Rizal in July

School's in again, and teachers, not just media folk, get invited to activities related to their profession and vocation, particularly the teaching of the life and works of our national hero (my personal idol) Jose Rizal.

When Maite dela Rosa, my supervisor (the equivalent of a principal) at the Community of Learners, learned that I was up and about after an ailment and going out already, sometimes to attend lectures (one event a day, unlike before when I had a crowded tuhog-tuhog or one appointment after the other schedule), she asked that I go to this one: the Teachers' Conference on Rizal's Life and Works at PETA's home grounds on Eymard Drive, New Manila, Quezon City. Whenever I go there and the weather outside ain't rainy, I start to miss its former home, an open-air theater at Fort Santiago, Intramuros, those years when PETA truly embodied the "aesthetics of poverty." There's something about walls and ceilings.

My daughter and niece like to remind me I should keep my storytelling down to 350 words or less and let the rest of the story be told in photos.

So okay, okay, I know how to listen to these experts in social media communication--the young.

This is the lamp burner that Rizal gave to his sister Trinidad and where he put his poem "Mi Ultimo Adios." This lamp is in the permanent collection of the Ateneo Library and housed in its Art Gallery on the second floor. I took this photo during a class field trip to the university's Library of Women's Writings and gallery on another occasion. Photos by Babeth Lolarga

When you're at a PETA workshop, prepare to get physical before you buckle down to listen to a lecture, watch a play's excerpt or have a Q and A with the playwright or director.

A tour of the theater all ready for another weekend of Rak of Aegis

View from the outside of a dressing and make-up room

To the question on why he chose to specialize in teaching the Rizal course, Vic Torres, a De La Salle University professor and five-time Palanca Literary Award winner, said in the beginning (or just five years ago), he took it for granted. It meant an additional subject, additional pay apart from teaching journalism and history. Then he realized while studying and preparing his lectures that there was so much to learn from the national hero's life and even to discover new things about that life. His novel Noli Me Tangere, for example, is also "a literal recipe book--it was obvious that he was hungry when he was abroad." Before Dr. Torres knew it, Rizal became very much a part of his life.

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.