Unafraid of the creative overflow because we're fueled by faith

"You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. If it seems to you that I move in a world of certitudes, you, par contre, must benefit from the great privilege of youth, which is that you move in a world of mysteries. But both must be ruled by faith." - Anais Nin in a letter to an aspiring writer

I often wonder if I am in any way living up to my role as a teacher, even if I'm only part-time. Most times I have to mind my duties as someone who happens to know how to write a little or over-much, depending on the reader. Somehow I can still make a shaky living out of writing. It doesn't matter anymore that the earnings still add up to a little below the poverty line at month's end, and I always need a lifeline extension from family in Pasig and in Baguio, especially my partner of close to 30 years (I silently thank Rolly Fernandez and the heavens in my morning rituals).

There isn't much of a difference between me and the help that my family in both cities hires to do house chores. Part of my work sometimes involves cleaning up other people's manuscripts, making sense of them, even if these sometimes cause me symptoms of stress like falling hair and growing irritability.

In one of the articles I found in the Web, it said that those who serve--nannies, domestic helpers, gardeners, care-givers of the sick and dying, dishwashers--they are the truest philanthropists in these times. The work I do forces me to sit for hours and hours. I don't know how long I will hold out, but I always finish, or try to anyway, what I begin. Nothing ennobling about lengthy sitting and enlarging one's avoirdupois, but I'm grateful just the same.

I don't know where or how this morning's blog entry will end. I wanted to begin with re-telling how Teacher Maite dela Rosa and I accompanied some high school students enrolled in the Community of Learners creative writing class on a field trip to the Ateneo Library of Women's Writings and the Ateneo Art Gallery upstairs this past Saturday.

Born in the late 1990s, the students are part of a generation that woke to a digital age. Something like the notebook of poet Angela Manalang Gloria, with the Bureau of Education's logo stamped on the cover, looked supremely exotic to them.

As I carefully opened a page (for me the experience was close to touching the shroud of Turin, having worshiped for quite sometime at Manalang Gloria's altar, though invisible), there were audible gasps and comments like "Look at her penmanship!" I asked if they knew what a fountain pen looked like. A boy answered, "It's something you have to constantly refill."

I turned another page that showed Ms. Gloria's handwritten draft for a poem that left clues to her creative process: how she crossed out some lines, then replaced them with another. That detail started a short conversation on the process of revisions and discouraging the use of correcting fluid. But sometimes one or two kids can't help being obsessive about erasures--part of a young writer's quirks that I have to respect.

We saw the typescript of scholars Doreen Fernandez and Edilberto Alegre's interview of Edith Tiempo. It led to a brief discussion on what a typewriter looked and sounded like, how it used to be the writer's tool. A girl said, "My lola still uses one." And I saw that lola in my head composing her lines to the clackity clack of an Underwood or a Remington.

Maybe in my next life, I shall be working in the stacks, meaning, become a library chick.

Seated around the first table at ALIWW: Mark Lee, Bea Buenaventura, Julian Zapata, Teacher Maite and Miki Cabochan. Girls at the next table: Isabel Arellano, Mika Mamauag and Joan Torres. Standing are Gio Gutierrez and Janrick Razon.

That's us at the gallery with part of Rodel Tapaya's exhibit behind us. His show "Bato Balani" will be the subject of our next writing exercise.

Kiri Dalena's ArtSpeak at ALIWW

Kiri with video cam           Photo by Roselle Siojo

The women of Women Writers in Media Now

The writer who savored the word and swallowed the world

The much-loved and esteemed Doreen Gamboa Fernandez would have been more than pleased at the culinary storm she helped generate: blogs devoted to restaurant reviews; culinary academies rising in nearly all parts of the country; regional and national cooking contests; newspaper sections and columns devoted to food and dining. In a large way, this is her doing. Add to that, the well-traveled widely exposed Pinoy has developed a discriminating palate that has learned to savor a multitude of tastes representing cuisines of the world.

Fernandez and her typewriter

 The life and works of this modern Renaissance woman is the subject of an exhibit at the Ateneo Library of Women's Writings (ALIWW) Reading Room on the Loyola Heights campus, Quezon City, until Nov. 9.

