Workshop week in Duma: Win!

Last Thursday towards sundown, we sang the song Today once again. “… I’ll be a dandy and I’ll be a rover/ You’ll know who I am by the songs that I sing./ I’ll feast at your table, I’ll sleep in your clover./ Who cares what tomorrow shall bring?”

We had done that onstage at Luce Auditorium three years ago, on the milestone year that was the 50th anniversary of the Siliman University National Writers Workshop. “Mom” Edith was in the audience, beaming radiantly at 92 years of age, very happy to hear one of her favorite songs sung by her generations of literary children.

Three months later she passed away, our beloved National Artist for Literature Edith L. Tiempo, poet, novelist, critic, educator, and co-founder (with her husband, fellow writer Dr. Edilberto K. Tiempo) of the longest-running creative writing workshop in Asia.

Last week, on the penultimate day of the workshop’s 53rd edition, the 2014 batch of 15 Writing Fellows and third-week set of panelists trooped to Dumaguete City Memorial Park for a twilight tribute of prayers, songs, poems and recollections conducted by the gravesite of Mom Edith and “Dad Doc” Edilberto K. Tiempo. 

Panelist and former Fellow Grace Monte de Ramos lay the flower wreath by Mom’s headstone, while Dr. Gémino H. Abad did the same for Dad. As the rest of us lit candles alongside the floral offerings, I teared up upon hearing vocalist and guitarist Pipo Sabornido offer a special song: Joey Ayala’s Walang Hanggang Paalam.

“Ang pag-ibig natin ay/ Walang hanggang paalam/ At habang magkalayo/ Papalapit pa rin ang puso/ Kahit na magkahiwalay/ Tayo ay magkasama/ Sa magkabilang dulo ng mundo…”

Opo, walang hanggan. We’ll be doing this every May as long as we are able to — continue to help nurture and strengthen the workshop tradition in Dumaguete, as confreres do in Baguio, Bacolod, Iligan, Davao, and certain university campuses — despite what cantankerous characters with characteristic foot-and-mouth disease may say.

Susan S. Lara, SUNWWW director in residence for the second straight year, spoke in tribute to Dad Ed, while Marj Evasco did the same for Mom Edith, reading too her poem “Bonsai.” The latest Fellows paid musical tribute, as did Pastor Elmer Sa-a, who sang another of Mom’s favorites, No Other Love, before everyone was enjoined by workshop coordinator Ian Rosales Casocot and SU cultural affairs mover Moses Joshua Atega to close with the fellowship song Beyond the Sunset.

Due northwest beyond the memorial park, the outline of Mt. Talinis with its twin peaks, Cuernos de Negros, turned stark even as a wispy cloud caught the tangerine of magic hour.  

That was on Thursday, when we also ended the evening with a special panelists’ dinner courtesy of newly opened fine-dining resto Pop’s Place on the highway close to Robinsons Dumaguete. Dr. Noel Pinggoy of GenSan, a balik-Fellow from Batch 2007, joined us for terrific crispy pata, kare-kare and pinakbet.

Earlier in the afternoon, we had the special mentoring sessions at Byblos reading room, with each of the panelists engaging in one-on-one consultations with sets of Fellows. The morning session was given over to a lecture by Jimmy Abad, also at Byblos, titled “Language and Literature (for Edilberto K. Tiempo).”

Here are the opening paragraphs of Dr. Abad’s enlightening counsel for all writers, for which alone the Silliman workshop that was completed last week cannot be said to be anything less than invaluable:

“The literary work is literary because it is both work of language and work of imagination: it isn’t so much written in a given historical language, like English or Tagalog, as wrought from language. For the writer, language isn’t a given, it is forged: made anew. The writer’s job, says Ezra Pound, is to “keep the language efficient.” The very word “text” is from Latin, texere, textus, “to weave.” In every instance of writing, language is re-woven, reinvented, so that with words and words a perceived reality may be endowed with form by which the thought or feeling is grasped. The words of any language are the living flesh of a people’s, a community’s thought and feeling through their history and culture; therefore, our words already speak us beforehand, and yet, with those words too we may talk back.  

“Language itself, the finest human invention, is already work of imagination — a translation of reality into words. Without language, there would be no memory, no history, no culture, no civilization. Our own consciousness is formed by language. But the very act of writing is act of imagination too: a work of translation. That word, “translation,” is from Latin, transferre, translatus, “to carry or ferry across.” Our thoughts and feelings without our words are like brambles — the underbrush of the human psyche, dream, and intuition. The writer then must ferry across the river of words of a language his own burden of thought and feeling without hurt or injury to mind’s import and aim.

“Only when the language has been found again within ­— within language, within oneself — does the writer discover his subject. That subject is the writer’s own clearing within language, his own perception of reality as imagined in his own time and place. What is most imagined is what is most real.”

Monday and Tuesday were the last days spent by the Fellows at the Rose Lamb Sobrepeña Writers’ Village above the town of Valencia, on the foothills of Mt. Talinis. After the Tuesday afternoon session, they came down from the hill a final time, to spend their last few days and nights in the city.

Tuesday night featured “The Word is Alive” — a poetry reading cum music jam at the fully-packed Byblos established by our young bibliophile friend Bron Teves, who also runs Rocks Café as a heady anteroom. 

Among the standout performances were the spoken-word adaptation of “When Love Arrives” by Sarah Kaye & Phil Kaye, as rendered with localized humor by J Marie Maxino and Renz Torres, and a reading by 2004 Fellow and UP Mindanao/Davao’s John Bengan of a hilarious excerpt from his satirical prose work, “Manny Pacquiao Speaks to a Butterfly in California.”

It starts: “O, Butterfly, you are der apter all. At pers I don’t see you, now I see you der. What you doing here outside Persian Deli? Da flowers here are far. Why you still fly dis time of today? Me, I’m jas chilling, you know? Well, I want to go out da hotel, away from da gym. I finish trehning anyway so no problem. When I see you landing in da metal pens of da park, I know a good day is here. Now I’m not feel bad to escape only few minutes. You know, I miss my kids so much. But don’t git me wrong, I love here in California. Jas like my home General Santos, all da leaves are green and da sky is great.”

(The full version first appeared online in the Philippines Free Press website, November of 2011, and recently in print in SU’s Sands and Coral.) 

Wednesday proved to be another enjoyable day for the fellows and panelists as we had the midweek excursion at Antulang Beach Resort in Siaton, an hour south of Dumaguete. Finishing up with the workshop sessions at poolside before lunch, we had the whole afternoon off — which meant a cruise aboard the 70-foot Annabelle Lee to Tambobo Bay and back.

There too, courtesy of Annabelle, Edo and Ana Joaquina Adriano, the fellows experienced crunching up inside the Edith L. Tiempo Reading Room for a group shot — memorable since no other resort in our country offers as many literary titles on bookshelves as Antulang does. 

Friday, we had our last workshop sessions. As I write this, everyone’s off to make something of the afternoon other than literary caucus, and to prepare for the president’s dinner and closing ceremony at the University House gardens. There we hope to congratulate and thank SU president Ben Malayang once more for his undiminished support for a time-honored program where young writers craft language — as Jimmy Abad pronounced — as  “the living flesh of a people’s, a community’s thought and feeling through their history and culture…,” indeed, as our imagination made real.