Brief announcements

A local theater direct o r wa s telling me about some new plays being workshopped by campus students. Dystopian futures were the norm — post-apocalyptic scenarios used as metaphors for Manila’s urban decay. Yet few of the playwrights offer concrete details, she noticed; they never fully map out their invented worlds, or bother to think them through. Rather, their worlds felt like borrowed worlds — lifted from Mad

Max, or any other convenient dystopian series. One featured a robot, but it was like a bad ‘60s robot with a mechanical voice; the other featured a character with cancer who wanted her cremains to be blasted into space after she dies, where they would “explode like a supernova.” That’s just bad science.

While Filipino writers love inventing fictional worlds, quite a few lack the patience to develop sufficient literary scaffolding to prop up those worlds. Fortunately, there are some writers who manage to convey their realities with a bare minimum of words.

Two Filipino writers — one an acquaintance, the other a UP friend — have recent books out that pull off this rabbit- in- the- hat trick. (Luis Katigbak I know from editing his columns for

Young STAR; Noelle Q. de Jesus I know as a talented writer, editor and classmate from UP’s writing program.) While often condensing their stories to skeletal remains, 600 words or less, Katigbak and De Jesus don’t scrimp on the scaffolding. Whether they start out imagining much larger worlds and then proceed to cut, cut, cut to the bone; or whether the shorter pieces in their books Dear Distance and

Blood, respectively, appear as fully formed sketches, it’s good to read writers who respect details.

Katigbak, we know, has been in the midst of a personal medical battle, and the appearance of his second short fiction collection may help him out financially as well as artistically. Of the two, Katigbak is more speculative: his short stories examine worlds that begin and end within the confines of a few pages. That means pretty much reinventing the rules with each wry missive, whether it’s the sketch “We Built This Robot” (about two boys creating a robot and the other using his friend’s brain to turn the robot into an artwork) or “The Editorial Meeting” (about a magazine pitch session briefly gone haywire). Some offer a bit more poignancy, such as the retreating friend in “Subterrania” or the bus rides in “Passengers.” Some are mere sketches, built around a punchline (“The Girl on the Bus”); many are told through the now overly familiar second person narration; but each seems to operate under its own rules. Katigbak starts each tale with a mundane situation, then decides along the way how much to curl and tweak the edges; it may be a full-blown alternate world, or a simple reflection on memories, things past, things picked up again for reconsideration. There’s a certain numbness to his narration, and this “blank” narrator can be a bit of a pill at times, but notice how Katigbak includes enough shading to fill in the corners of even the slightest exercises. It’s certainly a voice that speaks to millennials loudly.

De Jesus and I were batchmates in the UP graduate writing program at Diliman, and I remember tough sessions with Gemino Abad, Butch Dalisay, Jing Hidalgo and visiting Canadian fictionist Isabel Huggan. We learned to be concise without being too crafty, and these lessons seem to have stuck with Noelle, because she’s edited, along with fellow graduate Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta, two collections of local short-short fiction — Fast Food Fiction and its sequel, Fast Food Fiction Delivery — both of which, incidentally, included submissions from my wife Therese Jamora-Garceau and myself.

Her first story collection, Blood, includes tales of varying length, with subjects that range from Filipinos abroad to growing up during the martial law era. Somewhere, that fast fiction bug bit her hard: a number of these tales are one page or less, yet like Katigbak, she’s got a editor’s eye for observing and picking details: the final line of “A Small Consolation” (“Like a mother, a little like a lover”) hints at a fresh perspective on filial bonds, while the carefully rendered glimpse of a woman having her cake and eating it too in “A Happy Marriage” practically swims in irony. De Jesus peers at these lives from within, and even when they’re fleeting glimpses, we get a clear picture of the iceberg that lies beneath in her short-short pieces.

In my blurb for her book, I said that De Jesus likes both the marathon event and the 50-yard dash. The concluding title story concerns a young girl’s first period, and it’s Noelle’s more conventional style; she takes her time mapping out the world of a young girl. One speculative fiction tale concerns a Manila that’s run out of water. But it’s in the shorter pieces that I can spot the tinkerer’s mind, sifting through the details, offering fleeting glimpses of the mysteries of life.

Offering up short fiction to the world these days can feel like pitching pennies into the void: it’s a solitary, often desolate pursuit, and one frequently feels it goes unnoticed in the constant whirring that surrounds us. But at the same time, we need stories and careful writing more than ever these days. Katigbak’s sly turnings and De Jesus’ devotion to craft and fast fiction show there’s life left in the form yet.

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Dear Distance and Fast Food Fiction Delivery are published by Anvil. Blood is available through Ethos Books, Singapore and at kumsuning@pagesetters.com.sg.