A Fil-Am book fair in San Francisco

I reported last week on some recent positive developments in getting Philippine writing more exposure abroad, and I’ll follow through on that thread this week.

A sizable contingent seems to be shaping up for the Filipino-American Book Fair scheduled for early October in San Francisco, USA. A partial list of those invited and those going includes such notables as National Artists Virgilio Almario, Bienvenido Lumbera, F. Sionil Jose, and Benedicto Cabrera; historians Ambeth Ocampo and Felice Sta. Maria; journalists Marites Vitug and Criselda Yabes; political scientist Jojo Abinales; publishers Karina Bolasco, Reni Roxas, and Jing Hidalgo; critics Soledad Reyes, Vince Rafael, and Isagani Cruz; and, as a special treat for the locals, poets Vim Nadera and Teo Antonio, who will perform a balagtasan in San Francisco. The younger generation of Filipino writers will be represented by the likes of Carljoe Javier, who  along with some others  will be sponsored by a grant from the Asia Foundation, which is co-sponsoring the event.

The book fair is a pioneering venture of the Literacy Initiatives International Foundation, headed by Gemma Nemenzo. Before assuming the executive directorship of the LIIF, Gemma had served as editor of the San Francisco-based Filipinas magazine, which was a highly regarded Filipino-American publication covering a broad range of interests (indeed, well beyond the usual search for Ms. Philippines-West Covina or Ms. Narvacan of Southern California) before it went down in the recession. I wrote a column for Filipinas for a good many years and could see how Gemma had tried her best to make it intellectually stimulating as well as entertaining, and it’s good to see her directing that energy and vision toward the promotion of Filipino cultural concerns in the US through LIIF.

I’ll be taking leave from UP, but I’ll be going to the book fair on my own, to promote the recent publication of my two novels, Killing Time in a Warm Place and Soledad’s Sister, in a combined US edition titled In Flight, published by the Arizona-based Schaffner Press.

How I got published by Schaffner is an interesting little story in itself. Twenty years ago, when I was writing Killing Time as part of my doctoral dissertation project at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, I had sent an early draft to Timothy Schaffner  then the literary agent of Maxine Hong Kingston  whom I had met at a writer’s festival in Park City, Utah. Tim liked what he saw and sent it on to many publishers, including Alfred Knopf, which was interested but which also demanded certain revisions.

I would have worked on those revisions, but it was a particularly difficult time in my life, and I had just flown home to resume teaching after being away for five years, so the short of it was that I never got around to revising the manuscript as Knopf required, and instead, after making some last-minute touch-ups, I sent the novel over to Anvil, which accepted it; it’s gone though another edition and many printings with Anvil since then.

So Tim was, in effect, my first literary agent, although our association was short-lived. Many years later, after writing Soledad’s Sister, I found another agent, Renuka Chatterjee, who was based in New Delhi but was very well connected to the international publishing industry, and who also happened to be a very sharp and sensitive literary editor. Working with her was a pleasure, but again our relationship came to an abrupt end when her agency’s parent company, an industrial giant in India, decided to dissolve the agency and reassign Renuka elsewhere. Meanwhile, however, she had gotten Soledad translated and published in Italy by Isbn Edizioni.

Thanks to the attention received by the book, I was invited to join an eight-person reading at the World Voices Festival in New York in April 2009; after that reading, I was approached by a man named Jonah Straus, and he became my new agent. After a few months, Jonah reported that he had found an American publisher for my two novels  a former literary agent himself who had now become a small but prestigious publisher in Arizona, and his name was Timothy Schaffner. Twenty years after our first meeting, our paths had crossed again.

Last week I received another message from Jonah to tell me that Killing Time had been picked up by a publisher in Barcelona, Libros del Asteroide. Like I said last week, I’ve never been to Spain and wish I were going, but I’m happy for now to be represented by my book.

I’m sure that Jonah speaks for many other agents when he says that he’s always on the lookout for good, new work. Right now, he says, there’s a great demand for crime fiction (novels, not just stories)  which, ironically enough in this crime-happy country of ours, we seem to write very little of.

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Speaking of literary agents and foreign publishers, I’m happy to report that a tricky situation involving two Filipino authors and the University of the Philippines Press seems to have been resolved  to the overall benefit, I should say, of Philippine literature.

These two authors  journalist (and lately novelist) Criselda Yabes and Singapore-based crime fictionist Felisa “Ichi” Batacan  had published their books with UP Press, and signed the requisite, standard contracts. Subsequently, they were taken on by a literary agent, Jacaranda Press, which brought their works to the London Book Fair, where some interest was generated from foreign publishers. Unfortunately, a close reading of their UP Press contracts revealed that the press retained world rights to the material  meaning that the authors and their agents were not at liberty to negotiate with publishers without going through, and possibly paying a fee to, the UP Press.

As director of the UP Institute of Creative Writing, and having had some experience with the process myself, I interceded in this case at the request of Jacaranda and the two authors, asking the UP administration to review its copyright policies and to relax or to amend them to make it easier for UP Press authors to get their works published abroad.

In an ideal setup, the UP Press itself could act as its authors’ agent and therefore earn commissions from any resulting transactions, but the fact is that it has neither the capability, the experience, nor the contacts to do this. Besides, a good argument can be made for the Press to focus on what it does best  finding and publishing good work  and to leave the marketing of international publishing rights to the professionals who’ve invested years into the job. Like they say, if you can’t help, don’t stand in the way of those who can.

I’m glad that the new UP Press director, poet and scholar Neil Garcia, understands and sympathizes with this position, being an internationally published writer himself. I leave it to him and to the UP lawyers to craft a fairer, more forward-looking contract for UP Press authors. Otherwise, I warned Neil, Filipino authors looking for wider audiences might not even consider UP for their Philippine editions. Let me just make this clear: the UP Press is an outstanding outfit, having won many prizes and distinctions for its operations, especially over the past decade. Like many parts of our century-old university, it just needs to keep up with these digital times.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.