Briefly, wondrously

Sat my butt down at a coffeeshop. Turned off my auto-guilt mode and put my mombligations on standby. Brought a book on editing fiction and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Laptop, ready. Coffee, hot. Soul, squashed by a run-in. I was glad for Hubby, who had reached out for my hand and told me to write, to not let a bad afternoon get in the way of writing.

I love you, Hubby.

You too, Oscar Wao. Because the story I had been agonizing over sounds a little better for my having read about you. You see, there’s this story I’ve been wanting to write. It has an incredible premise and a kickass first paragraph. Even I want to read it. But the story just doesn’t fly. The characters are cardboard. This story is in its third iteration, and it’s still as dry as day-old pizza. I haven’t touched it in years. But you make me want to finish it. You–made on paper and of a writer’s dreams–are alive, the way the heart of a book is. Yours is a story that makes me want to create another. To me that’s the best kind.

Fast and furious

For fast fiction with a zing, check out Blagador's micro-fiction, which he arranged using black-and-white photos. The Polymath is one of my "kids"; I have an entire brood of writers who call me Mum, Mudra or Madder—a name I earned because I was, dagnabbit, the oldest among the fellows of two national workshops I attended. I'd like to think that I and my house are a safe haven to them; many of my kids have come or stayed over to chat, read, eat, borrow books, watch TV, or, yeah, even to iron a shirt.

I'm as proud as any mum.

The eleventh hour

Oh, the weight of a million things to finish by the day's end.

In a week chock-full of chores, today was an exhibit of fraught multitasking: While keeping an eye out on the pasta sauce simmering to my right, I was washing dishes and studying Dean Alfar's The Dragon in the Bell published in this week's Philippines Free Press. My copy of Free Press was spreadeagled above the sink, two laundry clips pinning it away from the splash of dishwater. Dean's story is up for discussion in my fiction class tomorrow, for which I also need to read another story (gah, must breathe) and submit a vignette that should contain these words: discover, subterranean, shoes, compatibility, and murder. And, just so there's no pressure or anything, our venerable teacher Butch Dalisay requires that we write "fiction that matters."

So.

The food's all done and waiting for The Coach, the kitchen floor's mopped free of stray garlic peel and tomato sauce, and the house is being aired out of the smell of anchovies.

I'm closeted in our bedroom, the curtains swept to the side so I can look out to the skyline for those times when I need inspiration for the vignette. The TV's turned on so I won't feel like I'm missing out on today's Law and Order. My fingers are poised over the QWERTYs.

Several long gazes at the skyline later, I still don't have a clue how to string the five words together. (It's the subterranean that's killing me.)

What was it that Butch said last week? "Fiction: Do it well. Do it honestly."

Well, here I am, honest to the bone, and I remain bereft of a workable plot. So I blog. Particularly about what Janet Burroway said of the paradox of least wanting to do what we most want to do: "We are in love with words except when we have to face them."

This difficulty is my fault, of course. My writing muscles have stultified from disuse.

According to Burroway, "The habit of mind that produces stories is a habit and can be cultivated, so that the more and the longer you write, the less likely you are to run out of ideas." Writing, she says, is mind-farming: "You have to plow, plant, weed, and hope for growing weather. Why a seed turns into a plant is something you are never going to understand, and the only relevant response to it is gratitude. You may be proud, however, of having plowed."

Time, then, to dig through the dirt. I will remember the poet William Stafford's advice to his students to "write to their lowest standard."

Poetry, by hook or by crook

I took to reading—and truly enjoying—poetry rather late in life. Away from the classroom.

To me there are three kinds of poems: those I can enjoy without creating another frown line; those I revel in for their sound, sense and sensuousness; and the many that make me think I should just stick to fiction.

(Of course there is the obligatory Rilke and Neruda*, every other yuppie's must-have poetry for brown nosing or bluff sophistication. The rule in cocktail conversations: When all else fails, bluff.)

I wonder if, when I struggle over poetry, I am one of those Billy Collins mourns over in his Introduction to Poetry:


But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means


I'm still scratching my head over some portions of Whitman's Song of Myself. Some time ago I downloaded his poetry into my iPod, and I probably looked funny frowning in concentration inside the crowded MRT coach, his words pouring into me, and I barely hanging on to the pole and my sanity.

* A lifetime ago, drowned in heretofores and Know All Men By These Presents, I thought Neruda was a friend of my cousin Aris when my cousin’s poetry referred to Neruda's Tonight I Can Write The Saddest Lines. Oh, the shame.

** Photo borrowed from someone else's site in one of my Net trawling trips. Can't remember whose, unfortunately.

Moon and Stars

Here in Manila I have an inordinate interest in the moon. I take hundreds of photos. A few days ago I took one of the moon lingering in the sky after daybreak. Tonight's Jeopardy! tells me this is called selenodolatry: moon worship.


But that's just because only a few stars can penetrate the smog. I love stars more. Sometimes the best part of our dive trips is the time we spend on the sand gazing up the night sky: with stars upon stars it feels like all 6,000 visible stars are on our side of the world. In Apo Island, the marine reserve off Dumaguete, the stars leap out of the sky when the island plunges into darkness after the power generators switch off around 10. Even the fireflies cannot compete. One night we counted 24 falling stars.


Naming the Stars
Joyce Sutphen

This present tragedy will eventually
turn into myth, and in the mist
of that later telling the bell tolling
now will be a symbol, or, at least,
a sign of something long since lost.

This will be another one of those
loose changes, the rearrangement of
hearts, just parts of old lives
patched together, gathered into
a dim constellation, small consolation.

Look, we will say, you can almost see
the outline there: her fingertips
touching his, the faint fusion
of two bodies breaking into light.