Rocket Kapre – Fantastic Filipino Speculative Fiction

Yesterday, I trooped down to UST to attend the second day of the  “Literature From Shakespeare to Bob Ong: Bridging the Divide Between the Popular And the Canonical” conference, by Visprint in collaboration with the UST Faculty of Arts and Letters: Dept. of Literature, Thomasian Writers Guild, The Literary Society and The Varsitarian. Many of the speakers were horror writers from Visprint’s stable, so it was a good opportunity to check the pulse of the genre here in the country, or at least to get the opinions of some of those at its vanguard. Komiks (in general, not horror komiks) were also represented, with Manix Abrera walking the audience through several of his strips.

I took a few videos of the talks and Question and Answer segments, and I’ll use this post as a hub as I slowly (yes I have slow a slow connection) upload the different videos. I’ll upload the talks first, and then lump the open forum segments in the last post. Siege Malvar, Alan Navarra, Nida Ramirez, and Eros Atalia were also on hand for some insightful talks, but my coverage here will focus on the komiks/spec fic content, although I’ll try to sneak in some videos of the others.

(Note that some of the links below are NSFW – many of these people specialize in horror, remember? ^_~)

Video 1: Horror Panel, featuring Budjette Tan (Trese), David Hontiveros (Penumbra novellas, Pelicula), Bart (G. M.) Coronel (Tragic Theater)

Video 2: Karl de Mesa (Damaged People, News of the Shaman)

Video 3: Manix Abrera (Kikomachine, 12) [not yet uploaded]

Rarely do I feature private trips on the blog, but then, rarely do I find something so spec fic to feature. My wife and I are back from our too-brief jaunt to Singapore, and while both of us are now paupers (but oh, the wealth in books I brought home with me), I did manage to sneak in a few pictures of the top secret Singapore Death Star Project,* at the risk of life and limb:

* Yes, I know they claim it’s just a lotus shaped museum, but if you were building a weapon of planetary destruction, would you admit it?

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In this third and final part of our interview with Zarah Gagatiga, she takes us through the storied (no pun intended) history of the PBBY, the organization which she now chairs, and the state of children’s literature in the Philippines.

What can you tell us about the Philippine Board on Books for Young People (PBBY) and your work with it?

Oh my God… the PBBY has been in existence for 27 years! It has a long history. Luminaries in Philippine arts and culture founded the PBBY: Lucrecia Kasilag; Alfredo Salanga; Larry Alcala; Serafin Quiason; Virgilio Almario. Its past officers and board members included the late, great Rene Villanueva, Mailin Paterno-Locsin, Linda Nietes, Gloria Rodriguez, Angelica Cabanero, Bodjie Pascue, Beulah Taguiwalo. The CCP, the National Library and the Museo Pambata are member organizations. The current board is composed of people you don’t mess around with! It’s a formidable non-profit organization pursuing a very challenging advocacy: literacy for children and teens! Young people are a country’s greatest resource. They need looking after, or else someone like the Pied Piper might take them away.

PBBY is a pioneer in the growth and development of Philippine Children’s Literature. In the course of 27 years, PBBY has initiated literacy activities for young people and those who work and care for them: the Salanga and Alcala prizes, storytelling, workshops, exhibits, book fairs, shows and plays, etc. The first National Children’s Book Awards (NCBA), which was held just recently, is a project that expresses the PBBY mission. We have to know where the industry is, before we can move on. Being in PBBY is a dream come true.

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This is the second part of our interview with Zarah Gagatiga, literacy advocate extraordinaire. In this portion of the interview, she talks about blogging, storytelling, and her upcoming book, Tales From the 7,000 Isles: Filipino Folk Stories, which she is writing with Dianne de Las Casas.

The Blogger

Your site has been active for five years now, and was recently included in a book (”But Still They Blog“) on the evolution of librarian blogs (liblogs). Why did you decide to start your blog?

I was bored. I wanted to try something new. I want to express myself. I want to improve my writing and grammar, especially because I’m so poor at it. Very selfish reasons, actually. Hahaha!

How has your blog evolved since then?

Wow. I change layouts and designs every year. But I love the current design so it’s going to stay in a while. In terms of content, it has become more focused and it’s veering away, slowly, from content only relevant to my ego. My earlier posts were all about me. ME. ME. ME.

I guess my writing style has changed too… Oh, I don’t know! Maybe someone should evaluate my blog objectively.

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There are few librarians more prominent in the country today than Zarah Gagatiga–and yet “librarian” is but one of the many different hats she wears. Influential blogger, avid storyteller, and chair of the Philippine Board on Books for Young People, she is one of the staunchest advocates for books and literacy in the Philippines. Zarah graciously took time out from her busy schedule to respond to some questions via email, which we’ve divided into three parts, each focusing on a different role she plays. Today we speak to her about her work with libraries, both as a librarian and as an advocate.

