Beloved

A CLASSMATE from college and I ran into each other. I was walking to get a ride; she, too, must have been going somewhere.

She asked me what I was doing. I replied: teaching again. We chatted a bit and moved on.

Days after that chance meeting, her question lingers. What did she want to know? With my mind on unfinished tasks, I had described my day job. Doesn’t work, like the weather, occupy the hours?

Today, when I woke up to the sound of the question breathing nearby, I realized I had answered my classmate but not myself.

What do I do? In the interval of the 30 or so years since I turned my back on youth, as I chased what I thought I wanted, while I acquired and accumulated and aspired and cut my losses and drifted and lost my way and found something like it and did the countless things I don’t remember even as I’m doing what it took me to be there that afternoon, walking to the place where I usually wait for a ride until this stranger in the mall looked back at me with eyes I remembered from a classroom where we waited for the last few minutes before we could be officially excused to leave the professor who would not be showing up again that afternoon.
I read.

I read not because I do this better than anything else. I read because when I follow the thread of a tale, I’m brought to a place where—hours, weeks, a breath later—I emerge, created anew.

From the moment I am awake, I read to wake myself up. I read until the coffee shop crew goes around for final orders and guards check if I have not been grafted to the bench. I read until someone in the family shouts through the bathroom door to ask if I have not flushed myself.

Despite the constraints imposed by all this bullheaded reading, I do take pauses: to go to work, to eat and use the toilet as it was designed for. And though I’ve not done this for a long time, I recently sat down to take part in conversations about reading and its other half, writing.

The University of the Philippines (UP) Cebu Arts and Humanities Cluster held the 2016 Tagik Landasan Creative Writing Workshop. For two days, panelists, fellows and participants turned to concerns grappling and grappled by those who live for the stories.

Whether just starting or writing for years, the obsessed are the same; they seek to find how a few tools—a word, an image, a narrative—can transform an intensely personal act of the imagination into a form that not just distills the human experience but mimics the ageless aspiration to connect.

When I stepped out from the cool shadowed interiors of the workshop venue on the final day, I could still hear echoes of UP Cebu student fellow Jae Mari Magdadaro reading her poem, “Buak (Broken).”

A child witnesses how infidelity breaks apart her parents in the opening line, “Bildong buak nga gibukotan og abog”. The workshop conversations surfaced many ways of reading and interpreting the poem.

For many, honing the writing means returning again and again to the reading. For this listener, Jae’s line was a counter-flow.

As a shard retains the power to cut beneath the dust, so can a lifetime of reading lead to a piercing realization of the missing beloved: writing.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 0917 3226131)

*First published in the April 3, 2016 issue of the Sun.Star Cebu Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

How to catch a writer

THANK the deity for email.

Nicholette Jeanne Legaspi is a senior Linguistics and Literature major at the University of San Carlos (USC) in Cebu City.

I am on my third semester of graduate course work at the state university at Quezon City.

Our stars may not have been destined to meet except that Nicholette has an assignment to finish by tonight. And she knows how to email.

When I first read the subject of Nicholette’s Aug. 27 email, I wondered if I was about to be scammed.

“Hello Mrs. Tabada! I’m a friend of Carlos” put a serious brake in my inbox checking. Will the writer ask me to send dollars to bail out my older son, stuck in the depths of the Iguazu Rainforest after losing his wallet and mobile phone while researching on the digital literacy of the Tapuya tribe?

Fortunately, I remembered my son and his best friend were most likely cramming for a long exam on law and finance at their library, and my possession of dollars was as tenuous as connectivity in the rainforest.

The still unknown but far from colorless Nicholette had my attention, though. In the digital black hole that is a Gmail inbox, the subject of an email must be worded for impact.

The challenge of the email writer then shifts to sustaining the suspense after the double-click that opens the email. Nicholette used 10 paragraphs before popping the request to conduct an interview by email for a feature she was writing for her journalism class.

Now, 10 paragraphs is tricky. For the preoccupied, 10 paragraphs is a love letter or a death sentence or both.

Yet, unusual for a young writer, Nicholette wrote 10 short paragraphs.

I am more used to writers of her generation composing for the digital screen, not the printed page: a smokescreen of unedited text, generous misspelling, endangered punctuation, prolific emoticons. And the nefarious infiltrating LOL.

To come upon a writer who respects the period and restores balance of thought and space through the order of paragraphs is, I confess, my weakness.

And that was how I conceded and Nicholette of the 10-paragraph preamble sent me a second email of the promised 15 questions.

Except that each question had a set of two or three follow-up questions. Preceded by a coy hyphen, each follow-up inquiry was as heart-tugging as baby piranhas trailing after their mother appetites.

While interviewing by email substitutes very well for sources beyond the traditional face-to-face contact, an email is easy to ignore. So free the piranhas one at a time in order not to scare away the prey, er, interviewee.

