On Oct. 10, friends and colleagues will celebrate the life work of the journalist, poet, editor, screenwriter and translator Jose F. Lacaba with “Salinawit ni Pete Lacaba: A Tribute” at My Brother’s Mustache. The happy event will feature performances of some of the songs that Lacaba has translated into Filipino—classics, standards, jazz, Broadway hits, even...
Tag: writing
Committed writing and the necessity of resistance
EDITOR’S NOTE: These remarks were delivered as a message from the family at the close of the 5th Edel Garcellano Conference with the theme “Resistance, Contradiction and Critique: Committed Writing Now,” held at the Ateneo de Manila University last Nov. 29. It’s extraordinary that the conference honoring Edel Garcellano and his work is now on...
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...

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...


