Filipino writers at the Melbourne Writers Festival 2017

Click here: SBS Interview

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Day One In Melbourne for the Melbourne Writers Festival and WrICE 2017

Whether it's difficult or easy to be a writer in these times, depends on the kind of writer you are or want to be. I thought it poetic to be in Melbourne for #mwf2017 same week a massive equality rally is happening, while in Manila it's the burial of #Kian, latest victim of police impunity and brutality. Always interesting to see place and compare notes with writers and locals who are also politically, historically inclined. Privileged to walk around parts of Melbourne yesterday with Christos, and then to walk right smack into the middle of the massive marriage equality rally. Later, in a balcony bar, we were joined by some people from the rally. They couldn't believe that there's no divorce in the Philippines. They were curious to know if people are interested in marriage equality, or in getting married, if that's the case. And they asked about the killings. I told them everything they've read in the news is true, and more. Our journalists have been doing a good job of bearing witness and keeping faithful to events. #photodumping#mwf2017 #wrice2017


https://www.instagram.com/p/BYRlkyfnYW1vnUUx5Irp3D2_l3OgQ1AtLqzDeo0/?taken-by=the_real_thelgado

Melbourne Writers Festival

In late August, I'm taking a break from field work, and boardroom work, and roundtable work, and even house work!, to take part in the Melbourne Writers Festival as one of the featured writers, and to reunite with fellows of WrICE 2017.

Here are some information on the events I'll be participating in:
http://mwf.com.au/writer/daryll-delgado/

If you're in or around the area, let's catch up and have a drink? :)

Preludes Analysis and Discussions

It's that time of year, when high school students bug me for all sorts of information, advice, answers to homework questions. I'm going to post here instead something I came across, this piece on one of my stories, Preludes, which high school students are being required to read:

Story Analysis

I thought this comment was such a gem:

Naixus Barbz

Question po, posible pang namatay yung husband dahil sa paglason ni Nenita sa kanya? Kasi kun pagiisipan, may background knowledge si Nenita about herbal mixing and concoctions dahil kay beshie, at sinabi rin sa story na gumagawa siya ng “medicinal tea” para sa kanyang husband para isabay sa dinner niya. Kaya kung ganon na ang kalagayan ng utak ni Gng. Nenita posibleng may hinalong kung ano anong sangkap sa “medicinal tea” ni husband na pampalason. Hindi man agad-agad pero little by little para di obvious ang paglason. Haha tama ba ang takbo ng utak ko??

:)

On a Writing Residency sponsored by the WrICE Program

Flew in from work travels in France - with a quick day-off in Belgium - last Saturday morning (about which I have a few notes to share in a separate post), and flew to Vigan, via Laoag (a historic city in the northern part of the Philippines), the following night. The layover at home was too short, but just enough for me to be treated to a pampering by the husband, to unpack and repack, and recover a bit from the long-haul flights. 

Here now in Hotel Salcedo de Vigan, where fellows are billeted for the next eight days, as part of the first leg of the 2017 WrICE residency program. I moved stuff around a bit in the room to maximize view from the picture window. Now I can write, and my leave from work officially starts. :) #WrICE2017

Vigan City, Philippines

The Movie Oro, Extra Judicial Killings, and Animal Rights Advocacy

Note: I have decided to revive my blog, and use it for lengthier musings about art, literature, writing. This is my first post for the year. 


The movie Oro tells a very important story, and many important points about social justice -- points which are executed with utmost care and intelligence, and with a keen awareness of the social and political backdrop against which the story is being told. 

