the beer and pen in dumaguete

My mentor and award-winning writer Ian Rosales Casocot told me a week ago, “You’re batch is so boring.”

By batch, of course, he means our batch of 16 fellows for the 46th National Writers Workshop (NWW) in the laidback but bourgeoning seaside city of Dumaguete. As I look around the table as we critique our works, whether it be fiction, creative non-fiction or poetry, I formulate at the back of my head why I disagree with that statement.

He might have been thinking about the time past fellows held candlelight poetry readings by the Silliman flagpole or climbed the fence to the swimming pool for a midnight swim, or got drunk every single night and went to the sessions with mind-numbing hangovers.

Not one among us gave up high school to attend the workshop like Maria Kapauan in 1982 (bambit.kusangpalo.com); or wrote a renga entitled “Upon Seeing You Play With Yourself” on a tissue paper on a Dumaguete night “when flowers took root in souls” like Maryanne Moll in 2002 (maryannemoll.blogspot.com).

Yes. Yes. We are not wild. But there are some interesting characters: 29-year old Mia (UP) with her hormonal mood swings, 17-year old Sasha (Ateneo) and her poet-whore, 33-year old abstract expressionist Pancho (UP), 21-year old debater/philosopher RJ (Silliman), and the just recently-turned 30-year old Christian (La Salle) who baffled us with his dead poetess.

And for all of us, me particularly, it is not the crazy and/or passionate (read: fellows falling in love with each other) antics that we carry with us when we leave. It’s the inside jokes and the battles we fought within ourselves as “writers”. To quote Pancho’s “The First Slaughter”, we will remember the workshop for our “compact bleeding”. And our adventures. And our idealisms and convictions on what the craft entails.

There are the hugs given to the author after an intensely harsh session on his/her work. And the lying on the sand in Siquijor after unsuccessfully attempting to steal beer from the hotel bar. Or how the atmosphere physically changed when Krip Yuson and Jimmy Abad first entered the Faurot House. And when we hugged frail 88-year old National Artist for Literature Edith Tiempo goodnight after a dinner at her Montemar residence overlooking the sea.

Memories, inspirations and beginnings; whatever our batch is perceived to be, those are what we will fall back on. After all, from the NWW website, “From the start, an appointment as a writing fellow has been regarded as a mark of recognition in Philippine literary circles.”

We join the ranks of more than 500 of the best writers in the country over the last 46 years. We did not know it then but we are now part of something that had Wilfrido Nolledo (1962), Krip Yuson (1968), Conrado de Quiros (1970), Leoncio Deriada (1974), Marjorie Evasco (1976), Butch Dalisay Jr. (1981), Ricardo de Ungria (1983), Vim Nadera Jr. (1968), DM Reyes (1989), Maningning Miclat (1991), Dean Alfar (1992), and a whole lot more in the Who’s Who of the Philippine literary scene in its prestigious roster.

We are going through the scathing comments and/or praises they also did.

Dean Alfar himself relates in ourownvoice.com how after his mentor Wilfredo Ma. Guerrero died, he had no one to talk to about writing until he was invited by Dr. Edilberto and Mom Edith Tiempo to the workshop. “The set of epiphanies I experienced there under their guidance, kindness and tutelage was the equivalent to several cerebral and spiritual coronaries,” he said.

We are part of it all, this Dumaguete writing life for three marvelous weeks in May. The oldest workshop in Asia, which began in 1962 (the UP Writers Workshop was institutionalized in 1965), was established by the Tiempos to give young writers a chance to interact with a panel of well-known writers, critics and each other.

I can only imagine the first ever workshop from what 1967 fellow Cesar Ruiz Aquino wrote in “Kabilin: 100 Years of Negros Oriental”:

It was a surprise invitation from Dr. Edilberto K. Tiempo to attend the Silliman National Writers Workshop as an observer.

In those days there were no motorized tricycles; pedicabs and tartanilyas were what we saw rather than heard in the streets. The quietness was the first thing that struck us about the town. It was a veritable spell. Here was the Philippine Old World in the South.

Nick Joaquin and Francisco Arcellana and the other workshoppers arrived, and, at a luncheon, the workshop began with a bang—or is it boom—as Nick Joaquin proceeded to be Nick Joaquin, impish, vast, so loquacious as to make all conversation with him lopsided. Joaquin was not a speaker—he was a loudspeaker. He was forty-something, as were Arcellana and the Tiempos.

It was not just the summer of 1962—it was the Summer of Philippine Letters.

What compact bleeding the fellows must have shared then, aside from those infamous nights of inebriation. “To have the two Tiempos and the Nick Joaquin with Arcellana was enough for the fellows to be treated like “culture heroes” by the university and the entire community,” says Aquino when I ask him what it was like after today’s session.

Since that kismet-filled summer when a writing family was born, the Tiempos have been the heart and soul of the workshop. So much so that when I inquire about any changes after Doc Ed died, Aquino just says with a wistful tone, “We were so used to the two Tiempos talaga.”

Sir Ian once commented about how Doc Ed’s blood pressure alarmingly rose after arguing with Mom Edith about the merit of a work that he had to go out of the room to calm himself. Another writer once mentioned, fascinated, how the couple once fought for hours over which sounded more poetic: a wind or the wind.

They were indeed an amazing force to be reckoned with, along with the panelists over the years, including Gregorio Brillantes, Bienvenido N. Santos, NVM Gonzales, F. Sionil Jose and Alejandro Roces, and the newer generation of Gemino Abad, Ophelia Alcantara-Dimalanta, Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo, Susan Lara, Marjorie Evasco, DM Reyes, Anthony Tan, Jaime An Lim, and Merlie Alunan, among other top writers in the country.

Now, with Mom Edith too weak to go to our everyday sessions, we fearfully wonder what will happen in the workshops to come and the next batch of writers.

Last May 11, at a dinner sponsored by Oriental Negros Governor George Arnaiz, Mom Edith formally returned the workshop back to Silliman University. Returned because, even if the Tiempos started it as the Silliman National Writers Workshop, the responsibility of handling the workshop fell in the hands of the Creative Writing Foundation Inc. and College Assurance Plan (CAP) in the early 1990s. Since 2004, the Dumaguete Literary Arts (DULA) Service Group Inc. managed it with funding from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts.

Next year, it will revert back to being called the Silliman National Writers Workshop. But it’s not the changing names that make my heart beat slower and grow a bit bigger. It is the workshop going home to Silliman University, with the initiative of President Ben Malayang III.

DULA President Ernesto Superal Yee said that Mom Edith will still be the director next year, and the selection panel will also remain the same. And that should anything happen to the directorship, the decision will be in the hands of President Malayang—that choice between all of Mom Edith and Doc Ed’s writer-children who could continue their work.

“We are also thinking about the possibility of Rowena Tiempo-Torevillas (the Tiempos’ daughter) to continue their family legacy,” said Yee.

And what a legacy it is. When Mom Edith was asked by Niño Soria de Veyra (livinginthephilippines.com) how she looked at her role in Philippine literature, she answered, “As a teacher.”

That is why although I love Sir Ian with all my heart, I will still say that workshop batches are never boring, especially not mine. We, the students, learn more about ourselves, our sensibilities as human beings, and the words that tell the stories of our lives. Over bottles of beer, of course.