Writing adventures and misadventures
IA M happy to be invited by the high school students of the University of Santo Tomas to give a talk in January on writing feature articles. Before I left the Philippines in 2017 to work as head of school at the University of Nottingham Malaysia campus, I always said “yes” to invitations by students to talk about news writing, editorial and opinion writing, as well as feature writing.
A week before I flew to Kuala Lumpur in 2017, I was at the National Secondary Schools Press Conference in Koronadal, South Cotabato, to give a talk on feature writing. It is a way to give back, to return the kindness that people had shown to me when I was starting to write.
I was the features editor of The Guidon, the college newspaper of Ateneo de Manila University. I held the post with Rayboy Pandan and Jake Yap. One day, a Catholic bishop from China visited Ateneo and we interviewed him. It turned out that he could no longer return to his country since he had been banished by the communist regime.
After college in 1983, I wanted to work for people who could train me further in writing. Professor Emmanuel Torres was my creative writing mentor at Ateneo, and he told me that Juan “Johnny” Gatbonton was hiring two people to work for the Bureau of National and Foreign Information. I applied since I wanted to be trained by Mr. Gatbonton, who won the first Palanca Award for the short story.
I wrote speeches for the minister of public information and contributed articles to the Philippines Today handbook. We also prepared the press materials for the visit of President Ferdinand Marcos Sr. to the United States and other countries. But on the side, I was re-reading The Elements of Style, which Mr. Gatbonton and his brilliant editor, Arnold Moss, had asked us to do. Mr. Moss also lent me a copy of A Reader Over Your Shoulder by Roland Graves, where Mr. Graves even found a minor fault in an essay of T.S. Eliot.
How did I get this job? Mr. Gatbonton sent me to interview the formidable — and frightening — Professor Teodoro Agoncillo Sr. for Archipelago magazine and write a feature article about him. I made an appointment by telephone through Dr. Anacleta Agoncillo, the wife of the professor. When I mentioned the name of Mr. Gatbonton, she said yes, I can interview the professor, “but only for an hour, since he is busy writing his next book.” I read everything I could find about him — his previous interviews, his CV, two of his books — before I went to his house.
Professor Agoncillo was wearing a white T-shirt and knee-length brown shorts. He was in his element, slashing at his critics with his tongue as sharp as a scythe. But he said that most of his comments are “off the record,” so I just put down my pen and paper and sipped the coffee he had offered to me. But Professor Agoncillo was also a man of tenderness, especially when he spoke about his children, one of whom, he said, was a PWD; his other son worked in Saudi Arabia. He just kept on talking for almost three hours. Of course I was glad; I had a lot of material for my article.
He even took me to the second floor of his house, to his library full of books and magazines dating back to the 1920s. He also showed me the first drafts of his books, which he had bound, and the awards he had received. Only then did I discover that the historian, Professor Agoncillo, also wanted a place in history. There was nothing wrong with that. We all write because we hope that our books would outlive us.
Other subjects for my interview weren’t as serious as Professor Agoncillo. When I was working as a news reporter for Observer newspaper in 1986, so-called penetration movies began to be made. Yen Makabenta, my editor in chief, said we should write about them. “Somebody should watch these ‘pene’ movies and interview one director,” Yen said. His sharp eyes scanned the faces of the staff. Finally, his gaze landed on me and he gave me the assignment.
I borrowed three “penetration movie ” tapes from our neighborhood video store and watched them. The tapes were dubbed in garbled English (they were being exported to Hong Kong and the US). The sex acts looked like acrobatic exercises. After watching the tapes, I set an appointment with one of the directors, who wanted to be interviewed at 12 midnight.
Thus, I was able to talk to Mr. Ruben Abalos, who had directed such masterpieces as “Saging ni Pacing” (Pacing’s Banana) and “Dingding Lang ang Pagitan” (Only a Wall Between Us). I interviewed him at a restaurant on Quezon Avenue where the waitresses didn’t walk but skated. He said he had just been appointed by President Cory Aquino as the vice mayor of a town in Pangasinan. I asked him, “What will you do to improve your hometown?”
“Show my movies, what else,” he said, “to educate the young people!”
Later, Letty Magsanoc hired me as an editor in her newspaper and afterward, I moved to The Manila Times where Malou Manga hired me as managing editor of Magazine. All along, I continued teaching journalism and English at Ateneo. A decade later, I was working on communications for the United Nations Development Program when Luchi Cruz Valdes asked me to join TV 5, “to help train our reporters in news and feature writing.”
We had a bomb threat on my first day at Magsanoc’s paper, we lost our jobs at the Times when then-President Estrada threatened to sue us for libel, I got sued for libel two times (both dismissed), and handlers offered me money to write about celebrities, businessmen and politicians or have them in my radio-TV show ( I reported the bribe offers to my bosses).
Journalism, as some people say, is “literature in a hurry,” but I guess it offers enough adventures and misadventures to make one’s adrenalin run high.