Excerpts from a review of After the Body Displaces Water

Came across a very well-written (and generous) review of my book, After the Body Displaces Water, by Cris Barbra Pe (Department of Literature, De La Salle University) in the Ateneo journal "Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia" (5.2 (2015): 110–139). I love it that the writer highlighted my personal favourites in the collection, the more low key stories that escaped the attention of previous reviews.

I'm sharing an excerpt below. The rest of the piece can be accessed at: http://journals.ateneo.edu

"Daryll Delgado’s first collection of short stories, After the Body Displaces Water, shows a breadth of styles, techniques, and subjects. At the same time, this collection is cohesive, woven together by a distinct voice, that of a confident storyteller. It is also a voice that seems to confide in the readers, taking them on a ride that is intermittently casual, nostalgic, heartbreaking, and in rare moments, whimsical. Sometimes, this voice also has a tinge of vulnerability.

Delgado is at her best when her stories appear to linger on insignificant moments or stay at the periphery. They may come in the form of conversations or letters. The opening piece “Conversation” is just that, a conversation between a man and a woman as they take a short walk together. It hinges on images of handholding, bottles, and a lamppost, yet several stories emerge from between the lines—that the man and woman are married, that their work involves words, and that they do not yet have a child. In that short walk from one end of the street to another, in that short conversation which may not even make perfect sense, the reader sees only a glimpse of their lives, but such a rich and potent glimpse as to shape a story.

... “Unreliable Narrators” is a finely crafted story, ingenious and witty, and is involved with such themes as politics, physics, mental disability, romance, writing, and the academe. The title not only refers to a technique in fiction but also to the technique used in the story itself. The letter writer makes use of footnotes and “reputable” academic sources, but given that the letter writer is staying in a facility for the mentally challenged, the reader is forced to question the veracity of what is said.

Given such stories about writing and the process of writing, it is not surprising to find in the collection a story devoted to the art of writing itself. “The Other Daughter,” like the other stories in the book, approaches the subject obliquely. A writer’s written work literally comes alive as a flesh-and- blood human. The “daughter,” named Anna, grows up, but apart from her “mother,” she has no life. Delgado literalizes truisms about writing—for example, that authors breathe life into characters or that characters become real in the author’s imagination. This is where the magic lies: how Delgado is able to create a believable story from that premise."

My story makes a cameo in Prof. Philip Holden's review

of Maximum Volume: Best New Philippine Fiction 2014. Edited by Dean Francis Alfar  and Angelo R. Lacuesta. Mandaluyong City: Anvil Publishing Inc., 2014.

"Most formally innovative is perhaps

Daryll Delgado’s “The Other Woman Narrative.” In this narrative of cultural 

crossing a woman reads a story she is drafting to her partner as they prepare to go 

to bed. The story she tells is of a woman executive assistant visiting Vietnam who 

commences a love affair with a man whom she later discovers to be married. The 

woman assuages her guilt by rhapsodizing to her lover’s wife, who is from Boston, 

about how very much she loved the city when she visited. The partner of the woman 

getting ready to go to bed in the framing narrative, male and “half-American,” listens 

to the story he is told, and subjects it to approvingly rigorous academic analysis (57). 

As the story progresses, however, he finds it less comprehensible and loses interest. 

The story moves to a denouement about loneliness: how its protagonist felt alone in 

Boston, in awe of the “breathtakingly, darkly beautiful” onset of a snowstorm (66). 

This conclusion to the tale returns readers, implicitly, to the couple in bed together: 

for all their physical closeness, they inhabit two separate mental solitudes." -- Philip Holden

13 th Ateneo National Writers Workshop

I was invited to be one of the panelists for fiction at the 13th Ateneo National Writers Workshop. It was nice to be part of lively, intense, and productive discussions about basic tenets of storytelling vis-a-vis form-and-genre-innovations, notions of representation and the writer's political ideology, etc. It was great to be in the same session with fictionist, Allan Derain, whose work I admire very much, and whose mode of criticism I find myself almost constantly in agreement with. It was especially lovely to be with women writers whose work and work ethics I hold in high esteem -- Beni Santos, Chari Lucero. It was fun to catch up with friends and former colleagues in the English and Creative Writing Departments -- Mark Cayanan, Martin Villianueva, Vince Serrano, Allan Popa, and Laurel Fantauzzo. But I was particularly happy to see and interact with Ma'am Chari, my last and ultimate teacher in fiction. :) After the draining and exhausting disagreements and melee in the literary community, I think I needed to see and listen to Ma'am Chari, to be reminded of why I write.

Yesterday I signed a statement in support of some principles that I consider central to my work as a writer, my training as a critic and a journalist, and the work that I do now with an organization that exposes and tries to address issues concerning rights.

I signed it at great personal risk: isolating people I hold most dear to me; upsetting relationships that have withstood time and distance, and ideological differences; and having to share space with people whose mode of engaging with issues I am strongly opposed to. 