Or, like Nicholette, tame the piranhas. First, set a reasonable deadline. Questions require one to reflect and answer. Heck, some questions take a lifetime to answer.

Second, take an interest in your questions and the answers these will draw. An interview succeeds when it becomes more than a Q-and-A and turns into a conversation between persons.

Simply repeating the questions jotted on the board when the assignment was handed out invites answers as dry as chalkdust.

Nicholette posed questions that did not just show she researched on the subject. She wanted gaps filled, puzzles pieced together:

“Do you ever feel pressured about keeping up a certain reputation of your writing self?”

“How does your life in Manila affect your Cebuano writing identity?”

When USC professor Frances Serenio set Nicholette and her classmates on a task to interview local journalists, she may have expected the professionals to give a tip or two to those still aspiring to dedicate their pens.

Thanks to email and a Nicholette way of asking questions, the nub’s on me.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Sept. 1, 2013 issue of the Sunday editorial page column, “Matamata”

Ghost writer

ONE of the pleasures of teaching writing is reading a young, sometimes raw, voice straining to hear itself.

The variety and disparity make the encounters. Some write without effort at all. Or at least no effort can make their unfettered voices conform to formula and rules.

Then there are the plodders. If I persist in untangling mismatched verbs and irreconcilable tenses, it is either because glimmers of insight give me the courage to dive into the turgid depths of gnarled grammar to discover an uncommon voice. Or the writer herself has such a hide of resoluteness to unlearn and learn, I anticipate much from sharing the journey with her—and never get disappointed.

One voice I remember clearly to this day. That I failed to recognize it even though the act of composition was being executed right in front of my eyes must be blamed on my mood at that time, as well as a writer’s love-hate affair with deadlines.

One long weekend in Lent found our family staying in a friend’s house along the Santander coast. It was the evening of Good Friday.

We were the only ones occupying one of three rooms. Although we heard the caretaker’s stories about the strange last room, I chose this because it had no TV set. The caretaker said she sometimes heard the shower being used while the occupants were away; I welcome a functional shower, specially in summer.

Since my family was waiting for the tide to rise with the moon, I was alone in the room. I intended to write my column that evening because my duties made it hard to focus during the day.

Opening a blank document on my husband’s laptop, I typed local names for the seaweeds we harvested and ate with our supper. Then I took a shower.

When I returned to the laptop, there were lines written below the words I encoded. Surprised by the gibberish, I automatically blocked and deleted the lines.

I looked out of the window. The family was still on the beach. I heard no one enter the room while I was in the bathroom. I was as certain that my family would not mess around with my work.

Who did? Part of me wanted to leave the room. Yet, remembering my deadline, I decided against dawdling and turned back to the computer.

Three words were encoded while I glanced out of the window: “I” and below this, “The am”.

It was not the air-conditioning unit that made the room feel frigid suddenly. I told myself that the malware-detection program of the laptop might need upgrading again, convinced that my husband’s laptop had some weird bug.

Yet I didn’t or couldn’t erase the three words, arranged in seemingly two paragraphs, with a space in between.

It should have been difficult for me to begin, let alone finish, a column that night. Yet such is the fear of missing deadlines—and to be honest, the dread of finding gibberish encoded again after just a second’s glance away from the open document—that, after an hour or so, I was halfway through the column when the other wrote again.

At first, the cursor disappeared. In its place, blue space bloomed on the screen, followed by words. Strung together, the words, mostly articles and conjunctions, did not make sense. Reading the whole composition, I thought I heard someone trying to talk.

Afraid that the “virus” would take over my composition, I abandoned my husband’s laptop and got my old IBM. Somehow, the temperamental battery worked; somehow, the column was completed that night and emailed the following day, without any more incident. When we returned home, I tested my husband’s laptop and found it working normally, minus the pop-up words and blue text.

Months later, I interviewed an old resident of Alegria. A local healer, she told me it was a pity I didn’t eat the writing that was offered to me and thus, absorb power. After trying to explain viruses, printers and the Internet, I gave up and she looked at me, most certainly with pity, as if I had just been talking about spirits and the supernatural.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabadal.blogspot.com/ 0917-3226131)


*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Aug. 7, 2011 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday column

Here comes the titan

I RECEIVED a letter.

When my son handed to me the long white envelope along with the newspapers he picked up from the newsroom, I guessed by the sloping handwriting on the envelope that it was neither an invitation nor a machine-regurgitated notification asking to be disregarded in case of irrelevance.

I eyed the letter askance.

Among journalists, a white envelope is portentous. It may hold a press release, a presscon invitation, cash, gift certificates or a bullet. The first two are work necessities; the third and fourth, traps; and the last, an early retirement plan.

My face must have betrayed this quick review of options because my son asked if he could open the envelope. I broke the seal and after reading, passed to him the four handwritten sheets of plain paper.

