Writing into the future
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Over glasses of cool drinks in a downtown resto one balmy evening, Amy showed me her son’s writing drafts. I read a few pieces and was amazed by what Attriu, her high school kid, had written. Here’s a sample:
John Slowan was one of the fastest men I knew and the best strategist in the squad. By taking a hovercraft, we crossed the city through the sewerage system. Even when unused, the sewers had such a horrible smell. The dead civilians and dead orks we saw all piled up in the sewer gave the word “united” a foul meaning. Crossing the main ork line we encountered some ork patrols, but we were quick enough to keep them from detecting our position…. We have reported orks massing just three kilometers from our line….
I told her Attriu could give some of our Creative Writing students a run for their money. And I was not pulling her leg. While some college kids stumble over their grammar as they try to put together a story or a poem, here is this fifteen-year-old who plays around with characters he appropriates from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, from video games, and from movies, then – instinctively, or influenced by the language and storytelling techniques of the media – puts them together in an imaginary battle for the Emperor’s dominion.
I told Amy she should check out some of the fan fiction – for that is what we call the genre her son writes in – posted all over the Internet. Or perhaps buy some gamer magazines that publish stories like Attriu’s. Which soon got us to talking about putting up again the Ways of Seeing page that used to grace this paper a few years back.
I asked myself, why not? We could make it into a literary and arts page of some sorts, perhaps feature contributions from readers. And we could call the section Ways of Saying, not to depart too far from that old page, so we could highlight the different expressive art forms readers may want to submit works in and which – if we find the piece interesting – we would gladly accommodate on this page. Hmmm. Something doable, I thought.
We had some nagging doubts, though. Reading is supposedly on the decline, more so reading of literary texts. The 1982-2002 National Endowment for the Arts study, Reading At Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, shows a “dramatic decline” with fewer than 50% of Americans reported to have read literary works during the survey years. I think we can hazard the guess that the figures would be lesser in this country. So why put up a literary page?
The same study revealed that while readership had decreased, “the number of people doing creative writing increased by 30 percent, from 11 million in 1982 to more than 14 million in 2002″ (Reading at Risk, 2004). And if the number of Creative Writing students who enroll every year in our school is any indication, there is a sustained interest if not an increase in Creative Writing in this region.
Not surprisingly, the works our Creative Writing students produce are not so different from what Attriu does on his spare time. While some of our students have published their pieces in local and national publications or have presented these in national literary workshops, they most have fun doing stuff for their Pop Lit class.
One such work is Gabriel Millado’s “Knightmare,” which he presented last October 10 during the 2nd Popular Literature Forum sponsored by the UP Mindanao Creative Writing Program. Gabriel, or Kid as he is known among his friends, ripped the characters of Sandman and the Dark Knight and placed them in one graphic tale he entitled, in classic Batman fashion, “Knightmare” (see sample panel above). His story goes this way:
Batman is racing against time to rescue the kidnapped Jed Walker, heir to the Kincaid fortune. At the same time, Morpheus is also looking for the boy, who may be a dream vortex, and in whose mind a rogue dream is hiding. As the two collide, Batman will find out if his determination is strong enough to stand against the duties of an Endless: for if the Sandman is to secure his realm, he may have to destroy the boy Jed Walker….
But Kid did not just write his crossover narrative of Batman and Sandman. He created a bricolage made up of frames from the two graphic stories: The Dark Knight Returns and Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes. He took frames from each, rearranged them, erased the word balloons, and lettered in his own dialogues from the two tales.
Here is a sample (see the graphic above), the frame showing Rose Walker walking into a dark room to find Batman lurking in the shadows. In the original story, Rose Walker walks into a dark room to find the Three Witches who warns her about her fate. Using the digital technology available to him, Kid meticulously crafted the frames to create his own tale. Cool, right?
(More next week: Another graphic novel inspired by local creative artists.)
This is the first part of a series to start off our literary page, Ways of Saying, printed every Sunday on Mindanao Times.











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