One of the points made by the film is how systemic injustice and structural violence brutalizes and bestializes people; how it perverts their view of society and of themselves, and how it turns them against each other. Another point is about how power is used to legitimize divorcing concerns for the environment from the concerns of the community, how it is used to turn man and woman against nature. The part of the movie where the armed men harass one of the villagers by taking his dog, and later butchering it for pulutan, is important to show this brutality, and the power relations at work. They did it because they could. The villagers, hungry and fighting for daily survival with the loss of their livelihoods, could do the same -- kill their pets for food, and that would have been perfectly justified -- but they don't. Because they are more humane, more principled than the armed men. This point is emphasised more clearly when it is revealed that some of the villagers were former armed rebels who had put down their guns, availed of amnesty programs, to join the community in managing and making a living of mining their natural resources. In contrast, some of the armed men and fellow rebels of the villagers turned out to have been "recruited" or pirated from their previous roles as defenders of the community, to become paramilitary for the governor and his business partners. These same men would of course later also butcher, massacre, four of the villagers, former comrades, as foreshadowed by the animal killing.

***

Beyond the film, it's hard to gauge whether or not the outrage over the animal killing in (and for),the movie is more intense than the outrage over the ongoing, nightly extrajudicial killings of poor people. It sometimes seems that way on social media, but I suspect it is less so in the real world. I do think that the analogy is not invalid, not false, given the very obvious context in which our lives and our movies are currently being played out. 

There are so many interconnected issues here, and many ways by which they're being viewed. I thought that it is a good sign that people are still capable of outrage, that we have not been numbed by the daily and nightly barrage of images of violent, extrajudicial killings of fellow Filipinos; of the violence in the president's speech and pronouncements, and in his view of women; of the violence that workers and indigenous peoples are subjected to on a daily basis. Is it too much to hope that the outrage over the death of an animal in the filming of a movie will get people to realize that taking the life of, exploiting and marginalizing people, is very, very wrong indeed? Can this outburst of compassion for animals perhaps be harnessed and used to proactively call for an end to the state-sanctioned killings? 

Just wondering.

My short bio

for all the high school students who have been messaging me on FB, here it is:

DARYLL DELGADO’s first book of short stories, After the Body Displaces Water (USTPH, 2012), won the 32nd National Book Award for Short Fiction, and was a finalist in the 2013 Madrigal-Gonzales First Book Award. She has also received a Philippines Free Press award for her fiction in 2010. Her more recent works have appeared in Maximum Volume 1 (Anvil, 2013); AGAM (2013); Our Memory of Water (Ateneo de Naga Press, 2016), and High Chair (http://www.highchair.com.ph/issue_22/22_delgado_placeoftrauma.htm); and Resurgent (http://www.resurgent.ph/artikulo/bodies). She has been a lecturer at the University of the Philippines, the Ateneo de Manila University, and Miriam College. She currently works for the Southeast Asia office of an international labor and human rights NGO. Daryll has a BA in Journalism and MA in Comparative Literature from UP Diliman. She currently resides in Quezon City with her husband, William.  She was born and raised in Tacloban City (in the Visayas, the central part of the Philippines) and continues to call Tacloban home.

***
I don't know if this helps you understand the story you're being required to read. But thanks for reading. I'll be posting answers to some of your questions on this blog soon. :)

Featured in The Short Story Station

Someone pointed me to this site: https://shortstorystation.wordpress.com

One of the contributors included me in this short feature on women writers of short fiction, Thoughts on Short Fiction: Women Writers . How very generous. I'm so honored. This encourages me to continue working on my second book.

Thank you, Short Story Station! :)

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.

At the 11th Lamiraw Writers Workshop in Calbayog, where I delivered a lecture on fiction, and caught up with old friends in the Binisaya writing world

At the 6th Davao Writers Workshop, where I delivered the keynote speech.

http://www.upmin.edu.ph/index.php/news-sp-3476/colleges/college-of-humanities-and-social-sciences/2005-the-6th-davao-writers-workshop-2014

micro mini review of my book in the UP Likhaan Journal

Delgado, Daryll. After the Body Displaces Water. Manila: UST Publishing
House. Daryll Delgado’s first book of fiction contains eleven stories that showcase the
author’s versatility in using the forms and techniques of fiction. The subject matter
of the stories are just as varied, but are unified by the strength of the Delgado’s taut
and precise writing.