A Day with Writers & A Few Notes on the Novel

I just got back home after a day of sumptuous feast (bangus, tilapia, shrimp, talaba), boating, birdwatching, and discussions on everything and nothing (from birds to ghosts to serial killers to madness to every barrio’s “idiot” to Koreanobela and back to birds again) in Malolos, Bulacan. I was with fictionists Marx Lopez, Allan Derain, Honorio Bartolome De Dios, Joseph Arevalo and Ana Gonzales—all of them from Naratibo and, besides Ana (whose only daughter happened to be my former student), all are colleagues from the Kagawaran in Ateneo. We were invited by writing couple Jing Panganiban and Gil Mendoza, both award-winning and published writers; Jing has been a writing mentor and friend since college when we were both in Heights.

They were all convincing me to join Naratibo; I did not commit to anything except that I’d try to have one of my stories be workshopped by them. I also reminded them of Tapat, the Filipino journal on the novel that I’m trying to put up with a little help from a very good friend. I just realized then that I was in the company of people who could be important novelists (they are now, in my assessment, all major contemporary fictionists in Filipino, but all as short story writers; none of them had a published novel yet, although I believe that they all plan to do so sometime in the future), and could be important contributions to the history of the development of the novel in Filipino that I am also trying to archive online.

I’ve been blogging on different sites for more than five years now, but I’m still mostly writing on anything. There was a time when I thought of writing on the nature of narratives but I realized that it was still a broad topic. I had some reflections a few months back to decide on a narrower focus after I’d been busy visiting the blogs of those who are into komiks and pinoy films, mostly indie. By then I already recognized the lack of resources online on the novel in Filipino. Of course, I can think of the most practical reason: unlike komiks and films, reading novels and writing about them would take more time and it seemed incompatible with the brevity and immediacy almost inherent to most blogs. However, whenever I’d review my daily top posts, it’s been almost always likely to be on my entry about Pinaglahuan by Faustino Aguilar. Most of the hits were directed from search engines.

I already said before that we cannot stop the students from making use of the internet in their research; it is up to the teachers, writers and scholars now to assure that they really get access to more reliable resources online. And so I am more likely to take my personal study on the novel in Filipino seriously here, especially for student researches who cannot depend entirely on their school library’s holdings of books, journals, magazines and newspapers that published and, for some, continue to publish novels and/or studies on the novel. If you have any way to help me on this, please leave a message or email me at ecsamar@gmail.com.

~ by ecsamar on February 23, 2008.