Kumustahan Creative Writing in the Philippines (The Philippine Writers Series 2024)

The essays in this book—arguably an inaugural moment in the field of “Philippine creative writing studies”—are written versions of the presentations given by the discussants at Kumustahan 2018 [a seminar, sponsored in Tagaytay by the Likhaan: UP Institute of Creative Writing], representing writing traditions and communities across the following linguistic domains: Filipino, anglophone, Bikol, Kinaray-a and Hiligaynon, Waray, Cebuano or Binisaya, Ilokano and Tinguian, Pangasinan, and Kapampangan.… While English and Filipino were this seminar’s linguistic media, free rein was given to discussants to determine the manner and structure of their presentations, with the autobiographical narrative being the dominant form …

A very clear realization we arrived at, as we listened to each other’s stories and reflections, is that as they operate, creative writing workshops in the Philippines presuppose and require “formalism”—the teaching of literary technique—but they also complicate and transcend it. Because theories become localized as they travel, as enacted in various artistic contexts in the Philippines, the strictures of formalism, as they are required by the workshop method, have always already been appropriated and translated.

Even or precisely as an academic discipline and a compositional methodology, creative writing is, after all, a cultural practice, and our localizations—our translations—of it indeed constitute our own conceptual and practical “difference” in this regard… Such translations have of course been both interlingual and intersemiotic—which is to say, on one hand, across English and our own anglophonic and vernacular deployments or versions, and on the other across the textual/literate and oral divides, whose syncretism and generative coexistence may be said to have characterized, in an important way, the truth of our social realities, for some time now.

As it originated in the Global North, creative writing’s condition of possibility, among other things, is the incumbency of a uniformly stable and archival literacy, and the individualist subjectivity that it promotes. By contrast, as we have assimilated and adapted the practice here … creative writing must endeavor to seek and assert its own place in a residually oral episteme. In this social situation, literacy’s abstract and categorical judgments that go against orality’s situational consciousness remain relatively precarious and rare, and the communal model of subjectivity—including the personalist bonds and valuations it engenders—that immemorially antedates literacy in our archipelago has not been entirely superseded.

—From the Introduction

Editor: J. Neil C. Garcia
ISBN/ISSN: 978621090046-0
Category: Literary; Essays
Copyright: 2024
Pages: 342pp
Size: 6x9
Type: PB/SP