Jaime An Lim presents the Preface
to his The Axolotyl Colony: Stories
(UP Press, Philippines, 2016)
Preface: Reading and Writing Fiction
“Reading and writing fiction is a form of active
social engagement, of conversation and competition. It’s a way of being and becoming.”
—Jonathan Franzen, “On Autobiographical Fiction”
I have always loved stories
since I was a kid listening raptly to our elder sister’s bedtime retelling of
their literature lessons. Folk tales,
legends, fairy tales, tall tales, you name it.
The more unlikely the story, the better.
Mine was a mind capable of accommodating prodigious amounts of adventure
and magic and enchantment. I had no
problem with suspending disbelief even in the face of gross improbabilities. In fact, for the longest time, I thought aswangs and kapres actually roamed in the night, that an encanto lived in every balete
tree, that Superman was a real person residing in the US, that movie actors did
not die since they appeared in movies after movies. I thought there was an alternate world out
there governed by poetic justice, where the good was always rewarded in the
end, the evil punished; where the lost child always found his mother; where it
was always morning. Literally. How naïve
I was. I was a total innocent,
susceptible to the power and reality of stories.
My access to stories widened
a bit with the advent in my life of soap operas which we listened to or watched
religiously at four o’clock in the afternoon, after school. Handuman
sa Usa ka Awit, or some such radio serial.
Usually about a domestic crisis that went through a convoluted passage
to its tearful resolution, or true love winning, again tearfully, against all
odds. So sentimental, so delicious. There
we were, seated on the floor and glued to the radio or TV, teary-eyed because the
poor girl (who was really the daughter of a rich mother) was being oppressed by
her cruel stepmother. Later on, there
were the movies with their irresistible buffet of comedy, drama, thriller, and
science fiction. Served with a generous
dash of melodrama, special effects, percussive music, sex, blood, and violence.
When I started to read, the
door to stories galore suddenly opened all the way. I was one of the few kids in town who
carried a library ID to the Public Library in Cagayan de Oro where I regularly checked
the book stacks like a child let loose in a candy store, pulling out one delectable
book after another . Think voracious. My
choice of reading material followed the usual path of discovery and affinity. You start with the easy stuff, like comics
with their visual and verbal prompting.
You revisit the old tales of your early childhood, without the help of
your sister this time. You grow up. You
start to negotiate the fictional terra incognita
on your own. Step by step. The scope of your reading widens. Adventure
stories. Love stories. Detective stories.
From Treasure Island to Emily
Loring to Earl Stanley Gardner to Agatha Christie.
I did not only borrow books;
I also bought books. Why I had to choose
books over the dozen other interesting youthful options, I would never
know. Perhaps, it only goes to show that
early on I was becoming a book lover. An
obsessed book lover. Libraries and bookstores and books call to me
with their irrestible siren song. One time, when I was in high school or
perhaps even earlier, I remember wandering into a drugstore that displayed a
wire rack of pocketbooks. The drugstore was
at the side of Lyric theatre which was on Velez Street, the city’s main street.
I was on my way to see a movie and
caught a glimpse of the bookrack. In any
case, curious, I went in and examined the pocketbooks. Perhaps, it was prophetic of my future writing
interest or a defining moment in my life, although I was not aware of its
significance then.
I picked three books. The
first was a poetry pocketbook, over a thousand pages thick, Louis Untermeyer’s A Treasury of Great Poems (including
poems by Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Pope, Poe, Tennyson, etc.). It was to provide me with my first comprehensive
education on the craft of poetry: poetic forms, rhyming schemes, figures of
speech, meter, tone. It eventually fell
apart after more than ten years of constant use. (My continuing interest in poetry is another
story.)
The second was Ray
Bradbury’s The Golden Apples of the Sun,
an anthology of twenty-two science fiction and fantasy stories which blew me
away. I had never come across such
stories that brilliantly mixed the real and the unreal. I found them haunting. For weeks, I could not help thinking of the
sea monster that fell in unrequited love with a lighthouse (“The Foghorn”), or
the young witch Cecy who decided to give up her magical abilities in order to
fall in love with a man through another woman (“The April Witch”), or the
Chinese emperor Yuan who sadly and reluctantly executed the inventor of a
marvelous flying machine for fear that it might breach the Great Wall of China
(“The Flying Machine”).
The third was Giovanni
Boccaccio’s The Decameron, a series
of 100 stories told over a temporal frame of two weeks by ten young Florentines
who decided to avoid Black Death by leaving the city and staying in a villa in
the countryside. The stories were varied
in theme, setting, and tone. Some of the
tales were even hilarious and bawdy, which pleasantly surprised me. So in high school, while my classmates were
still grappling with “Patricia of the Green Hills,” I was already off to
Florence enjoying Filomena’s tale about the attempt of the powerful sultan
Saladin to trick the wise Jew Melchizedek into choosing among three world religions--Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam--as the true word of God.