Apart from photographs of Fernandez and copies of her books, the glass cases display the meticulous syllabus, exams and class records she kept when she taught generations of Ateneo students English, literature, journalism and creative writing, her own notebooks and notes from graduate school where she did ground-breaking research on the history of Philippine theater under scholars Bienvenido Lumbera and Nicanor Tiongson who later became her colleagues, thank-you notes from medical residents, students and people who heard her lecture or to whom she gave her time and attention.

An "A" student even in graduate school

No wonder the Ateneo community insists, with this exhibit, on remembering what to its members is “a great woman.”

Teacher, scholar, writer, taste-maker, even “pleasant patient, strong even during the most trying of times,” in the words of the resident staff of the Makati Medical Center who she taught how to improve their command of the English language. It was her way of giving back for their helping her recover from illness. Fernandez wore these inter-related hats with elan, unselfishness and humility.

Doreen the professor

 Unselfish and humble because she did not hog credit to herself. In her book Tikim: Essays on Philippine Food and Culture (Anvil Publishing), she acknowledged as her teachers “those who give me information about food: market vendors, street sellers, cooks, chefs, waiters, restaurant and carinderia owners, farmers, tricycle drivers, gardeners, fishermen …” and on and on her list goes. In short, “everyone who eats and cares.”

Even at her most scholarly, her writing remained vibrant and readable. At the end of her narratives, she always had a glossary of food and food-related terms and list of publication sources. In one of her last books Palayok: Philippine Food Through Time, On Site, In the Pot (The Bookmark Inc.), a table of illustrations is included where the sources of each image is acknowledged.

Some books that Fernandez wrote

With frequent collaborator Edilberto Alegre

 Only she can come up with the just-right definition for that condition of a fruit, manibalang, i.e., “almost ripe, fruit soft yet firm and crunchy.” Or that piquant term for a young coconut’s meat, mala-uhog, i.e.., “literally, like snot.”

In Tikim, she also lay down some guidelines for credible food writing that read so elegantly like the writer’s character: “The writing done about food must be worthy of its subject. It should be not just utilitarian reportage, but writing that depends heavily on the unsaid, on the assumed, on the subtext of culture. It should require full participation from the reader, responses drawn from home and growing, from memory and pleasure. Because of this, it must be done with words that resound, and with the silence vibrating between and behind the words. Words that bear the culture within them need no adornments; they speak from intimacy of the experience. And yet, one reaches for words oft dedicated only to poetry, for words beyond the cooking stove, kitchen and plate, for words that convey sense, sensibility and sensuousness.”

Unknown to many readers, this “doyenne of food history in the Philippines,” a title given by renowned folklore scholar and museum professional Barbara-Krishenblatt-Gimblett, was a diabetic during all the time she was trying out restaurants, writing her food columns, researching Philippine town and sitios for almost-lost life and food ways. This never hampered her work. Her prose bristles with joie de vivre that is evident in her personal photos on exhibit.

Wedding portrait of Doreen and Wili Fernandez

 Little known, too, is that the homemaker Doreen served her husband Wili, a top honcho in the interior design profession and himself a gourmet, take-out food. This wirter once spotted her loading warm, freshly cooked laing in her car for her husband’s supper but not just from any run-of-the-mill source. She bought it from someone who cooked it with love.

Laughing with sister Della Besa the pianist

 The young bloggers have plenty to thank Fernandez for. This plenitude she made possible through her writings–cum-teachings. She foresaw the “new kind of interaction” where local and foreign chefs use Philippine ingredients in creative ways (mango-filled crepes, salmon belly sinigang) or how street food would continue to flourish in hard times and good.--Text and photo reproductions by Elizabeth Lolarga

First published by Vera Files and Yahoo Philippines, Oct. 30, 2012

Joy T. Dayrit, whole and entire

"Gifted" is an understatement in describing the scope of Joy T. Dayrit's works. She was a writer of short stories and poetry, a painter, a children's art teacher and friend to many writers and artists. She was an admirable woman for whom a disability was no cause for diminishing her zest for life.

