Saturday, December 28, 2024

How I Became a Writer - Hope Sabanpan Yu - Filipino FilAm Series #5




From Cecilia Brainard: I am proud to share Dr. Hope Sabanpan Yu's Essay on HOW I BECAME A WRITER. All articles and photos are copyrighted by the individual authors. All rights reserved. Cecilia Brainard and PALH have permission from the authors to use their materials. 

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Dr. Hope Sabanpan Yu is a professor of comparative literature at the University of San Carlos where she also serves as the Director of the Cebuano Studies Center. She is the Commissioner for the Cebuano language of the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (KWF) and also of the Cultural Historical Affairs Commission of Cebu City (CHAC). She is a member several writers organizations: the Women in Literary Arts, Inc. - Cebu (WILA), Bathalan-ong Halad sa Dagang (BATHALAD), Mamugnaong Anak sa Dagang (MAD) and the translators' group Inotherwords Incorporated (IOW). She is a poet, fictionist, essayist and critic who works part-time in translation.

Her study Women's Common Destiny: Maternal Representations in the Serialized Cebuano Fiction of Hilda Montaire and Austregelina Espina-Moore (2009) was awarded the prestigious Lourdes Lontok-Cruz Award for research excellence in 2010. Her other scholarly works are:
 --Bridging Cultures: The Migrant Philippine Woman in the Works of Jessica Hagedorn, Fatima Lim-Wilson and Sophia Romero (2011),
--Institutionalizing Motherhood (2011)
--The Controlling Mother (2014) and The Other(ed) Woman: Critical Essays (2014) published by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts,
--This Thing of Darkness: Female Shapeshifters in Philippine and Japanese Literature (2018), -----Nature and its Persuasions: Critical Essays (2021), 
--A Comprehensive Compilation of Extant Cebuano Music with Transcription and Analysis (2022) and Mas Masaya sa Entablado: Ang Siste ng mga Piling Dula ni Piux Kabahar (2022).


 


HOW I BECAME A WRITER
Hope Sabanpan Yu




THE FAINT SWEETNESS of the ylang-ylang filled the night air. In the main bedroom, the soft creak of a wooden chair and the shuffle of slippers on the wooden floor told me my grandfather was settling in with a book. My siblings and I would gather at his feet -- wide-eyed, leaning closer as the world around us dissolved and gave way to the exciting world of talking animals in Aesop's Fables or to the labyrinthine imagination of the 1001 Arabian Nights. His voice was a deep river, flowing with wisdom and wonder, carrying foxes and herons and cunning caliphs and bewitched sultans. The stories twisted and turned, teaching lessons I barely grasped but felt in my soul, where words held power, every sentence could hold a whole universe.

 

It was through these nights that I learned the manner of stories: how a fable unfolded, each one deliberate and purposeful, how a tale could be both mirror and lamp. In those quiet and enchanted moments, the seeds of storytelling were planted deep within me, although I did not realize it yet.

 

By day, the world was a canvas of motion and discovery. Elementary school was an affair of textbooks with penciled-in answers, classrooms that smelled faintly of chalk and floor wax, and the occasional quizzes, each with its items of studied possibilities. Reading became a shared ritual where a cluster of classmates exchanged notes on memorable reads, whispering about a mysterious character or the surprise of a plot twist in the Nancy Drew series. We devoured tales of animals that spoke, courageous heroes, and distant worlds. In grade four, I had a teacher who loved to tell stories in the mid-afternoon from Philippine mythology, and my imagination ran wild with characters like the engkanto, the duwende, and the kapre which gave us goosebumps. But even then, stories felt like something more than just entertainment. They were companions, guides, a language I was slowly learning to speak. And yet, I did not write then. Words were still something I absorbed, their enormity pulling me in but never quite pushing me outward to create. Until several years later in high school, that is, with an unexpected present.


At a corner grocery store close to where I lived, I made friends with someone I occasionally ran into each time I bought a chocolate bar or ice cream cone. We just started with smiles and hellos. I sort of had a crush on him. He was an engineer, ten years older than I was. Though I learned that he had a girlfriend, I still fell for him and looked out for him when I failed to find him at the store.