In college, my reading syllabus
expanded considerably. At Mindanao State
University we had the good fortune of having young enthusiastic Peace Corps
Volunteers as literature teachers who introduced us to canonical works in
modern American literature like William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Lawrence Durrell’s Justine, the first book in the Alexandria
Quartet. Our Philippine literature
classes likewise offered works and authors hitherto unknown to us in high
school. Dr. Lucilla Hosillos, fresh from
her Ph.D. studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, taught contemporary
Philippine literature at MSU for one summer and introduced us to some of our
literary luminaries: Jose Garcia Villa, Nick Joaquin, Francisco Arcillana,
Bienvenido Santos, Edith Tiempo. My own
favorites were: N.V.M. Gonzalez, Edilberto Tiempo, and Kerima Polotan-Tuvera. My story “Outward Journey” was my own version
of a “rite of passage” story, in response to Gonzalez’s “The Bread of Salt” and
James Joyce’s “Araby.” My “Liberation of Mrs. Fidela Magsilang” was also a
variation of a favorite piece, Tuvera-Polotan’s “The Virgin.” They were my
early models.
There was also one book that
I found particularly useful in my study of Philippine literature: Philippine Cross-Section: An Anthology of
Filipino Short Stories in English, edited by Maximo D. Ramos and Florentino
B. Valeros. I studied all the stories
and rated them according to my personal preferences. I discovered something strange: on subsequent
re-readings, my ratings changed over time. Which only meant that at a certain
point I was not yet ready, intellectually or emotionally, to appreciate the
full achievement of some of those stories.
But I read and re-read the book countless of times until, like the Great Poems, its pages got unglued from
the spine after the many years of frequent handling.
Of course, reading fiction
is different from writing fiction. And
the leap from one to the other is a great one.
I never imagined myself, by any stretch of the imagination, as a writer. To my mind, writers are a different breed of human
beings. They are special. They are the
anointed, the special creatures touched by divine fire. Which I was not. They have a command of an extraordinarily
large vocabulary, including a hundred difficult words. Which I did not have, despite my pocket
dictionary and pocket thesaurus. They also
have a fluent command of the English language.
Which I was still trying to master.
But, you know what? Reading does
bring you closer to writing, simply because you are invariably encouraged to
recreate what you find meaningful and admirable in the work of your favorite
writers. This is probably why many established writers
when asked for a piece of advice by aspiring writers frequently say: “Read. And
read widely.” The connection between
reading and writer, I strongly believe, is more than tenuous and accidental. Every
story or book you read becomes a virtual teacher. You eventually begin to read
not as your usual ordinary reader, out to take pleasure in the leisurely act of
reading, but as a writer trying to discover your favorite writer’s writing
techniques, attitudes, psychology, world view, thematic preoccupation. You
begin to take an admired passage apart into its smallest components--word
choice, sentence structure, punctuation-- to see what makes it tick. Why and how do certain words produce certain
emotional effects? How do you move from point A to point B? How do you create a
sense of a beginning, a middle, and an end?
How do you control pacing? How do you unify the disparate parts into a
satisfying whole? How do you make
dialogue sound natural and believable? How do you use narration, summary, and scenes
effectively? How do you use hyperbole,
understatement, symbolism, and irony as powerful rhetorical devices? Although I
believe that you cannot teach talent, you can teach the craft of writing. When I started to read as a writer, it was
then that I was on my way to becoming a writer.
It was this new perspective that subsequently helped me to make the leap
from reading to writing fiction.
In 1970, I reached a crucial
crossroads in my writing career. At that
time, MSU was sending some of the junior faculty members out to do their
master’s degrees. Most of the faculty
chose to study at the UP Diliman. I
requested that my wife and I be allowed to study at Silliman University in
Dumaguete instead. Summer before the
start of classes in June, I had attended the Silliman National Writers
Workshop, not as a writing fellow but as a teacher-observer. The workshop directors and panelists were
seated in front of the conference hall.
The fellows, fifteen or twenty of them, were seated in the center of the
room, and the teacher-observers were arranged around the periphery. The panelists made their comments on a
submitted manuscript, its strong or weak points, and offered possible revisions
for its improvement. Afterwards, the
fellow made his/her reaction to the panel assessment. Sometimes, there were tears, justifications,
disagreements, even among fellows and panelists. But mostly the workshop was very
collegial. The atmosphere was both
critical and generous, the older writers helping the younger writers to see
what they were doing right or wrong. I found
the whole interactive process enlightening. It was then that I decided to do my
master’s at Silliman.
In Marawi, I was writing on
my own with only myself as the audience.