Journalism is a tough profession in a tough turf. It’s a mantra I repeat to justify the skepticism and suspicion, questioning and probing, checking and cross-checking that goes before committing to print a fact, inference or opinion.

Yet, a decade or so of this information-sifting has ruined me for the unalloyed pleasure of receiving and reading a letter.

The letter was written by a reader reacting to something I wrote. In my experience, readers who disagreed with my articles always fired away a chain of SMSs or emails to express their scorching assessment of my sanity, soul or lack of both. Only one paused long enough to first post a reaction in her blog before sending me a link.

The letter-writers, though, are invariably—there is no equivalent for this in journalese— nice.

What is it about writing a letter that makes the pleasure mutual, for both sender and recipient?

First, the penmanship is no small source of delight. I don’t mean only narcissists write by hand for the reflected pleasure of admiring their every curve and curlicue.

One’s handwriting is sole and revealing. Rounded and generous or spiky and impatient, a penmanship lets slip a writer’s true state, if his words won’t. While sustaining me through years of writing and rewriting, my editor made her critiques in the form of a letter written in her inimitable hand, recalling the teachers of old who trained with a gimlet eye so many young hands holding a pencil. When I failed to meet too many deadlines, my editor—you guessed it—sent me an email.

In newsrooms, editors encourage readers to email reactions or contributions. Yet some editors will personally encode or have an encoder convert into soft copy a handwritten letter. Sometimes the content justifies the time and effort. I’m sentimental about the journey that makes a thought transform a blank sheet of paper that finds its way into an envelope passed from hand to hand, or from postal bin to postman’s bag, finally resting beside the workstation of an editor in a publication that may send these words out across the globe.

So why not just email? Why be picky about form if substance is the essence?

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his team have been working for 15 months to unify email, instant messaging, text messaging and the social network into one “social inbox”.

The new message system that’s known as “Project Titan” is not intended to end the dominion of the email giants: Microsoft’s Hotmail, with its 361 million users; Yahoo! Mail’s 273 million users; and Google Gmail’s 193 million users. I’m not an email killer, clarified Zuckerberg.

According to Mike Swift’s article in the San Jose Mercury News, Facebook’s coming Titan just wants to free people to communicate, without the bother of choosing IM, SMS or email.

I can just taste the flavor of conversations in a future dominated by Facebook or even journalism. Reply now! Hit a button before you even finish a thought. Doubt first; verify later.

Before the titan takes over, I’m rereading the sheaf this reader wrote by hand.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)



* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Nov. 21, 2010 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday column

Journalists, ugly and true

CHOOSING is easy when the range is limited to the good and the bad.

Instead of comforting, though, the undeniability of this logic chaffed when I recently had to make a choice between John McPhee’s “Encounters with the Archdruid” and Stephen Glass’s “The Fabulist”.

I was in this secondhand bookstore, looking for a weekend treat that would not cost more than P151 (that’s all the change I had left; with payday still a week away, I didn’t want to break up the lone bill left in my wallet).

McPhee is a writer I’ve stalked longest, next only to Joseph Mitchell.

But while Mitchell died in 1996, McPhee, at 79, feels there are still topics to write about. His early books of the 1960s and 70s often turn up in bargain bins, perhaps because someone committed enough to pursue his personal curiosity into months, even years, of studying and writing about obscure folks going about their uncommon business—harvesting orange juice, fly-fishing, basketball, floorwalking, foraging for wild edibles, making birch-bark canoes, tending the lawn at Wimbledon, for samplers—would be out of place in the shelves groaning under bestsellers.

For the rigor of his note-taking and immersion in his subjects, McPhee deserves to be called, as he was extolled by one reviewer, “a reporter’s reporter”.

Yet, for the respect he pays to words and the gusto of his storytelling, what comes to mind is not journalism of the cut-and-dried variety but something more enduring, like literature. Here’s McPhee estimating the depth of a river where he’s dragging a canoe: “There were times, in holes, when I was up to my armpits, but that could not be called dramatic. Among armpits on this planet, mine do not imply great depth."

Coming upon “Encounters with the Archdruid,” one of four books McPhee devoted to “geology” (the arena now called “ecology”), should have instantly concluded at the cashier and my riding off to the sunset, delirious, with my sixth McPhee.

Alas, I dawdled at a shelf holding the hardbounds and found, at perfect eye level, the insidious, nefarious Glass.

Since about five years ago, every writing class I’ve handled gets acquainted with Stephen Glass before they wrestle with news leads and angles.

Thanks to the 2003 film dramatization, “Shattered Glass,” these future journalists get quickly drawn in, then repelled and, against themselves, become fascinated with the unraveling of Glass. (McPhee, on the other hand, glazes my students’ eyes after the first dozen pages; one condensed New Yorker article ran to 30 or so pages.)