One day he gave me a piece of lined yellow paper. On it was a poem, scrawled in a neat script — a cascade of words that spoke of time bringing a gift from the stars subtly given. It was simple yet profound, and it unsettled something in me. What does one do with a poem gifted to them? The act of receiving it felt incomplete, as though the poem was less a gift and more of a beckoning. So, I wrote back but never gave it to him. The lines felt clumsy at first, the words that stumbled and fell, rhymes that clanged rather than sang. But something about the process felt alchemical. I could take a blank page and, with the pen, fill it with echoes of my thoughts, my dreams, my questions. Responding to that poem was like prying open a locked door, and on the other side lay the boundless terrain of poetry. I wandered through its fields, scribbling at every turn. The more I wrote, the more I realized the words I was chasing were not always my own. They were fragments of my grandfather’s voice, of stories shared in school, of rhythms I had absorbed from the books and the air around me. 


And then poetry, too, began to shift. The compactness of a verse was not always enough for the worlds I wanted to explore. The imagery and emotion I had honed began to stretch outward, finding form in characters, in dialogue, in the tangled arcs of short stories. It was terrifying at first. Where poems were distilled lightning, short stories were sprawling storms with thunderheads to navigate and sudden downpours to endure. But they also offered something new: the chance to inhabit other lives, to construct worlds from scratch, to play god with words.

 

University marked the next turning point in my writing. As features and literary editor of the school organ, The New Builder, I began writing short stories in earnest. One of them, titled “Once in a Lifetime,” found its way into print, a quiet but profound affirmation of my efforts. Still, studies consumed much of my time, and writing became an occasional indulgence, with scraps of poetry that rarely found their way into publication but were filed religiously along with others.


It wasn’t until I entered a contest and my poem “Ibabaw sa Kakahuyan” was selected and published in a newspaper that I thought, perhaps, I had the makings of a writer. And this was certainty solidified when I joined my first writers' workshop, the Cornelio Faigao Memorial Writers' Workshop, after having been rejected the previous year with a submission for poetry. I submitted a story titled “The Driver’s Daughter” and it was there, amid the critique and camaraderie that I began to see writing as more than a solitary pursuit. Soon other workshops followed, scattered across the country, each one widening my understanding of the literary world and amazing me with the richness of the other fellows’ writings and the brilliance with which the seasoned writers critiqued the works.

 

Still, life has its own stories to tell, and for a time, mine shifted. I continued to write occasionally, but married life became a priority. My vehicle for storytelling became the bedtime tales I spun for my little daughter – when I was not reading from my own copy of Aesop’s Fables; stories conjured up from my imagination and populated with creatures from Philippine mythology like the tikbalang, aswang, and the manananggal. When I found myself free in the afternoons and wove a story, my daughter’s wondrous eyes reflected back the magic I had first discovered as a child. Then I moved on to writing children’s stories that took on issues with the environment. The fairy child that lives in the trees whose skin is brown. She’s small but fierce, her laughter the sound of leaves rustling in the wind. But her world is shrinking, as tree after tree is felled to the sound of saws cutting through, the earth trembling under the clearing taking place. She is a child of the forest, and her home is vanishing. When she meets two schoolboys one late afternoon, she is able to tell them about her plight and together, they learn that to protect the fairy’s home is to save something irreplaceable.

 

And then there’s the boy who swims in the sea. Born with webbed hands and feet, he is a curiosity, a child the villagers whisper about. But in the water, he’s a marvel, moving like a fish, speaking to dolphins and fish in a language only they understand. The coral reefs are his playground, his sanctuary, until the day he learns of how the other fishermen in his village earn their keep – through dynamite fishing. He cannot stop the fishermen alone, but he can show his village what harm dynamite can lead to aside from the life underwater and the wonder that is being destroyed.

 


This was one of the best times of my life as spinning these tales seemed effortless to do – a child sees the world without the armor we grownups wear, and feel its weight with unfiltered intensity. But the child also carries an immense capacity for hope, for action, for dreaming a world better than the one I’ve inherited. That’s why the brown fairy child exists, why the boy with webbed feet swims through my imagination. They’re sort of a bridge between the magic of a story and the sharp edges of reality.

 

In time, my husband and I ventured into business, a new chapter that demanded its own kind of creativity and diligence. Writing faded to the background, surfacing only in fleeting moments, with a scribbled line now and then, an idea tucked away for later. It wasn’t until after an operation to remove a twisted ovarian cyst that I found myself in a rare stillness, a period of rest that became a period of reckoning. It was then, in the quiet hours of recovery, that I realized what I had always known deep down: I wanted to become a writer.