In Dumaguete, I suddenly discovered a whole community of writers, a
community of kindred spirits. For the
first time, I was interacting with so many other writers. My teachers in the Creative Writing program
were all writers: fictionist Edilberto K. Tiempo taught Literary Criticism;
poet-fictionist Edith L. Tiempo, the History of the English Language;
fictionist Raymond Llorca, Contemporary Philippine Literature; and poet Myrna
Peña-Reyes, Creative Writing. I met writers on campus or in town, coming and
going: Cesar Ruiz Aquino, Rowena Tiempo, Lemuel Torrevillas, Anthony Tan,
Carlos Ojeda Aureus, Bobby Villasis, Artemio Tadena, Antonio Enriquez, Edgar
Griño, Christine Godinez-Ortega. I did not get a chance to meet the other
well-known Sillimanian writers. Elsa Coscolluela was before my time. Merlie Alunan, Marjorie Evasco, Susan Lara, Leoncio
Deriada, Timothy Montes, and Ian Casocot came to Silliman after I had graduated.
Then we had the different
batches of panelists and writing fellows over the years. They included some of
the literary giants that I came across in the Cross-section anthology who I thought were already dead but, as it
turned out, were very much alive and kicking, then: Nick Joaquin, Kerima
Polotan Tuvera, Ricaredo Demetillo, Gemino Abad, Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo,
Ophelia Dimalanta, Cirilo Bautista, Gregorio Brillantes, Rolando Tinio. Some of the writing fellows I met included
Luis Cabalquinto, Felix Fojas, Gilbert Luis Centina III, Jolico Cuadra, Ernesto
Lariosa, Roger Mangahas, Edgar Maranan.
So many writers congregated
for the workshop that, every summer, there were probably more writers in
Dumaguete per square kilometer than anywhere else in the country. The running joke was that if the bus that
carried all the writers for a field trip to Sibulan or Valencia were to plunge
down a cliff, it would effectively bring about the End of Contemporary Philippine
Literature.
Silliman provided me with an
invaluable support for my writing effort. I felt lucky. How many aspiring writers were
given their work the rare chance of a close reading by their peers and by the
country’s top writers? This community of writers gave me the opportunity
to hone my writing craft. They became my
sounding board, my inspiration and competition. We helped each other.
In fact, it was Antonio
Enriquez who encouraged me to enter the Palanca. We accidentally bumped into each other at the
LBC office one morning in 1973. He was
mailing his entry to that year’s competition.
He asked me to submit as well. He
knew I had written a number of stories but I did not have enough
self-confidence to enter any literary contest.
I did not think I had a ghost of a chance. So I was not really too keen on entering. I remember what he then told me. He said, “You
will never know if you don’t try.” I
thought he might be right. So I decided to give it a try. What did I have to lose except my illusions
and self-esteem? 1973 turned out to be a special year. Tony won the First Prize with “Spots on Their
Wings and Other Stories.” I won the
Third Prize with “The Liberation of Mrs. Fidela Magsilang.” Not too bad for a first-timer.
What did I write about? Some of the early pieces of advice that I
gathered from reading writing manuals and talking with other writers were:
Write about what you know, in your own heart and home. Live a full life and observe
the world around you. Be attentive to
the ways of society—how people speak, what people value and fight for, what
complicated personal relationships they get into, how they express their joy
and grief, what uplifts them or diminishes them as human beings. Make use of the materials that are available
and lying all around you—details of human struggles, incidents and moments that
define them. Observe details of time and
place. Know your history. If you don’t
know the material well enough, then do some research. Read. And read some more.
If you write with honesty and clarity about what you observe to be true, then
your writing will be credible and believable. If you have to take from your own life, then
by all means do so. The whole wide
world, which includes you, is your raw material.
For this reason, I believe
that all writing, whether we are aware of it or not, is partly and ultimately autobiographical. It is autobiographical because every piece of
writing is constructed through the mediation of a writer’s point of view, his
verbal resources, his personal history, his knowledge, his values, his frame of
mind. He can mask his presence beneath layers of indirection and symbolism. But
the mark of his personality will remain stamped indelibly on his work. His work, if it is the authentic product of
his heart and mind, will carry his imprint.
His writing will carry his voice. It cannot be otherwise.
I am different things at
different times. I have a shifting
identity, or rather several overlapping identities: Filipino, Chinese mestizo,
married, divorced, widower, father, gay, foreign student, provinciano, Sillimanian, Cagay-anon, Cebuano, book lover, movie
goer, artist, reader, and writer. So
what do I read and write about? How much of myself is found in my stories? How
much of my world, my sense of time and place? How much of my life? How much of
my own personal story?
You figure.
*****
Jaime An Lim, born in
Cagayan de Oro, finished his AB English from Mindanao State University and his
MA English and Creative Writing from Silliman University. He also holds an MA
in Comparative Literature, an MS in Instructional Systems Technology, an EdS in
Education, and a PhD in Comparative Literature, all from Indiana University,
Bloomington, Indiana. He has won awards for his fiction, poetry, and essays
from Asian Student, Academy of American Poets, Focus, Panorama, Homelife, Free
Press, and the Palanca. In recognition of his achievement, the Unyon ng
Manunulat sa Pilipinas bestowed on him the Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas
in 2000. As president of the Mindanao Creative Writers Group, he helped
organize the annual Iligan National Writers Workshop which has been going on
since 1994 with the support of the National Commission for Culture and the
Arts.
Hola Jaime Ann Lim: Saludos-
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