You’ve stated before that you became a librarian in part because your mom was a librarian. What was it like, having a mother with the “keys to the kingdom”, so to speak? I bet you never ran out of books to read.

Yes, I never ran out of them. Nor will I run from them. Never

The earliest memory I have of a book my mom brought me was a storybook about a red fox and a hen. It was not Henny Penny, it was one of those American books with thick pages that smelled of dried animal skin. And the illustrations! I remember that the book was classically beautiful. Then came Dr. Seuss and Robert Palmer. She brought home some non-fiction books as well. I can still remember the big dinosaur books she borrowed when I was in 1^st grade. At the time, I was studying in a small town parish school, and books were scarce. We had a library but students would only get to go there four times a year, imagine that. My mom filled the gap.

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Oh, hey, look whose turn it is on the other end of the (figurative) microphone? Fantastic Filipina writer Rochita Loenen-Ruiz ( who is currently guest blogging at Ecstatic Days)  interviewed me, and Lavie Tidhar posted the conversation over at the World SF News Blog. Here’s an excerpt:

Q: What do you think are the obstacles or challenges that we face as Filipinos writing in a field that’s dominated by the West?

The first challenge is that, as I touched upon a little earlier, most of us Filipino speculative fiction writers are ourselves products of that domination. The books we read in our youth gave us many of the tools and techniques that enable us to be writers, but which, at the same time, might not be right for the kind of stories we now want to tell–at least not without some adaptation. Even the language many of us write in, which approximates American English, while serving as the basic tool of our profession, seems to add a layer of alienation any time we choose to write certain types of stories. You see that a lot in the komiks scene here, particularly the local superhero scene, where you can see creators struggling to decide when to use English, or when to use Filipino, or how to translate a concept or experience from one context/language to another.

There was a recent discussion with regard to the viability of the classic superhero in the Philippines–the type who only focuses on halting crime rather than effecting any social change–given that the scale of problems such as poverty and corruption here. And yet, classic superheroes are exactly what many of the creators grew up wanting to do. In the same way, I grew up wanting to write The Belgariad, or the Wheel of Time, but now that I’ve realized I want to write stories influenced by the historical Philippines rather than historical Europe, I find that there is no great body of fiction that I can turn to and build upon. (Which is one of the reasons I’m all for discovering Philippine myths and legends.) It’s a blank slate, and for a writer that is both exciting and terrifying.

The other challenges are more practical in nature, and apply more specifically to Filipinos who live in the Philippines and want to publish novels.  While the short story market is becoming more and more accessible to writers from across the globe, it’s still difficult for someone who doesn’t live in the West to get a book published in the West, even when we just factor in logistical matters, such as the fact that a writer who lives in the Philippines is less likely to be able to network at a convention, or attend a writing workshop like Clarion. The sad thing is, it’s not any easier for a Filipino writer to get a spec fic novel published here in the Philippines. Most publishers don’t appear interested in spec fic in general, and spec fic novels in particular. There are no literary agents here, nor conventions where an aspiring writer can approach an editor or publisher. That’s one reason why I believe that many authors in the future will take the self-publishing route–they simply don’t have a way to get the attention of publishers. I hope that Rocket Kapre can help change that in the future.

You can read the rest of the interview here.

Thanks to Rochita for taking time from her writing to interview me, and thanks to Lavie for sharing the interview.

It’s a little more than a month before the deadline for submissions to Alternative Alamat, and I thought it would be an opportune time to launch my second companion project. A few months back, I released the Myth List, an index of Philippine myths and legends with fantastic elements. Today, I’m happy to announce the launch of Rocket Kapre’s Philippine Pantheons page, what I believe to be–as of this writing–the most comprehensive list of Philippine Gods and Goddesses on the Internet. Yes, Wikipedia included.

It does not claim to be a comprehensive list–that being said, as far as my research can determine, this is the most comprehensive list of Philippine gods and goddesses on the Internet, with 344 individual entries. Of course, given that the Ifugao alone seem to have had deities in the hundreds, that means there is still a lot of room for expansion.

Still, it’s a good place to start, and I hope that it opens the eyes of writers to the vast potential for stories represented by our myths and legends. Many of the entries are merely names and a domain, but as Michael Chabon found himself inspired by maps “and the romantic blank of unexplored territory”, and names that were like magic spells, calling into being that which had previously not existed, so too do I hope you glean inspiration even from the sparest of entries. The West has its Thors, its Aphrodites… maybe it’s time for our own deities to shine.