I signed it because, in situations involving disagreements and disputes over literary production and criticism, I strongly disagree with the act of pursuing legal action as a primary course of action, over other modes of discourse which are far less adversarial and far more productive.

                                                          

In signing, I expressed my agreement only to the specific declarations in the statement. This agreement does not extend to opinions or declarations made by the other signatories after the release of that statement. 

I am reposting here in my blog the statement I signed because, while I cannot do anything, for now, about the other risks that seemed inherent to my signing of the statement, I can at least physically remove my views from those vapid and crude remarks and manners which, I feel, hijack the value and intent of the statement, and the very reason why I signed it: thoughtful, open, intelligent, productive, and sober discussion of issues.

ORDER IN THE FOOD COURT*

(posted on April 18, 2015 at 12:31pm)

We, concerned writers and supporters of literature, voice our dismay over the legally-registered demand of Noelle Q. de Jesus, Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta, and Anvil Publishing—editors and publisher of Fast Food Fiction Delivery—for Adam David to take down his online reappropriations of the contents of the anthology. David selected excerpts from various pieces in the collection, retyped them, and plugged them into a website coded to generate random combinations of these passages. David’s work, accessible through Mediafire and Blogspot, is consistent with the trajectory of his writing, which—from The El Bimbo Variations to Than Then Than—has questioned notions of originality and displayed an impertinent stance to literary tradition and an aggressive repurposing of source texts, often to humorous yet critical effect.

De Jesus, Katigbak-Lacuesta, and Anvil, through their lawyers, have accused David of four grounds of copyright infringement and have threatened him with a fine of PhP150,000 and imprisonment of one to three years for each count. Hence, David stands to be fined as much as PhP600,000 and be imprisoned for as long as 12 years. The grounds for infringement are: (1) reproduction right, (2) other communication to the public of the work, (3) publisher’s right, and (4) moral rights. In other words, the editors and publisher have accused David of: not securing permission from the copyright owners, disfiguring the original form of the anthology material, failing to acknowledge the anthology’s contributors, and giving the public access to the anthology outside the conditions set by the publisher.

We are distressed by these accusations because we feel that the demand:

1. implies an unwillingness to participate in the kind of discourse that is necessary to the development of literary practice, even if and specially when such engagements are informed by negative critique;

2. exhibits a disregard for literary practices that have persisted over the past 500 years, specially in the light of copyist tendencies and the aesthetics of collage as evident in Cervantes’s Don Quixote, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, to the Conceptualists of the late 20th century;

3. with its emphasis on how David’s violation of copyright allegedly “erod[es] the integrity of every short story in the book,” is based on an outdated notion of author as singular, original, and propertied, hence reducing the work solely into a commodity and diminishing the agency of the reader by turning her into a mere consumer;

4. rather than encouraging discussion, demonstrates instead censorship through intimidation and harassment; in effect, by taking the legal (read: costly) route, the conflict between various aesthetic and creative viewpoints deteriorates into a battle of financial resources.

To conclude, the demand of de Jesus, Katigbak-Lacuesta, and Anvil signifies an aversion to practices that seek to advance the many ways in which authors produce materials, readers engage with texts, and literature responds to its changing social, technological, and cultural contexts. We denounce this attitude of conservative literary gatekeeping, we resist the policing of the literary community, and we oppose the forces that coerce our writers into silence.

                                                                                                                    (500 WORDS)

Tagik Landasan and Lightning Reunions in Cebu

Was in Cebu last March to attend the Tagik Landasan workshop organized by the UP Cebu Creative Writing Program. Evenings turned to lightning reunion parties, and occasions to hatch multiple ideas for multiple book projects over multiple bottles of wine and beer. Bisaya writers rock. And drink a lot. :)

Thanks to Jona Bering for these photos.

Cameo! My works mentioned in a few articles

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/contortionists-conjurers
Contortionists and Conjurers by Lara Stapleton

http://lifestyle.inquirer.net/186047/delivery-of-stories-short-and-sweet
‘Delivery’ of stories short and sweet by Ruel S. De Vera

EL PABELLÓN (extractos de una novela en proceso de escritura)

The Pavilion (excerpts from a novel in progress) in Spanish here: http://www.perroberde.com/pb05/the-pavilion/

Spanish translation of my story, "The Pavilion", included in Perro Berde 5

Perro Berde 5, the 6th issue of the Filipino-Spanish cultural magazine produced by the Spanish Embassy in the Philippines, will be launched on March 4th, 2015 at the University of Santo Tomas. I contributed a story to this issue, an excerpt from a novel in progress. Excited to read the Spanish translation!

Dividing my labors

Promised myself a real break from office work for the holidays in order to write "something", and I fulfilled it. Resolved to limit working from home and to use this corner only for writing, and I broke the resolution on the day I made it. Hard to stop once I opened my office email. Before I knew it, the light outside has gone and I have just spent the whole day working from home. Now I'm trying to convince my husband that we must go out because I've put on make up, combed my hair, and chucked my comfy shorts and flip flops for this work getup.