NWW Remembrances

By Chi Balmaceda Gutierrez.  I was a part of that workshop of 1988-1989 which was held for an entire semester. My co-fellows then were the Soria-de Veyra brothers from Leyte, Vim Nadera, Mozart Pastrano, Cynthia Lopez-Dee, Jun Celmar, Tim Montes, among others.  Each time Mom Edith had a literary session with us, which was usually […]

By Alvin I. Dacanay One of the attractions of what is now known as the Silliman University National Writers Workshop—which celebrates its 50th year this month—for the Manila-based fellowship applicant is the chance to not only learn about the craft of writing from some of the country’s literary luminaries, but also to travel to some […]

By Vim Nadera.   Way back in 1988, while I was in the midst of my thesis writing for an M.A. in psychology, Dr. Ophelia Alcantara Dimalanta offered me an alternative. She led me to a different direction. She recommended to the first Silliman University Semestral Writers Workshop. At first, it made me a bit […]

By F. Jordan Carnice . Sometime in the second week of May 2008, I baptized our batch “Katsubongs” without meaning to. Like what the other batches of the workshop did before us, the ritual of naming was just one of those customary but unwritten agreements for hilarity’s sake. But later on, as we braved one […]

By Mo Francisco. There’s only one thing that all fellows of the Dumaguete Workshop will agree on—some more wistfully than others: a summer in Dumaguete ends all too soon. That statement however holds the most truth for our batch. While other batches had three weeks, ours had to cram all our stories, forging of new […]

By May Tobias-Papa.           Perhaps it is because I graduated with a degree in Fine Arts, and not Creative Writing, the terms, form, structure, motivation, tension, embodiment of a concept, objective correlative all sounded Greek to me, so I got lost. I forget whose poem this is, but most of the […]

By J. Neil C. Garcia. My experience of Dumaguete and the Writing Workshop is palimpsestic. After my own fellowship, back in 1990, I returned at least five other times, always around the same ardent season of the year. Each visit would evince its own textuality, and in my memory subsequent trips would write their own […]

By Nerisa del Carmen Guevara.   Excerpts from The Mermaid Travels  SUNDAY, MAY 1  The first day. I never liked planes. They never prepared me for leaving or arriving. Surrounded by a numbness of padded seats and sifted air, everything is static. No jolt of wheel on gravel and stone, or sound of water being […]

By Niccolo Vitug. Boxing Gloves The 42nd batch of the Silliman National Writers Workshop was called the Dumaguete Fight Club because we had boxing matches night after night, in 2003. Not all of us participated, though; there were those who hung out with panelists for nightly cocktails, and there were those who stayed in their rooms […]

By Vicente Garcia Groyon. 1993 was a challenging year for the workshop—it had just been uprooted from Silliman University and renamed the National Summer Writers Workshop, running on assistance from various donors. The foundation established by alumni to continue the workshop was in its fledgling stage, and things were still up in the air at […]