TRAVELS (and more) WITH CECILIA BRAINARD: How I Became a Writer - John Jack G. Wigley

From Cecilia Brainard: I am proud to share Dr. John Jack G. Wigley'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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Professor John Jack G. Wigley, Ph.D., is the author of seven books and co-author of a number of textbooks on literature and creative writing. Presently, he is a literature professor at the Faculty of Arts and Letters, a Research Fellow of the UST Research Center for Culture, Arts, and the Humanities (RCCAH), and a Resident Fellow of the Center for Creative Writing and Literary Studies (UST-CCWLS). He was a former Director of the UST Publishing House and Chair of the UST Department of Literature.

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A Writer’s Journey Through Memoir Writing

John Jack G. Wigley

I already have seven books – two memoirs, two books of creative nonfiction, a short story collection, a novel, and a translation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. Some of them have been recognized as outstanding books in local and national book awards. Although I have tried my hand at writing in different genres, I guess I am most remembered for writing memoirs. The first two books I wrote, Falling into the Manhole and Home of the Ashfall, were memoirs. This is my journey of becoming a writer through the writing of memoirs.

THE BEGINNING

I developed an early love for literature as a child. While most boys my age would play tumbang preso or shoto or climb guava trees and catch spiders under the scorching heat of the midday sun, I would get the storybook my mother gave me during Christmas, and holler at the young kids, about four or five years old, to come and gather around the wooden staircase of Lolo Jessie. I would borrow my neighbor's kiddie blackboard, ruler, and chalk and read passages from the storybook aloud. I would bang on the board if I saw inattentive kids who seemed uninterested in listening to my retelling of Why the Pineapple Has Many Eyes or Chicken Little. I would ask the kids who said what and what happened to whom in the story. They would answer in unison as I flashed illustrations from the book. I was fascinated by the stories I read to them, totally lost in the world of Pina, the disobedient child, and Chicken Little, the innocent fowl who thought the world was over after an acorn fell on his head.

One day, I thought to myself, I will be writing my own stories.

THE DECISION TO WRITE CREATIVE NONFICTION

I turned to creative writing, specifically nonfiction writing, because of advice from a dear friend. He said that I have a “natural gift of story‑telling.” I didn’t believe this at first. Although I had taken enough units of creative writing both in my master's and doctoral studies, I do not consider myself a writer. I have always considered myself a performer, having some background in the performing arts and being a former speech teacher. However, a friend of mine, in one of our meetings in Café Adriatico, Malate (“conclaves” as we fondly call them), told me that I have a knack for telling stories. He told me, “Since you are biracial, born a few hundred meters from Clark Air Base, I bet you have a bag of personal stories to tell. Why don’t you start writing them down?”

I did write essays and poems as far back as high school but didn’t have the confidence to have them critiqued or even to apply to be a fellow in creative writing workshops. I felt my writing was amateurish. But as I grew older, my fears subsided. In the end, what remains is my desire to tell the stories and be heard. I guess it is important for me to hear my own stories in my own voice, without fear or embarrassment.

As I started writing, I realized that having a bagful of stories to tell is not enough. The more significant chunk of the problem lies in the telling of these stories. Sometimes, I would wake up in the middle of the night when I would feel this “itch” of memory waiting to be written down. But as I would start writing it, I’d be suddenly stumped, sometimes looking out the window for hours. I couldn’t find the right words to describe a memory. No descriptive detail to illustrate the remembrance. All that would remain was the “itch.”

I would make an outline of those memories and write them down on a memo sheet. I said to myself, I will deal with them later when the stories are finally ready to be told. I was pretty sure that that time would come. But then the memos only piled up inside an envelope. They would remain untouched and unwritten for years.

THE PROBLEM OF MEMORY

For me, the act of mentally recounting the past has always been easy but extremely difficult to do in writing. One has to search internally—what is in one’s mind and heart about these recollections and how one felt about them when they were happening – and investigate tangible objects to check the veracity of these memories.

I started browsing through my photo albums to help me reconfigure the past. The pictures initially were a big help. By looking at them, I could return to the exact space and time when the sights and scents were real. However, I eventually discovered that pictures are just visual representations of these occurrences. They can only provide superficial references about the memory. Because memory is fleeting, the pictures can only do so much. I have discovered that memories, like pictures, can only help remember what you want to remember. It is selective. Everything else is a haze.

I would also have conversations with friends I grew up with and family members who, despite recognizing the narratives I wanted to write about, had rather different versions and/or recollections of the stories. They might well have accused me of fabrication. I realized, too, that my family and friends might interpret this confessional writing as self‑indulgent or self‑absorbed.

I went back to the places I had been to, the settings of the narratives—the movie house, the school, the church, some of the houses we lived in, even the manhole, which, surprisingly, is still uncovered. I am amused at the thought that perhaps I am the only one who remembers these things the way they were, or in a certain way, from a different perspective. Perhaps everything that I remember has not only been forgotten or obliterated by family and friends; perhaps they did not happen at all.

