what’s with writing workshops?

“Writing workshops did me a lot of good, but it has also done a lot of harm. Cold formality in my writing is a ghost that continues to haunt me.” Timothy Montes
oOo

Lent was spent revising my stories for the March 31 deadline of IYAS Creative Writing Workshop which runs from 25 April to 1 May 2005 at the Balay Kalinungan of the University of St. La Salle in Bacolod City.

Writing workshop is a cerebral intercourse with loads of sado-masochism thrown in. But why do we keep on coming back for more? Is it for the chance of meeting aspiring writers to establish and expand networks? Or is it for the opportunity of standing on the shoulders of literary giants? Or the chance of visiting a place on partial subsidy?

Thus far I have a 50% batting average: got accepted by Iligan, rejected by UP-Mindanao; got thrown out by La Salle-Bacolod, taken in by Dumaguete. In that order!

Until now I still have this feeling that I was accepted in Iligan in 2001 simply because Christine Godinez-Ortega, the workshop directress, must’ve found my name familiar, she and I being occasional essayists for the Philippine Daily Inquirer. I submitted “The Memories I Keep” which I wrote in just four days after I accidentally stumbled into Iligan’s press release a week before deadline. It was the first “story” I wrote that heaven knows I now wish I hadn’t.

“Is this a story or an essay?” chorused most of the Iligan panelists and fellows. Chari Lucero recited some lines in “The Memories I Keep” like they were parts of a declamation piece, saying afterwards that my story could win hands down in the Worst Purple Prose Contest in the US. She even went on to ask me, rather quite sarcastically, if she be allowed to submit it herself! Then to my rescue Jaime An-Lim said: “But if anything, I like the title.” Bwahaha-huhuhuhu!

A year later, Merlie Alunan, who was made to write the critique-cum-introduction to the workshop’s output in book form, said that my story-essay-whatever “was a finely controlled narration….” Go figure!

I must’ve learned nothing from Iligan because the stories I submitted to UP-Mindanao that same year had more POVs than there were eyes on a pineapple and with shifts more jarring than its husk.

In 2004 I applied for both the IYAS and the Dumaguete Writing Workshops, submitting the same stories of course. With IYAS, I didn’t lose sleep after knowing that it had awarded only three slots for English fiction and that I was up against Kit Kwe and Peter Mayshelle. But the cynical me had a Hwaaaaaaaaat? moment after I was told I made it to Dumaguete. There must be a mistake somewhere, I said. Me and THE Dumaguete Writing Workshop? Oh my GU-lay, DE-licious!

As everybody knows, I lasted only for a week in Dumaguete that two of my three stories remained untouched by the panelists and fellows. While I told them that I was going home to vote to prevent FPJ from winning, I’d rather keep to myself the real reasons why I didn’t return. Having done that, I wonder if I can be called a Dumaguete fellow.

Dumaguete was really a waste because I could have learned more from Edith Tiempo, Krip Yuson, Cesar Aquino, Jimmy Abad, Butch Perez et al.

At the bienvenida dinner hosted by Dr. Edith Tiempo at her wonderful Montemar residence overlooking Dumaguete and Cebu, Atty. Yee asked me how my “Manti-anak” fared earlier that day. This was after he introduced himself, saying my name aloud and adding “in-the-flesh!”

“Dead on arrival,” I said. Actually Edith Tiempo called it a fable that she “quite enjoyed.”

“Never mind, your two other stories are good,” he said, wiping daintily the spotless china with the equally spotless napkin.

I nearly choked, “Com’on, you’re patronizing me.”

“Why should I?” he said, then raising his left brow higher than Montemar’s altitude, “Bakit? Kilala ba kita?”

Toink!

Dumaguete then, Bacolod now. Actually my sole target this year is to gun for UP-Mindanao in October. But then Dr. Gloria G. Fuentes, IYAS workshop directress, emailed me and five others (last year’s rejects?) to try again. Is this some kind of hint or what?

I’m submitting “Dreams” and “Choices” anew and I feel they’re now far better than when they were submitted last year. Thanks, in great part, to Faye, my fellow pugante, whose suggestions gushed like the thick sauce of the Scooby burgers we chomped in Dumaguete.

It’s a waiting game from here on.