In the late 1990s, Glass, a gifted, fast-rising American reporter and editor, was exposed for committing serial fraud. Of 41 articles he wrote for The New Republic, a prestigious magazine read by Washington and the Oval Office, Glass invented quotes, sources, institutions and issues in 27 of those articles. He denied and denied those fabrications until in 2003, when the ex-journalist published a “biographical novel.”

“The Fabulist” is the title of Glass’s novel. This was the copy I was staring at. I had only seen the book previously in a “60 Minutes” interview, when Glass apologized for faking journalism and plugged his book.

“A spectacular crash, I’ve learned, is the quickest way to incredible accomplishment.” So begins a tale that tantalizes in its allusions to answers Glass refused to give in real life.

Why did he do it? (Stephen Aaron Glass, the novel’s protagonist, perfects the “takedown article” but has to lie and invent to stay ahead of newsroom rivals.)

Does he exemplify the excesses of journalism? (Other journalists are more ruthless in stalking Stephen Aaron after he’s fired.)

Is there life for a journalist after a crisis of credibility? (He gets a new girlfriend, moves into a new apartment, and rediscovers Judaism.)

Is he sorry? (A believable degree of atonement is hard to stumble across when one is rapidly scanning a mint copy with still stiff, crisp pages. In the end, I just reread the line that opens “The Fabulist”.)

Maybe bad guys attract Hollywood. Owing to the exigency of my wallet’s contents, I went home with the writer who, without being a fabulist, elevated armpits into the heavenly.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Sept. 26, 2010 issue of “Matamata”

Dear R.

When I read the banner story of Sun.Star Cebu’s Mar. 5 issue, I instantly thought of you.

“Higher tuition in 15 schools” is the kind of headline that might as well bleed in great gouts of red on page 1 for the fear it strikes in parents.

But it’s news, too, that can chill a young person’s heart.

In her Sun.Star article, Princess D. Felicitas reported that the Department of Education refuses to name the schools because the increases, whether approved or pending, are too “sensitive”.

Do we even need it spelled out? For any working-class parent, whose life’s mission is to bequeath an education so that one’s child can have a choice—“the only true freedom,” wrote the poet Cynthia Ozick—the escalating cost of education may reduce us to rooting around the wrong set of choices, precisely wrong for NOT being choices at all: asking a child to quit school to work and help out, choosing only the brightest or the toughest child to send to school, transferring a child from small, expensive classes to free but crowded classrooms with harassed teachers, even leaving out books from the monthly budget.

Because we are adults, we steel ourselves for the worst, for a future that’s unrevealed, unknowable and thus distrusted because it will mark the ones who make us most vulnerable. Where is the parent that does not desire the best for one’s own?

So we swerve naturally into these missteps: we think we know better, we choose for our children, we advise the best course for “security”.

But you paused long enough to hear your child. And emailed a stranger to ask about your child’s chances as a writer.

Since second year, your child dreams of a life of writing. Now editing the campus paper, this child will still not let go, though that dream may seem to recede as she awaits the results of exams taken for the Accountancy course you’ve foreseen. Law, as you’ve advised, may follow.

That was a long email I sent in reply, heavy and dense with comparisons of curricula and academic areas of excellence, career path and compensation packages, trade hazards and insurance.

After reading this paper’s Mar. 5 headline, I realize I sent you a mistake. There’s no advice a stranger can give your child except that which you are already doing: listen to her.

A professional newsroom can refine and polish a journalist in ways that years and years of classroom learning cannot. But anyone can take up Mass Communication, Nursing, Accountancy, Law, and Plumbing and Heating—and still live to write.

To write to live is challenging enough. But if your child lives to write, she can only do so by listening to herself.

Recently, I finished “The Blue Flower.” It is the story of an unfinished story. The book reminded me of another novel, “The Bookshop.” A mouse of a widow risks her life savings when she opens a bookshop. She later learns that “a town that lacks a bookshop isn’t always a town that wants one.”

Both books are written by Penelope Fitzgerald. She took up writing at the age of 58. This jam- and chutney-making grandmother, as profiled by a reviewer, wrote early novels that were inspired by her life: writing a mystery to amuse her dying husband, working in a bookshop, living in a houseboat that sank twice in the Thames.

Three of her novels, including “The Bookshop,” were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. She won the Booker Prize for “Offshore,” set in a houseboat community. Chosen for the American National Book Critics award, “The Blue Flower” is regarded as Fitzgerald’s masterpiece.

Finally, I share two pieces of advice for writers from another Booker Prize winner, Margaret Atwood:

Rule 1 is “Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.”

Here’s another: “Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.”

College is optional; the self is all the material a writer needs. Cheers, R.!
mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 01973226131

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Mar. 7, 2010 issue of “Matamata”

Green sap rising

PALPABLE as a pear was the silence that received the closing lines of Carolyn Forché’s prose poem, “The Colonel.”

“… The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves… He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.”