 

The decision was met with contestation from family members who saw no future in it. “There’s no money in creative writing,” they said. “Writers starve.” They urged me to stick to business, to the pragmatic path we had built together. But something in me refused to yield. Against their doubts, I applied to a Master’s program abroad but opted out at the last minute from choosing the creative writing path. When I was accepted, the practical side of me—the one that had run a business, balanced budgets, and calculated risks—found a compromise. I chose to pursue the research track, reasoning that research funds could support my creative endeavors. In this way, I wove together the practical and the poetic, the pragmatic and the passionate, carving out a path that was uniquely my own.

 

While pursuing my graduate studies in Literature, I continued writing creatively. During the hectic demands of academic life, I continued to write poems, small bursts of reflection and longing. These poems became a collection under the title Paglaum/Hope, a testament to the resilience I had found in words. Later, I published another collection; one that spoke to my views as a woman and my experiences navigating the shifting roles life had given me. In total, I authored four poetry collections, each one a chapter in the unfolding narrative of my creative life.

 

At the same time, academic writing began to take root. Papers written to fulfill class requirements grew into published articles, and the mandate to contribute to scholarly discourse subtly shaped my approach to writing. I seriously began presenting papers at conferences, stepping into the world of academic inquiry with the same curiosity that had first drawn me to storytelling. By the time I entered a doctorate program, I was weaving between academic and creative writing, letting each inform and enrich the other.

Academic writing begins with the seed of a question. For me, it is often one that burrows its way into my thoughts and refuses to leave, like a bone that needs to be chewed on. That first question revolved around Philippine-American women writers, their lives, their words, their diasporic narratives. What happens when these women, fractured by history and geography, write their way toward belonging? What truths do they uncover in the gaps of continents, in the hyphens of their identities?

The joy begins in the chase, combing through databases, chasing the flicker of a citation that might lead me somewhere significant. I read through articles, pulling at threads that dangle enticingly from paragraphs, noting phrases that glimmer with possibility. Following each thread is like a treasure hunt in the library: shelves of books with call numbers become coordinates on a map where the connection can continue. I feel like an explorer with each article in a book from the shelves feeling like a step closer to something even more profound, something hidden waiting to be uncovered to complete the story I speculate can be told. There is exhilaration in the company of scholars, whether dead or alive, whose works have gone ahead of my own; in poring over a study and finding lines that sing with recognition.

 

As the sources accumulated in this laborious process, the synthesis of voices ― mine and those of others, with notes spread around me like a map of stars, the constellations revealed themselves. A writer’s reflection on exile becomes a point of connection to another’s musings on the imposition of English in a foreign land. Themes of food and poetry emerged as anchors, grounding these diverse narratives. As a picture took shape, a new angle on an old discourse, a fresh lens through which to see, I became even more excited. But there were moments of frustration as well; especially with dead ends, the paragraphs that refused to cohere, which as time passed I realized were part of the process, the necessary resistance that sharpened the joy of discovery. When the writing finally flowed, when the ideas stuck in place, it was like the first breath of dawn after a sleepless night.

 

When a draft is finished, I am elated and emptied. The paper now exists outside of me, a fragile thing that carries my thoughts into the world. I imagine it someday in a journal or perhaps in the hands of another scholar, sparking something in them, the way others’ writings have ignited my own curiosity.  The joy of academic writing is at its heart the joy of creation. It is the magic of taking fragments of thought and shaping them into a whole. It is the delight of conversation across time and space, of listening and responding. And it is the hope that, in this weaving of ideas, we might come to understand something new about ourselves, about each other, about the world.

The same can be said of the delight in weaving stories and somehow, with this realization writing was no longer just a response. It became a need, a way of making sense of the chaos both outside and within myself. Writing is the map I use to navigate life’s labyrinth, the mirror in which I search for my reflection.

 

When I think back to those childhood evenings, to my grandfather’s voice reading a fable, I understand what I did not then. He was not just telling us stories; he was passing on a literary inheritance. And when that friend gifted me a poem, he handed me a key to unlock that inheritance. My journey towards becoming a writer meant listening with my whole being ― with my ears, yes, but also with my skin and soul because the story does not always announce itself in words. It can come in the texture of light through a glass window or in the rhythm of waves rushing to the shore. I have many of these things stored like seeds in my pocket. The writing is never perfect; it is but an ever-reaching, straining towards a truth that flickers just beyond my grasp.

 

Embracing this pursuit, chasing the glimmer even as it eludes me, to know that the beauty lies in the trying has been a lifelong endeavor.


 

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