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.

Going visual

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Tried and tired, that was how I felt while retooling the Department syllabus for composition class. I wanted something that would perk me up, because that would mean I’d infect my students with my enthusiasm. But how do you inject something new to a course that has been taught year in and year out (and more often than not yielding students who still don’t know how to write).

I scoured the library shelves, tentatively thinking of assigning a textbook or two (as long as there are enough copies to go round) for my required readings, and using those textbooks as our guide throughout the coming semester.

Then I found Donald and Christine McQuade’s Seeing & Writing (Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000) — and there were three copies to go around! Here was what I was looking for. A more respectable English teacher would perhaps have some reservations, as Piotr Gwiazda elaborates in his review of the textbook:

When I first looked at a review copy of Seeing & Writing, I was almost taken aback by its unapologetic focus on the visual and its more-than-usual emphasis on popular culture. As opposed to more traditional textbooks of writing, featuring difficult but thought-provoking essays on Balinese cockfights or writing as re-vision, for example, this new textbook overflows with photographs, advertisements, posters, comic strips, and art reproductions, in addition to a number of stories, poems, and compelling though suspiciously brief selections from Philip Lopate, Katha Pollit, and Susan Sontag, among others. It has been noted and argued that the proliferation of visual images in contemporary culture has significantly reduced our students’ ability to read closely, in a linear fashion, with an eye for depth and complexity rather than speed and superficiality. Seeing & Writing seemed to me a strange and disturbing validation and authorization of the kind of values that composition courses to some extent attempt to counteract. Not that pandering to the actual interests of college freshmen is in itself an unworthy enterprise, but the editors of Seeing & Writing, in my initial opinion, failed to cross the line where entertainment stops and learning begins, offering a book that is colorful, flashy, accessible and, yes, interesting, though seriously lacking in its potential to cultivate students’ respect for language and thinking. Many colleagues in my department shared my alarm and skepticism.

Thank god, he tried out the book in his class:

After teaching Seeing & Writing for one semester, as an experiment of sorts, I claim that the textbook works somewhat better than it looks; I am ready to consider it a praiseworthy effort. Its focus on the relationship between the verbal and the visual proves particularly attractive to first-year college students, especially when it also happens to overlap with their own professional interests… [Read Gwiazda's review here.]

After thirteen years of teaching writing, I’ve seen how students are more visual. Most of the textbooks in writing I’ve come across fight a futile battle when editors insist that students turn their sights instead to the printed page. So I was mulling over the thought, “Why fight it? Why not embrace this visual acuity that young people seem to have acquired growing up amidst a frenzy of images?” But how?

More browsing confirmed my decision to go visual when I found another book, Robert Atwan’s Convergences: Message, Method, Medium (Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002). Its publisher says of the book:

A new kind of reader highlights the way verbal and visual texts speak to each other. Essays, photographs, Web sites, poems, cartoons, stories, billboards, advertisements, paintings, monuments, maps, and album covers are grouped in clusters that cross genre and medium – a related poster, web site, essay, and poem, for example. This presentation helps students map out relationships between verbal and visual messages. This is the reader for those instructors who want their students to read and write critically about all the texts they encounter.

Six familiar themes – with a twist. “Staging Portraits” outlines the way verbal and visual portraits reveal certain details and hide others. “Telling Secrets” asks why we love to tell secrets, and what our secrets tell about us. “Shaping Spaces” explores what it means to think spatially – whether the space is a piece of paper, our room, or the World Wide Web. “Making History” traces how describing the past often means making it up. “Dividing Lines” shows how different groups of people draw lines between us and them. “Redefining Media” sketches out the evolving relationship between message, method, and medium.

Convergences introduces a new methodology for reading a wide range of verbal and visual texts, helping students to ask what, where, when, how, and why as they read and write. Why does it matter that the message be tailored for the medium? Who is this advertisement aimed at, and what is it selling? Convergences presents each new reading as the end result of conscious choices made by its creator and helps students learn to make conscious choices constructing their own texts.

Here is the answer to “how.” While Seeing & Writing focuses more on honing students’ critical skills in observing and interpreting (the writing part) visual and verbal texts, Convergences enhances these skills by engaging students in a more critical investigation of a visual or verbal text’s rhetorical methods in relation to the message it presents and the medium it uses.

Now I’m excited to try this out with my students.

Reading and Kindle

A post, “Steve Jobs on Reading,” on Tropophilia caught my eye when I saw it on my Tag Surfer. What really grabbed my attention was what Steve Jobs, commenting on Amazon’s Kindle, said about reading (in the US) in his conversation with The New York Times:

It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

And I thought the Kindle was such a good idea, especially for the more mobile population nowadays. (Heck, if I had the money I’d order me a Kindle.) I was thinking that reading from a Kindle would be such a welcome change from reading ebooks from my PDA.

Of course, I understand how Steve Jobs would make such a comment. He has his iPhone and iTouch and MacAir to sell.

With the Steve Jobs quote, Tropophilia threw this question: “Are books on the way out?”

Ways of Saying

My quest started innocently enough. There were times when I would try to imitate what had somehow transported me into another “world.” But my imitations took a serious turn when I discovered the series of Palanca award-winning pieces complied by Kerima Polotan-Tuvera. Here were “worlds” closer to mine. In its pages I discovered the poems of Carlos Angeles. And when I found out that for a time his family stayed in Tacloban City, where I grew up, I realized why the images in some of his works found a home in my imagination.

Photo by Tim Pierce. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0, and posted on Wikimedia.

With this discovery, I got caught in the game of weaving webs of words. I dreamed of someday being able to spark something in the mind of someone reading my work. Just as I — crouched in a dim corner between the library stacks — felt in my mind light bulbs switching on as I read poems and stories of Angeles, Estrella Alfon, Franz Arcellana, Manuel Arguilla, Gilda Cordero Fernando, N.V.M. Gonzalez, Nick Joaquin, Polotan-Tuvera, Bienvenido Santos, Edilberto and Edith Tiempo, and so many other Filipino writers in English. I wanted to know how they wove experiences of Filipinos into “worlds”; I wanted to learn how to make such “worlds.”

My quest earnestly began when I attended the 26th Silliman University National Summer Writers Workshop. (Now dubbed the National Writers Workshop, the annual event is held around April-May in Dumaguete City, where Workshop founders Edilberto and Edith Tiempo based themselves after finishing their fellowships in the Iowa International Writing Program under Paul Engle.)

Soon after that summer, I quit my job as television reporter to enroll in Silliman University’s Creative Writing Program. I continued with my quest inside the classroom, and it continues up to the present even while writing what I hope are definite answers to these questions.

Back then I was hoping the Writers Workshop would provide me ready answers. But there are no formulas to writing poetry, it seemed. At least, not like writing news for TV. What panelists in the Writers Workshop did was to ask more questions than give answers. What in essence they suggested, after training their critical eyes on my poems and those of the other writing fellows, and after some kind words about the work at hand, was the need to re-envision the poems. They pointed out that poems fail because they are not well conceived. The first important lesson I learned in that Writers Workshop may be capsulized in the term poetic conceptualization.

This simple advice was enough to deflate my greenhorn’s enthusiasm for the art. Poetic conceptualization was not just about coming up with the right arrangement of words in a “frame.” For the panelists’ diagnosis not only pointed to problems in craftsmanship but, more importantly, also a failure to develop the incipient depth of vision the poems exhibit. The panelists were unanimous in saying that while young poets may easily enough master the craft through practice and time, what was more difficult to achieve is poetic insight.