From Charlson to Chari

Yesterday, I submitted to Chari Lucero my revised drafts of the two stories—one is conventional realist fiction; the other, speculative—I had presented in her Ph.D.-level fiction-workshop class, effectively ending a very challenging semester that really tested my ability as a fictionist.

I can’t help but remember all the fiction-workshop teachers I had since I entered UP as a graduate student. Charlson Ong was my first. During one of our first sessions he had us read what I suppose were his favorite stories, including Bharati Mukherjee’s The Management of Grief and Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. His final requirement was easy: one revised short story. I later left that story in some dustbin; I’m ashamed of it now. I admire Charlson as a fictionist, but as a teacher—well, it’s a good thing that he was the first. Ü

After Charlson, Butch Dalisay. I truly cherish my first writing class under him, not only because he was the one teaching it, but also because he and the five students (myself included, of course) that made up that class became quite close by the semester’s end. I also cherish the three stories I wrote for that class, because these were responsible for getting me a slot in the Dumaguete workshop five years ago. As a teacher, Butch can really inspire. But I found it rather frustrating whenever he would give me oblique comments when what I wanted was for him to tell me straight what were the flaws in my stories. I asked him once about this, and he told me he doesn’t like using the direct approach because if he did, he would be “trampling” on his students’ (writing) dreams.

In contrast, Jing Hidalgo would honestly tell me what’s wrong with my story and what I may do to correct it. I appreciated her a good deal for that when I attended her fiction-writing class. That said, she doesn’t quite inspire the way Butch does. Both are formalists to the core, but between the two of them Jing’s formalist orientation is stronger, especially when she’s on professor mode. She’s now my thesis adviser, and I’m sure she’ll make me work hard to come up with several publishable stories for my thesis. Now, if only her hectic schedule can accommodate me sometime.

Chari was easily the most passionate of all my fiction-workshop teachers, not to mention the most knowledgeable about Philippine literature. Not only in English and Filipino, but also in the regional (particularly Visayan) languages. She was a relentless taskmaster: requiring us to type and print our comments on our classmates’ drafts, which my classmates and I have never done before, and requiring us to provide excerpts as examples of fictional elements as listed in David Lodge’s book The Art of Fiction, and so on. Every meeting we had to submit something to her. We discussed many diverse stories, from Haruki Murakami’s Barn Burning and Ana Blandania’s The Phantom Church to Ines Taccad Camayo’s People of Consequence to Estrella Alfon’s Fairy Tale for the City. And her comments on our drafts were as sharp as surgical blades. She’s that good. My classmates and I naturally learned a lot from her. We have learned so much that most, if not all of us, plan not to enroll in any of her fiction-writing classes in the future.

I plan to take another fiction-workshop class next semester as a penalty subject. I don’t know who’s going to be my teacher this time, but I’m hoping for Butch again. In any case, it will be another class for me to push myself to write new stories. I've never been a prolific writer.