors of Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature have selected the works that will make up the first issue of this journal, envisaged by the UP Institute of Creative Writing to represent the best of Philippine literature today in both Filipino and English.
I can’t release the list just now, pending notification of all the writers of the entries we accepted from several hundred submissions. But having seen that list, I can say that it represents a fair and exciting balance between writers old and new (as well as old and young). Likhaan accepted a total of 14 works in the two languages, divided evenly by language, but somewhat differently by genre, depending on the quality of the submissions. Eight of those 14 names are familiar to me in varying degrees, which means that I – for all my exposure to the workshop circuit – know nothing of the work of the other six, a healthy sign that great changes are taking place, and that Philippine literature is being reshaped by a new generation of writers voicing new concerns.
Please don’t write me at this point to ask who’s in, or what happened to your submission. Again, I’ve seen the list by e-mail, but being away in the United States, I wasn’t personally involved in the selection process, although I would’ve stepped in to break any tie (there was none). My associate editors and I relied on a corps of referees – all of them distinguished writers and academics themselves, both within and outside UP – to make the toughest decisions and to justify them in notes that we will publish in an introduction to the first issue.
We had hoped to launch that issue on Writers Night this December, but it looks like late January will be a more probable date for the launch, given how Pinoy brains seem to refuse any serious work for the greater part of December. That’s good for me, because I’ll be back by then, and can personally present the authors featured in this new journal with their copies.
If you’re an alumnus or alumna of the Fulbright, Hubert Humphrey, or East-West Center programs administered by the Philippine American Educational Foundation (PAEF), bookmark Saturday, Dec. 2, for a special event you’ll be sorry to miss, if you value networking or just want to know whatever happened to all those fine people you enplaned for the US with decades ago.
That’s when the first national conference of the Philippine Fulbright Scholars Association (PFSA), Fulbright Philippine Agriculture Alumni Association (FPAAA), Hubert H. Humphrey Alumni Association (HHHAA), and East-West Center Alumni Association (EWCAA) will be held in Escaler Hall at the Ateneo de Manila University in Loyola Heights, QC. Made possible by a US Embassy-Manila grant to PAEF, the conference will see how these scholars can help further in strengthening Philippine-American relations and advancing national development.
Opening formalities will start at 9 a.m., with US Ambassador Kristie A. Kenney invited to give a message. A plenary session will follow till noon, with representatives from the four alumni associations as panelists: Corazon de la Paz, SSS president and CEO, for the PFSA; Dr. Rudy Undan, president of Central Luzon State University for the FPAAA; Dr. Noemi Silva, academic vice-president of Notre Dame of Marbel University, for the HHHAA; and Congressman Nereus Acosta of Bukidnon for the EWCAA. Breakout sessions will be held in the afternoon on issues important to the alumni. The conference should be over by 4 p.m.
On behalf of the PFSA board of which I’m a member, we’d like to thank the key people from the US Embassy supporting this conference – Lee McClenny, Public Affairs Officer and PAEF board chairman, and Bruce Armstrong, cultural affairs officer and PAEF board treasurer. For more information, please call PAEF at 812-0919 or email them at fulbright@paef.org.ph.
I’ve received more mail about the language issue – I swear, few things inflame our passions more than language – including a message from a reader named Alvaro who argues that "The 50 years of English (100 by now), compared with the 333 years of Spanish presence, suggest that Castilian would give better ‘identity’ to this archipelago and insert them in the community of 600 million people of Hispanic America and Spain, a growing empire."
I’m going to give this discussion a rest for now, with the reiteration of my notion that language is made in the streets (do I hear some people crying, "Horrors!"?), and not in or by academies.
Want to help in the promotion of better English and better Filipino? Mind your own language. Use it well. Use it freshly. Use it to be understood by ordinary people, to excite and to engage their imagination – not to elevate or separate yourself from them. If patriotism has been said to be the refuge of scoundrels, linguistic snobbery just might be the refuge of those who have little else to say.
E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at <http://www.penmanila.net>.
It’s a unique award in this country. In the UK, the Guardian newspaper has been sponsoring a similar award since 1965, starting out with fiction and eventually encompassing all genres. There are several such awards in the US and Canada.
As a teacher and promoter of creative writing, I put more value on distinctions like this than on the usual prizes, because they encourage the production of books, beyond individual stories or poems. Like I often remind my graduate students, it all comes down to books: if you think of yourself as someone seriously committed to writing, you’ll inevitably have to think in terms of coming out with your first book, and then your second one – "the book with your name on the spine," I like to tell them.
It’s easy enough to churn out a poem or even a story overnight, but a book challenges the writer to demonstrate both a certain breadth of vision and a consistency of style (or a range thereof). When you’re a young writer who can barely finish that 15-page short story or those 10 poems the teacher expects by semester’s end, a book seems the farthest object on the horizon, or a cruel mirage. But you’d have to wonder how all those people who wrote books ahead of us (you know, people like Rizal, Faulkner, Woolf, Mishima, and so on) managed to pound out all those volumes despite the lack of computers, Google, Starbucks, Red Bull, and the other support systems – not to mention the workshops and fellowships – we have at our fingertips today.