How to Help:

• Spread the Word: … because this list won’t do anyone any good if no one knows it’s here. If you use the list, and it helps you with your story or komik or research, point people back to us with a link.
• Information: If you think I’ve missed a god or goddess, please leave word in the comments section here, or send me an email at rocketkapre[at]gmail.com, and tell me your source. I’ll verify it as best I can, then add it to the list if warranted.
• Art: If you’ve drawn or seen artwork of a deity online, post a link in the comments and I’ll add them to the proper entry.
• Stories: If you find a story which uses one or more of these deities as characters, let me know link in the comments and I’ll add them to the proper entry.

I did a quick-and-dirty interview with Joseph Nacino when Demons of the New Year first launched, and now I have an in-depth interview with his co-editor, horror scribe Karl De Mesa, up at Pinoy Pop–not just about Demons of the New Year, but his life and his newly released book “News of the Shaman”, published by Visprint. You can see the first part here, and the second part here. An excerpt:

Did they know from the start that you were a writer, and that you tend to write about people around you?

Yes, although maybe some of them would be surprised to see themselves in my fiction. But a lot of my friends aren’t really big fiction readers. My family doesn’t read my fiction for the most part. I’d tell them about a launch and they’d say “okay” but not show up, which is a good thing in general, because some things I’ve written, especially my non-fiction essays about growing up in the Philippine left, might make them angry.

Is it a different experience, writing about these experiences without even the venner of fiction?

Very. People have asked me why I don’t just become an overtly political writer. The truth is, hindi ako natutuwa sa ganoon eh. That’s actually the feedback I received from writing workshops: “Ikaw, ang dami dami mong material, bakit hindi ka na lang magsulat tunkol sa status ng Pililipnas?” Eh hindi talaga ako natutuwa eh.

…

When you’re dealing with taboos, with that kind of transgression, you take the reader far beyond their comfort zones. How do you ground them?

You ground them with characters who are real people, with sympathetic concerns and motivations. This is something Philip K. Dick was great at. Even monstrous creatures can have drives that people will understand: hunger, for example, is something we’re all familiar with–I used that for my were-dog story in “Tales of Enchantment and Fantasy”. Other creatures can be motivated by a need for control, say a Tikbalang in a crime family. The characters can be inhuman, but their motivations can still be human. They may have special needs, but that’s still a motivation that can be sympathetic.

I think this is one of the powers of horror: defamiliarization. That can also work to make the central form of a metaphor stronger.

—

You might also want to check out Fidelis Tan’s two part review of Demons of the New Year itself. Part one / Part two.

If there’s one theme that I’d say unites many of the stories in this year’s RP612fic, it’s this: a need for catharsis. We’re coming off a decade under an unpopular President, and while many are hopeful for the coming administration, there still remains a lot of unsettled issues, a lot of unpsent anger. Luckily, catharsis is one of the functions that fiction can undertake in the life of both writers and readers, and I hope that participating in this year’s Independence Day micro story tweet fest helped a few of us get ready for the new challenges that face us, while helping us remember what has come before.

I’d like to thank everyone who participated, especially Dominique Cimafranca who was impressively prolific during the RP612fic period. We generated over one hundred and fifteen stories over the Independence Day weekend–here are a few of my favorite stories:

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t point to Adam David’s essay on freedom, over at the Philippine Online Chronicles.

The rest of the stories run the gamut from science fiction, to horror, to fantasy (from the fantasy that means “magic” to the fantasy that means “how I wish this were true). Some are meant to be read alone, others in sequence (although there was a limit to how I could arrange them in anything but the reverse chronological order of a Twitter search.) Some aren’t stories in so much as hopes, dreams, or ideas and that’s fine too.The usual disclaimer applies: these stories are meant as fiction, and are not to be taken as allegations of actual facts, nor as statements of actual intent.

And now, beneath the cut, are the rest of the stories. (2009’s stories are here.) Enjoy, and see you all next year!

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There’s no better complement to a Spec Fic story than some good fantasy or science-fiction artwork. CG Pintor is an organization of Filipino digital painters, co-founded by Usok #1 cover artist Kevin Lapeña, and now and then we’ll do interviews with some of their members. Today we speak with Benjo Camay (The-Hand on deviantart), who contributed a piece to the illustrated edition of Usok #1, namely the art for “The Coming of the Anak-Araw” by Celestine Trinidad.

What’s the first thing you remember drawing?

I remember that I when I was 4 years old I’d always draw a scuba diver thrusting a knife unto a shark’s body.

Uhm. Why? Did you have a deep hatred of sharks or something?

Actually, I don’t really know why I did that when I was a kid… maybe sharks are just so cool to draw?

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