One Friday afternoon, I sat behind a group of writers participating in the “Mugna sa Pagsulat,” a writer’s symposium organized by the University of the Philippines in the Visayas Cebu College (UPVCC).

Poet and Ateneo teacher Larry Ypil was asked to read Forché by UPV Tacloban professor Merlie Alunan to illustrate the importance of point of view in storytelling.

I joined the group only after lunch and was unable to hear their morning interactions with Larry, speaking on poetry, and University of San Carlos professor emeritus, Dr. Resil Mojares, discoursing on creative non-fiction. I had no gauge to assess the writers: how well they read, if they ate words for breakfast, or slept with them.

But the sight of so many school uniforms in the group made me perceive the hall as filled with young writers. Inevitably, this idea summoned two other phrases: “green sapling rising” and “the promise of new fruit.”

Whether the metaphors applied to the group as promise or cliché I could not make up my mind on until I heard them after Larry read the last of Forché’s lines.

In truth, the group said nothing at all. Even though Merlie negotiated the world of the colonel with them, picked out the images the poet flung about like trophy ears, no one seemed able to say anything that came close to explaining what Forché must have lived through when she worked with Amnesty International in El Salvador in the 1970s.

But for the silence.

The silence of the hall after Larry read the end of the poem was eerie. As a teacher of more than two decades, I am familiar with the effects of certain works. Essays are the classic headscratchers and ignite a pandemonium of ear-pulling. Many youths are raised to paroxysms by photographs and lyrics; utterly depressed by news writing.

But a poem that opens a fissure of silence has not spent itself, just given life to echoes ricocheting inside its listeners.

I found the silence eerie not only because a poem is usually just an unfortunate casualty, subjected to class postmortems and dissections that bleed sawdust and theories.

I found the silence of that hall filled with school uniforms eerie because many of the writers are young enough to know Martial Law only as a footnote in history books, and Ferdinand Marcos as the man who may or may not have killed the father of Kris. Those school uniforms are probably part of campus papers that will never volunteer for fact-finding missions that try to trace what is left of a hinterland community that’s just oozing and ripening beneath shallow mass graves.

And yet for the silence.

It is true that one must have lived to create a song, a painting, a poem. But the sap is greenest and the hunger is keenest when one is just beginning.

Perhaps our tragedy is that we pour resources into staging political showdowns between old dogs with old tricks. Shouldn’t we be holding more workshops to make us read more, create more, live more?

Or partake more of the pleasure in witnessing green sap rising.

mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131


* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Sept. 21, 2008 issue

Life is peanuts

BEFORE any whiff of New Society doublethink invaded our classrooms in the 1970s, we just gardened and sewed. The subject then was not known as Home Economics. We were not yet drilled to man our stoves and sewing machines so that, as dutiful wives and mothers, we could be the stalwart partners our men could lean on in war or in peace.

But if you spent your elementary years at St. Theresa’s College (STC) in Cebu, the subject known prosaically as Practical Arts was a discipline more exacting than science.

If my classmates and I thought we could take a break from serious striving during this non-academic subject, our teacher, Miss Tan, made sure we never repeated the mistake.

Brisk and tireless, Miss Tan was short as Napoleon. As consummate as that commander, she packed authority in every inch of that compact, bird-like frame. I talked to my peanut plants, driven to desperation by Miss Tan’s unannounced inspection of our garden plots. Advised by classmates who survived these lightning tests, I also wheedled my plant’s branches to look green and jolly, the leaves to dance as if they were on fiesta.

Woe to you if Miss Tan found your plants to be a bit jaundiced, a victim of criminal neglect. Or worse, if you forgot it was your turn to water the class plots. Once, I came to school almost late. Trying to beat the first bell, I dumped sprinklers of water on the plots.

Standing in line later, smug and smirking that Miss Tan’s pet peanuts had a drenching, I noticed my white socks were covered in brown spots, with a few clinging bits of soil and humus. As I had no spare, I took off the soiled socks, turned them inside out, and put them back on just as the final bell rang. Better to endure ickiness the entire day than fail Miss Tan.

All good teachers have the magic quality of being absolutely intolerable when you are under their tutelage, and virtually mythic and unforgettable when you remember their legacy. To teach us the variety of stitches, Miss Tan required us to practice on small squares of cloth. I enjoyed sewing, finding it more soothing than being hostaged by temperamental peanuts.

But when I showed off my finished samples to Miss Tan, she flipped the squares to show me the disorderly tangle of knots on the underside. “Rip” was her terse advice, punctuated as usual by the pugnacious jut of that rock-hard jaw.

And rip we did. No one skipped corners by using a fresh square and throwing away the first mistake. Nothing got thrown away in Miss Tan’s class. We used discarded dusters and retazos for our rug projects. We picked and dumped leaves, twigs and even expired worms in a hole at the bottom of the garden. This disgusting stew, I was to learn later as a countryside extension worker, was compost, integral for the scientific, earth-friendly farming of which Miss Tan was an early disciple.

