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."