A first book is the writer’s announcement of his or her presence, and a great one often presages even more wonderful things. T.S. Eliot’s first book was Prufrock and Other Observations (1917); Ian Fleming’s was Casino Royale (1953). In the early ’70s, an alcoholic teaching high-school English started his first novel, only to toss it into the garbage; his wife retrieved the manuscript and urged him to get back to work. The book became Carrie, and the author was Stephen King. And it was only in 1997, can you believe it, when an unknown writer named J. K. Rowling got her first book – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – published by Bloomsbury, which turned out an edition of a measly 300 copies (any one of which is now worth at least 10,000 pounds to collectors – that’s a million pesos to you and me).
This year, two fiction books and three poetry collections are on the short list for the Madrigal-Gonzalez award. The fiction books are Iskrapbuk (UP Press) by Allan Derain and Pangangaluluwa at Iba Pang Kuwento (UP Press) by Jimmuel C. Naval; the poetry collections are Mga Tulang Tulala: Mga Piling Tula sa Filipino, Bikol at Rinconada (Goldprint Publishing House) by Kristian Sendon Cordero; Order of the Poets: Poems in English and Filipino (Akdang Bayan) by Jaime Dasca Doble; and Ibang Daan Pauwi: Mga Tula (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House) by Manolito Sulit.
The winner will be announced on Dec. 8, after a book forum with the finalists at 2 p.m. Both will be held at the Pulungang Recto, Bulwagang Rizal, UP Diliman, Quezon City.
The winner will receive a cash prize of P50,000. The award was established in February 2001 and sponsored by the Madrigal and Gonzalez families through Atty. Gizela Gonzalez Montinola, writer and granddaughter of Bienvenido Gonzalez, former UP President, and daughter of Gonzalo Gonzalez, former member of the UP Board of Regents. This year’s members of the board of judges are prizewinning writers Malou Jacob, Luna Sicat-Cleto, and Rene O. Villanueva.
Incidentally, with my former student and sometime badminton and poker buddy Joel Toledo placing second in the international quest for the prestigious Bridport Prize, it can’t be too far-fetched to imagine that a Filipino can win yet one more important prize we haven’t claimed: the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, administered by the University of Pittsburgh Press, that pays the winner $15,000 plus publication by the press. The prize is open to writers of collections of fiction in English, no matter where in the world they come from. For more information, check out <http://www.upress.pitt.edu/renderHtmlPage.aspx?srcHtml=htmlSourceFiles/drueheinz.htm>.
I can’t release the list just now, pending notification of all the writers of the entries we accepted from several hundred submissions. But having seen that list, I can say that it represents a fair and exciting balance between writers old and new (as well as old and young). Likhaan accepted a total of 14 works in the two languages, divided evenly by language, but somewhat differently by genre, depending on the quality of the submissions. Eight of those 14 names are familiar to me in varying degrees, which means that I – for all my exposure to the workshop circuit – know nothing of the work of the other six, a healthy sign that great changes are taking place, and that Philippine literature is being reshaped by a new generation of writers voicing new concerns.
Please don’t write me at this point to ask who’s in, or what happened to your submission. Again, I’ve seen the list by e-mail, but being away in the United States, I wasn’t personally involved in the selection process, although I would’ve stepped in to break any tie (there was none). My associate editors and I relied on a corps of referees – all of them distinguished writers and academics themselves, both within and outside UP – to make the toughest decisions and to justify them in notes that we will publish in an introduction to the first issue.
We had hoped to launch that issue on Writers Night this December, but it looks like late January will be a more probable date for the launch, given how Pinoy brains seem to refuse any serious work for the greater part of December. That’s good for me, because I’ll be back by then, and can personally present the authors featured in this new journal with their copies.
That’s when the first national conference of the Philippine Fulbright Scholars Association (PFSA), Fulbright Philippine Agriculture Alumni Association (FPAAA), Hubert H. Humphrey Alumni Association (HHHAA), and East-West Center Alumni Association (EWCAA) will be held in Escaler Hall at the Ateneo de Manila University in Loyola Heights, QC. Made possible by a US Embassy-Manila grant to PAEF, the conference will see how these scholars can help further in strengthening Philippine-American relations and advancing national development.
Opening formalities will start at 9 a.m., with US Ambassador Kristie A. Kenney invited to give a message. A plenary session will follow till noon, with representatives from the four alumni associations as panelists: Corazon de la Paz, SSS president and CEO, for the PFSA; Dr. Rudy Undan, president of Central Luzon State University for the FPAAA; Dr. Noemi Silva, academic vice-president of Notre Dame of Marbel University, for the HHHAA; and Congressman Nereus Acosta of Bukidnon for the EWCAA. Breakout sessions will be held in the afternoon on issues important to the alumni. The conference should be over by 4 p.m.
On behalf of the PFSA board of which I’m a member, we’d like to thank the key people from the US Embassy supporting this conference – Lee McClenny, Public Affairs Officer and PAEF board chairman, and Bruce Armstrong, cultural affairs officer and PAEF board treasurer. For more information, please call PAEF at 812-0919 or email them at fulbright@paef.org.ph.
I’m going to give this discussion a rest for now, with the reiteration of my notion that language is made in the streets (do I hear some people crying, "Horrors!"?), and not in or by academies.
Want to help in the promotion of better English and better Filipino? Mind your own language. Use it well. Use it freshly. Use it to be understood by ordinary people, to excite and to engage their imagination – not to elevate or separate yourself from them. If patriotism has been said to be the refuge of scoundrels, linguistic snobbery just might be the refuge of those who have little else to say.
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