Last Friday, during my alma mater’s 75th year homecoming, I met Miss Tan again. I was curious to explore the newly curated STC Folklife Museum. She was an unexpected grace.

A teacher changes her students in unseen but telling ways. When I stooped a little to take her hand, I saw but did not see those familiar tresses, once swept into severe, neat plots by a plain and unchanging headband; I was assaulted instead by bizarre garden smells that come and go with first dew.

In my mind, I turned a leaf to check for aphids and came upon a mushroom; learned tenacity from watching the labors of a millipede undertaking the circuit of a twig. To this day, I discard words and rewrite paragraphs because, as Miss Tan drummed into me all those years ago, simplicity is its own reward.

Her hand is small but still tough. Held for the first time, her hand reminded me of the white-dusted lemon yellow blossoms put out by our peanut plants before the sun was high in the sky. If I eat peanuts piece by piece, not tossing them by the handful, it is not only because these plants are volatile and high-strung garden divas. If they earned the devotion of Miss Tan, they’ll get no less from me.

mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131

* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s July 27, 2008 issue

On immortality

SUCH are the pangs of mortality: just when you live long enough to know and desire so many books, you are no longer young and limber to rummage for hours on your knees in secondhand books sales.

Fortunately, desire respects no age. By taking five-minute breaks to stand up and banish the floating-dot blackness fogging up my spectacles, I got back enough equilibrium to lunge back and crawl, head hanging down, so I could read book spines that were dumped, higgledy-piggledy, in the dust and gloom of this store’s bargain books section.

And that is how I found the biography of Max Perkins.

Being born in the 1960s has a few perks. One of these was a library card that gave free access to the collection of the United States Information Service (USIS) Library. Located along Jones Ave., the USIS Library was a guilty pleasure for students like me who fantasized about a new world order but hated the hideous ranting of revolutionaries.

Though I often felt I was betraying ardent allegiances when I surrendered to the guard my knapsack (carefully purged of political tracts), I strode into that book-scented hush with only one goal in mind: the fiction section.

Among those shelves with their hard-cover editions sheathed with special laminated covers, I broke faith and defected: forgot dour Marx and alienated Mao to romp with Sylvia Plath, William Burroughs, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and other writers who went after the great, white, American dream.

Even when they wrote about the dream turning into a nightmare, these authors made me care for their makebelieve characters. This was more than the thin gruel of sympathy I could squeeze for the exploited millions revealed by Marx and Engels as the “historical victims” of the “commodity fetishism” and “laws of motion” driving the “political arithmetick” of capitalism.

The most powerful idea, I realized then, was not the one whose time has come. It is its wording.

This thought crossed my mind again last Thursday, when my knees were on fire and I was lightheaded, exulting for coming upon a P242 copy of “Max Perkins: Editor of Genius.”

Perkins was just the editor that introduced writers who only changed and continue to alter how we read, write and live: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, James Jones and others whose works became classics.

A. Scott Berg’s literary history won a National Book Award and made one critic write: “Why didn’t someone think of it before?” For Perkins belonged to an old and perhaps passing generation of editors that believed in self-effacement: “The book belongs to the author.”

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings gifted him with a sloughed-off rattlesnake skin with seven rattles shortly after she won a Pulitzer Prize for “The Yearling.” A newspaperwoman struggling with marriage and fear of the “second” book, Rawlings finished the novel after Perkins kept encouraging her for years.

Perkins cautioned aspiring editors from feeling important: “An editor at most releases energy. He creates nothing.” Unbeaten for 36 years in finding new gifted talent at Charles Scribner’s Sons, Perkins spent “two intense, often violent years” getting Wolfe’s “Of Time and the River” into print. According to legend, Wolfe, imperial in height and mercurial in temper, wrote the novel while using the top of his refrigerator as desk. He tossed each completed page into a crate without rereading it. It took three men to cart the box to Perkins, who “somehow shaped the outpouring into books.”

While some critics regard Wolfe’s novels as at least 50 percent written by Perkins, the latter believed that it was just part of his editorial duty to think of length and form, as “these were practical conventions that Wolfe couldn’t stop to think about for himself.”

Hemingway, on the other hand, had a tendency to overcorrect. Perkins said that the writer known for declaring war on adjectives and adverbs rewrote parts of his classic, “A Farewell to Arms,” at least 50 times. “Before an author destroys the natural qualities of his writing—that’s when an editor has to step in. But not a moment sooner.”

Reading this affectionate portrait—its very elegance a tribute to a man who lived for words—I realize our debt to editors, the invisible ones who shape worlds from chaos, who bring order and sense into the wild coupling of the creative.

Though all too imperfect, these human handmaidens—Perkins admitted he spelled “terribly,” was “idiosyncratic” in punctuation, and read as “slow as an ox”—have one claim to immortality: “(Perkins) treated literature as a matter of life and death.”