The Ateneo Library of Women's Writings (ALIWW) and the Ateneo de Manila University Press launched Light, her selected stories, in a slim, elegantly designed book in a color brighter than celadon green. 

Portrait of Joy Dayrit by Elaine Nuvas

 Edna Zapanta Manlapaz, book editor and ALIWW founder, remembered Josephine Teodoro Dayrit, who used the professional name "Joy T. Dayrit," as a meticulous writer who would submit to the latter's class several drafts of the same work in graduate school. Manlapaz would be stumped to look for what was outstandingly new about it. She'd read the latest draft line by line until she discovered that an adjective was deleted, and that discovery would make Dayrit smile.

The writer-painter's chair and cane served as subject for a series of paintings.

This meticulousness informed even her art. A fine example is the series "My Chair/30 Times" wherein she painted 30 versions of her chair and cane as subject. Somehow, it reminded one of Wallace Stevens's famous poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird."

 As Manlapaz said, it was quintessentially Dayrit to do repetitions with variations (the hallmark of a distinct style), perhaps with an eye to perfection. It also proves that anything can feed the imagination of a disciplined writer and painter which Dayrit was.

Quite telling in her story "A Quiet Infidelity" is how a persevering priest and a successful accountant, once childhood sweethearts, tame their ardor with just a chaste kiss exchanged between them.

In "Roda," the title character chides friend Greg for working hard to make a name for himself in a business office, for always being hurried and not setting aside time to relax and to enjoy his friends' company. This story serves as postlude to an earlier one where Roda's life is cut short by a sudden illness and Greg appears as one of the mourners.

There are no highly dramatic, emotionally draining and tear-jerking scenes. Dayrit's prose is clean and spare that one is almost tempted to call it "Hemingwayesque". But that would make her turn in her grave for in one of her journals, she bristled at a comment made by National Artist Nick Joaquin who during a meeting with women writers, said aloud how they could write if they were pregnant or busy raising small children.

This is where ALIWW's mission comes in: restoring Dayrit to her place in the literary canon. After all, she won literary prizes from the Palanca Memorial Awards and Focus Philippines literary content apart from her stories passing the astute editorial eye of Joaquin himself and getting published in the pre-martial law Philippines Free Press.

Her reflection on a new typewriter ribbon

At the ALIWW exhibit that pays tribute to the writer-painter, the space is made out like Dayrit's private office and library. On the walls are paintings large and small, especially selected by her dear friend Roberto Chabet, the esteemed father of Philippine contemporary art. The look of her desk is recreated with a word bank (a wooden box) near her electric typewriter which, one assumes, she utilized to get what's known as "writing prompts" to get her started.

Good friends: Roberto Chabet clowns around while Dayrit smiles, unaware.

 Her eyeglasses are there, as though she had just taken them off to stand up, stretch, step out to take a snack or go to the toilet, leaving a sheet of newsprint paper fed in the typewriter with a playful reflection on what it's like to have a dual-colored typewriter ribbon. It reads: "My new typewriter ribbon is black and red. I had wanted only black, but that was out of stock. So black and red it is. If you go with the flow, it could be fun."

Mobiles for children's enjoyment

 This fun-loving side of her is reflected in the colorful mobiles hanging from the inside of an open antique closet. These heart-shaped mobiles painted back to back were meant for her grand-nephews and grand-nieces to play with.

Underneath the glass-topped tables are photos of Dayrit from childhood to adulthood. In almost all of them is her bright, brave smile, even as she was being fitted with leg braces. Manlapaz quoted the late Kerima Polotan who once told sculptor Julie Lluch, "When Joy enters a room, she lights it up."

Some of her box paintings and her favorite books, including The Little Prince

 In her journals, Dayrit wondered what her true calling was: writer or painter? One day, she quit agonizing when she realized that she was happy being both, that she did not need to fragment herself, that words and images were what defined her.

The ALIWW exhibit, which runs till Aug. 31, has been visited by droves of freshmen since the schoolyear started. It bodes well. Dayrit's writings and art are alive.--Text and photos by Elizabeth Lolarga

First published by Vera Files/Yahoo Philippines, July 13, 2012

Alun-Alun Dance Circle at ALIWW