The writer Marra PL. Lanot, recently departed, and her friend, National Artist for Literature Nick Joaquin, long passed, can be said to have belonged to a mutual admiration society in which they admitted their imperfections, with each staunchly defending the other’s humanity before the world. Such was his esteem for her that he wrote the...
Tag: literature
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Postscript to the Frankfurt Book Fair with my friends Jose Rizal, Edward Said and Adania Shibli
To be clear, I was not at the Frankfurt Book Fair. But in the past few months, I’ve been holding a book fair of sorts on my own after coming to terms with my being a polygamous reader. I seem to think that just because I am unable to read one book at a time,...
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Writers workshops on my mind
I belong to the generation of writers who were largely self-taught. There were no academic courses in creative writing that we could enroll in, no creative writing workshops that we could apply for, no writing classes even. In college, I was a campus journalist, as I had been in high school. After college, my classmates...
Poster invitation to 59th University of the Philippines National Writing Workshop. —LIKHAAN FACEBOOK
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Literary workshops and shrinking spaces for the humanities
There’s now quite a lot of evidence that the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop was supported by the CIA in order to deradicalize writers during the Cold War. This is not surprising. In fact, our schools and universities themselves were set up by the Americans, just a few decades earlier, expressly to quell Philippine nationalism and...