THIS WAS years ago. The month was April and towards the end of. We don’t know when the writers workshop began to begin in early May not late April. Come to think of it, we wish it straddled, again, the two beautiful summer months.
The workshop director met us at the wharf very early morning. First we went to Hibbard Hall. Then to the Silliman Cafeteria for breakfast.
We breakfasted across the table from the most serene-looking lady we ever saw, who was going to be one of the panelists.
Then to Alumni Hall where we would be staying for the workshop’s three weeks.
We can’t remember if we ate lunch and supper at the cafe or at Opeña’s.
The next day the second workshopper arrived, a seventeen-year-old boy who wrote like Dylan Thomas or James Joyce, according to one panelist who ran a by-line in one of the national magazines. This was during one of the sessions that followed on the first week.
The comparison made us so jealous we went to a bar and ate our heart out (wept) over beer.
At a more famous bar later that week we — the seventeen-year-old and me and the loquacious panelist who talked no end — had beer while waiting for the afternoon session. He did stop talking, or rather alternated between talking and singing. He sang songs from Rodgers and Hammerstein. He had a good voice and sang well.
The fourth panelist was a University of the Philippines professor who was just so brilliant.
The trouble was the four panelists, all in their mid or late forties, were all brilliant.
AND THAT was not years ago — that was ages ago. 1962 to be exact! We were teenagers then, Wilfredo Pascua Sanchez and I. Now we are older than they were, those four fabulous panelists! They were Ed and Edith Tiempo, the founders of the workshop. The other two were Nick Joaquin — in the opinion of everyone at that time if not quite now the best Filipino writer in English ever — and Franz Arcellana, to our mind the most riveting classroom figure this side of deconstruction.
Ah but deconstruction was still two if not decades away in the country. Back then what mattered was how much intelligent reading of the texts you can bring on your own into the discussions. Of course if you possessed theory like the Tiempos did, so much the better.
That was the first workshop. Half a century has passed and even Franz Arcellana’s youngest son is now in his own forties whose own son is in college in Silliman. Juaniyo Arcellana turned out to be his father’s literary heir, writing a column in one of the national broadsheets but writing books in both fiction and poetry and, some five years ago, workshop critiquing. In a moment of absolute hilarity I once wrote this comparison: ‘The father was a magician of a lecturer; the son, a hypnotic mumbler of auto-suggestions.”
But why not? ‘He who can, writes; he who cannot, teaches.’ Who was it said that? The teacher lectures; the writer mumbles — that’s to say writes.
Nick Joaquin did not seem to put much stock in critical theory. But he brought so much intelligent reading and virtuoso talking – and singing! — into the workshop. Funny that the songs were from South Pacific and this was at North Pole which, alas, is no longer around like the Tiempos Ed and Edith and Franz Arcellana and Nick Joaquin whose birthday it is today — May 4. 2013, two days before the Silliman National Writers Workshop begins.
May the Fourth be with you!