It was a job that fell on my lap, with that attendant feeling of sudden things.
And yet–for some reasons I cannot even begin to fathom–it also felt like something inevitable. Or maybe this is because this has always been a dream, something a lot of us writers in Dumaguete have been talking about for what has seemed like a long, long, long time. And now that this is finally in place, thanks to the encouragement of Dr. Ben S. Malayang III, there is no other recourse but to take the challenge and see how this can grow. We are hitting the ground running with this one.
I am talking, of course, about the new Edilberto and Edith Tiempo Creative Writing Center of Silliman University, and I have become its first coordinator–a job that frankly scares me.
Last Thursday, we held our first event: the first in the Creative Writing Center Lecture Series. We are very fortunate indeed that with the establishment and the final organization of this writing center, we have two outstanding authors who are in Silliman University as visiting professors–the poet Fidelito Cortes and our speaker last Thursday, the writer and scholar Nerissa Balce, who also happens to be his wife. Both are our first resident writers in campus.
This Creative Writing Center has been long time in coming, considering the impressively storied literary tradition Silliman can actually boast of.
This is home, after all, of the late National Artist for Literature Edith Lopez Tiempo, a giant in national letters. Together with her husband, the fictionist Edilberto Tiempo, they carved a unique place for Dumaguete in Philippine literature, effectively making this city the literary capital of the country.
In 1962, they also founded the National Writers Workshop, which has produced so many of our best contemporary writers, Fidelito and Nerissa among them.
The impact of Dumaguete on the literature of this country cannot be underestimated. This is why we have named the Creative Writing Center after them.
Silliman University has since recognized this strong literary and creative writing tradition that we have–and aims even further, by strengthening that tradition in all its major aspects: our Cebuano and larger Philippine tradition, our Anglo-American tradition, and finally our Asia-Pacific tradition of the writing craft.
This year and in the coming years, this Center has been tasked to spearhead many events with this primary goal in mind.
To help us in this task, we have as members of the CWC’s Advisory Board Dr. Betsy Joy B. Tan, vice president for Academic Affairs; Dr. Margaret Helen Udarbe-Alvarez, dean of the College of Arts & Sciences; Dr. Evelyn F. Mascuñana, chair of the Department of English & Literature; Prof. Myrna Yape, chair of the Department of Filipino & Foreign Languages; Prof. Diomar Abrio, University Cultural officer; Jose Mari Jonathan Antonio, Institutional Advancement officer; Jacqueline Pinero-Torres, one of our business officers; and Prof. Philip Van Peel of the Department of English & Literature.
A significant part of this body are our resident writers, which include Dr. Cesar Ruiz Aquino, the Center’s Associate for Poetry & Fiction, Prof. Myrna Peña-Reyes Sweet, the Center’s Associate for Poetry, and Bobby Flores Villasis, the Center’s Associate for Fiction & Drama.
They–together with Silliman’s formidable writing alumni that include Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas, Marjorie Evasco, Jaime An Lim, Merlie Alunan, Christine Godinez-Ortega, Anthony Tan, Timothy Montes, Elsie Coscolluela, Leoncio Deriada, Susan Lara, Krip Yuson, among others, will help us forge a distinctive creative writing program that will put a Silliman stamp on the national literature. (Our secretariat–composed of Warlito Caturay Jr., Alana Narciso, and Lady Flor Partosa–are also part of the team that will make full realization of our upcoming projects.)
Part of creative writing’s appeal is how it can serve as biting commentary for the way we live now, from which perhaps we can gain insight to our existences as human beings.
Nerissa Balce talked about one such insight last Thursday, in a lecture titled Laughing against the State, which gave a unique focus on the uses of political humor–particularly in social media memes–in the U.S. and the Philippines.
What else to look forward to? In three Saturdays–June 30, July 7, and July 14–her husband Fidelito Cortes, the acclaimed author of such poetry collections as Waiting for the Exterminator and Everyday Things, will give a series of workshops on poetry for interested individuals not just in Silliman but for the rest of the Dumaguete community.
He will also give a lecture titled The Poetry of Everyday Things: Poetics and the World on July 12, at 10:15 am at SC 110 at the College of Arts & Sciences.
Then on July 24, the novelist Joni Cham, author of In My Mother’s House, will come to Silliman University to do a reading of her work. And there will be more to come, of course.
It’s just heartening to note that while Silliman and Dumaguete has always been a warm home to creative writing and literature, this is one more sure step in the right direction to establish creative writing as a force in the community.