Long live the immortals.

mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131

* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s July 20, 2008 issue

Things to do this summer

DO your community a favor. Tell its stories.

It's a good cue to take from Mass Communication undergraduates who traditionally apply in newsrooms for their internship this summer.

While talking about travel writing with a class last semester, I realized that there are two ways to write about something. You can cover what is strange and unknown: approach the subject as an outsider, immerse yourself, back away, and commit as much honesty to be able to write with an insider's intimacy.

Or you can write about what you've always known: take what might as well be coming out of your pores, magnify it by taking another look and another, and then let go and watch the story catch spark.

To write, no one needs a college degree.

Some of you feel that a bit of education is needed to write well, or at least write to be understood.

But you can read, right? If you have the time, patience and curiosity to stick it out with a story from opening to closing, you might want to double back and find out how the writer managed to do it: release, line by line, a story to hook and land a reader that, as fishermen like to brag, didn't get away.

I also know what the doomsayers--and newsrooms have not cornered yet the market on cynicism--have been foretelling for years: the death of English.

Who says you have to stick to a language that's not yours or you've not made into your own?

As I acquired an education long before a revolutionary decided that Cebuano could be taught and learned in class, English is the portal I've entered all my life (and perhaps into the next one).

While I love the words, and what the words do to me, I believe everyone is entitled their own take to English, a second tongue. That includes the right to make mistakes.

There are several remedies for those determined to tell stories despite false starts.

Long before the magic of word processing, there was rewriting. Even professionals have to rewrite. Writers might like to talk and talk about writing, but the truth is: there's more writing done in the moments you spend framing your thoughts than in several worthy hours spent in a writeshop, taking apart someone's work.

It's not to say that other people don't count. Writing is communicating: someone has to listen to you. If even your mother passes out after reading your first line, take the hint and rewrite.

If you're already optimistic, ask a friend to read your work. If your friends become optimistic, send your work to an editor. Let the article do the talking. Editors detest hard sell but dote on a well-written piece.

If you don't see your article published, call once, and once only, to ask the editor if he received your emailed contribution. If you get more than a grunt in reply, offer to rewrite, send photos. Mothers never give up on their children; so should you.

When you write about your community, you're not just whiling away the hours, earning cell phone load, reading your name in print.

You're also showing that the media is still about community. It's not just about selling copies or airtime. It's never been only about advertisers and public figures.

Media, critics say, are failing to connect with their communities. By your writing, you prove them wrong. So tell the stories of your place and time: the folks who do good when there are no cameras around, the people changing or being changed by the life that is taking place beyond media deadlines.

And writing is not a bad way to spend summer.

Mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131

* Published in Sun.Star Cebu's April 6, 2008 issue

Just do 8

I've been tagged by Solang (peryodistang-pinay.blogspot.com).

Here are the rules for “8 facts”:

• In the “8 facts,” you share 8 things that your readers don’t know about you. At the end, you tag 8 other bloggers to keep the fun going. Each blogger must post these rules first.
• Each blogger starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
• At the end of the post, a blogger needs to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
• Don’t forget to leave them a comment they’re tagged, and to ask them to read your blog.


WRITE eight facts that your readers don’t know about you.

This was my task after fellow newsroom denizen Solang tagged me and seven other bloggers. In the “8 Facts,” a blogger “tags” eight people by sending this post of “eight random facts/habits about themselves” to their friends’ blogs and asking them to tag eight others.

After Solang’s tag, I visited her blog and the seven others, read their “8 facts,” and thoroughly enjoyed discovering new bloggers, as well as some facets I never knew about close friends and long-time colleagues.

But I still hadn’t written my own list. In a few hours, it will be exactly a week since I received Solang’s post. I feel spooked by my attempts to create what should be a very short list. It feels somehow like I’m writing before a mirror (realizing later that this is one thing I could include in the list and—deep sigh—worry then about just seven more facts.)

So, after several false starts and a severe writing hangover, I’ve decided to “just do 8” and beg the reader’s forgiveness for inflicting these on her:

I like to write facing a wall. I need to forget where I am to start and finish anything. I can shut out the world if the deadline has really been severely trespassed, putting my life (or my editor’s sanity) in extreme jeopardy. But I still prefer not to write facing a door, a window, or a mirror. I’ve been told that someday someone might just stab me in the back. I’ll take the chance, rather than have someone walk in and catch me talking to myself (or dozing when I’m supposed to be at work).

I like to finish writing a piece before taking a break. I take a sandwich for lunch, as well as bring my water bottle so I don’t have to line up at the carenderia and go back to find an unfinished draft has curdled, fizzled or, worse, refused to take up again with me until we come to a neat end. Since doctors though have told me that I will someday own a kidney stone as large as a mountain from holding in my bladder too frequently, I have modified this rule: with the cooperation of my bodily fluids, I will not leave a paragraph midstream.

I watch my back when prepositions and idioms are around. I never trust these two-timing shapeshifters. Fortunately, there is Google.

I always overwrite. I believe there is a newsroom malady akin to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): bombarded by deadlines, writer defers writing until the 13th hour, then panics, then gets too much data or data for somebody else’s assignment, and writes a piece that needs to be lynched and mauled before it will fit the available news space. Guess what? I don’t have PTSD. (I know my special reports editor is reading this.)

I write best when not writing: smelling books, just doing nothing, or reading some poor sod write about writing. Sometimes story angles and opening sentences occur when the mind is unguarded and left open. I know this from experience. (I’m not saying this only for the benefit of my editors.)

I plan the first line. Where closing lines come from though is one of life’s mysteries. The “clincher” is best not analyzed but, like silences and orgasms, just fervently appreciated.

I don’t like editing at all. I only edit because my newsroom pays slightly more to its editors.

I like writing.


Here’s my tagged 8:

Elisabeth P. Baumgart (capturedlife.multiply.com)
Fr. Stephen Cuyos (www.stephencuyos.com)
Carlos Q. Tabada (carlosqtabada.multiply.com)
Jeneen R. Garcia (neenerish.multiply.com)
Joy Sosoban (joyfulforever.blogspot.com)
Jianna Karla K. Olayvar (jko.blogs.friendster.com)
mustAveabag (bagabonds.blogspot.com)
Omar Dumdum (patheticcroaks.blogspot.com)


mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131


* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Aug. 12, 2007 issue

Xman redux

CHEAPSKATE that I am, the first thing I bought when I had something left over from my salary was this mobile phone.

Inexpensive and simple, the new phone fit me, down to the longish time it took to unlock and the limited memory of my ancient SIM card.

As far as coexistence anxieties went, this new phone and I settled down in no time, except for a few days ago, when this infernal gadget went crazy.

Fumbling with the keypad, I panicked every time the phone tone indicated an incoming message. Each time, I feared the worst: my younger son finally swallowed his older brother and was regurgitating him out, with the pieces in odd order.

Every time, it was this and that writer asking if Myke was gone, had gone, was really, really gone.

Texting is really ideal only for thumbs that fly over the keypad and eviscerate nimbly the rules of English writing. It is not for technophobes that feel they have to use the shift key every time to begin a sentence with a capital letter; or leave a space after punctuations (two if a period).

Also, texting is just too bloody for explaining to the young, the heartbroken, the dreamers that the mentor they wrote for, imitated, drank with—heck, loved—had, as of 3 PM last Friday, taken off for an 18-hour flight with his two young sons and a pocket full of finger puppets to go home to his beloved Arlaine.

Thanks to Myke, my editor-on-leave, I discovered a facet of the phone I thought I knew: push the buttons too quickly and this unremarkable piece of plastic will rear its spirit and refuse to execute a command.

Toxic, my editor would have said, nodding his bangs sagely while smiling roguishly.

Yeah, everything’s toxic alright, Xman. Some just use the poison to make poetry.

I first worked with Myke U. Obenieta in 2000. Our group of writers and photographers were prowling in the firecracker-making countryside of Babag, Lapu-Lapu to catch children and minors assembling in the illegal trade.

It was my first special report but my heart was not in it. Why punish the victims? For Myke, his interest was not to expose and investigate; he wanted to listen to the stories woven by those small, nimble fingers before an accidental spark sent them flying all over the countryside.

In the exacting world of journalism, Myke and I felt, more often than not, like mutants. In the backyards of Babag, we took to calling each other Xman, or “X-Man,” if according to Myke, as he was more straitlaced about grammar than I.

Over the years, in the newsroom or during coverage, we bumped into each other desultorily. I knew him better though as one of the most graceful editors to light up a classroom or a young writer’s dreams.

Some students stumble into writing because, caught between the devil and professors who believe in “publish or perish,” they have nowhere to go but into the roiling waters of the publishing world.

But the ones that grow into their craft have, hovering over their pens, not just Muses but angst-ministering angels and nurturing mutants. Until he finally made good on his travel plans last Friday, the Xman did not assign writers as go off with them on rambling, irreverent, offbeat, funny explorations of language, the movies, drinking, poetry, parenting, loving and other digressions that inexplicably fed the Craft.

For those unable to believe he has left, let me comfort you with Epictetus.

It’s not only because quoting some long-dead Greek confers the proper gravitas on leave-takings. The fellow is in one of the books left behind in the normal clutter of my editor’s desk.

This, as well as an oil-and-pastel painting of a ballet dancer, the communities of writers woven around his four scrupulously updated blogs, and the unfinished series of despedidas requiring at least half-a-year to complete, are portents that Myke has just stepped out and will, one afternoon, pop up to declare to us, day-shift stiffs: “Hi, beautiful people!”

mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131

* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s May 13, 2007 issue