I realized that mulling over these stories in my head would not help me in any way. So, I forced myself to write. Looking at the paper before me, with the pen in my right hand, I felt it was the right time to write these stories. I looked at the memo sheets and figured them out one by one. With a deep sigh, I started writing. Never mind the rules and conventions of writing. I will deal with them later. After writing several personal narratives, I learned that the past is a bleak universe. I wanted to picture the past as a perfect and uncorrupted space. But as I swam along its depths, my perceptions changed. Unraveling the past made me realize two important things— first, the past could be altered by someone who tries to revisit it, and second, the past is never in a fixed‑time continuum.

As a writer, I know that he risks falsifying his accounts if one wishes to play around with the facts. But the present carries only residues and remains of the past, so when one tries to write about it, he won’t be able to actually recapture the past completely. This brought me to the idea that much as I would like to remember the past for what I deem it was, I can only write about what it meant to me as a child then and what it means to me as an adult now. I would discover in my later readings that Annie Dillard, a respected memoirist, calls this “fashioning the text.” Eventually, my writing work replaces the memories I keep about my past. I did my best not to misrepresent things and to be as truthful as possible. I have also examined what “false memories” might be and discarded them.

MY POETICS AS A CREATIVE NONFICTION WRITER

Most of the narratives I wrote revolve around one overarching theme – the initiation of the persona or the “I” – to the “first times.” Initiation is one of fiction and nonfiction's favorite and most common themes. Ernest Hemingway and N.V.M. Gonzalez used this in their many stories like “The Killers” and “Children of the Ash Covered Loam,” respectively. There is something about “first-time” stories that will always haunt the person to whom “they” happened. As a writer, I find these “first-time” stories naturally provide fertile material for memoir writing.

Under the wings of Milagros Tanlayco and Ophelia Dimalanta, considered vanguards of New Criticism at UST, I was exposed to everything I know about form: epiphany, organic unity, the objective correlative, etc. I may have patterned my narratives using fiction’s narrative arc – exposition, rising action, climax, denouement. In the first parts of the narratives, the “I” is somehow enmeshed in some kind of struggle or unmanageable conflict. Then, the persona finds some kind of strength, either physical, emotional, or mental, from the constraints of his own circumstances and experiences an epiphany at the end. Perhaps I am particularly drawn to characters in literature who, like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, Meggie Cleary in The Thornbirds, or Harlan Brown in The Frontrunner, are initially defeated by some events that are bigger than they are but who wins in the end because of their sheer determination and unwavering faith.

They were my character heroes. When I revisited my own narratives, I was amused to see some similarities between myself and them, even if my conflicts seemed trivial compared to theirs.

MY POLITICS AS A WRITER

I have always felt different. I have been carrying an American‑sounding family name, which belonged to a race that was not known to me. This did not give me a comfortable feeling when I was growing up. I remember one of my teachers joked about my surname when I was in fourth grade. He said that I might be the heir apparent of the biggest company that manufactured the Juicy Fruit and the Double Mint Gums. I sheepishly answered that that name was Wrigley, spelled with an “r.” “Your father may have been the bastard son then,” he quipped. I never responded again. It became too difficult for me to explain the mystery of my origin.

As a child, I wanted so much to blend with the others. My pledge, my dream was to look and be the same as others. To just keep going and not be noticed because of how I look and how my family name is pronounced and not have to explain why this is so – that would have been such a relief. I never wanted to be different, yet I always felt different.

I grew up hearing the gossip that my mother was a prostitute. She might have met my father in a bar and bore two illegitimate sons – my brother and I. I had a half‑sister and a half-brother who did not at all look like me. Classmates and neighbors would call me names like “mestisung bangus” and “anak ng Kano, pero made in the Philippines.” I did not fully understand the implications of such epithets at that time.

I also grew up with practically no money. Mother, who had not finished school, had no stable job and had four children to raise, mainly relied on the kindness of relatives and friends. My sister, who was the eldest, had to work at sixteen years old. It was a good thing that I got monthly support from the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, a non-government agency that catered to helping Amerasian children get an education. This helped me get through kindergarten to college.

Growing up gay is also another hurdle I had to overcome. I already felt different because of the color of my skin and the way my family name sounded. And then, this. I didn’t know what this was. I didn’t know the word at that time. I didn’t know anyone who was like me. All I knew was that I was different because I felt different. The friends I hung out with were girls or the kids who were my “students” on Lolo Jessie’s stairs. My male classmates would call me “shokeng tisoy,” and “ay, manay,” as they flipped their hands and swayed their hips.

Looking back, I realize now that these hurdles were blessings in disguise. They have become the rich material I needed for writing. I have analyzed the interrelationship of race (because I am half‑white), class (because I was born poor), and gender (because I am gay), how these “structures” have shaped my experiences and how they have provided me with the “voice” I am to use in telling my stories. I use “voice” here as the metaphor that appropriately comes from challenging the silence that has enveloped me for many years.

While I did not understand then – how I might have been marginalized because of my race, class, and gender – I have come to comprehend through the writing of these stories. The writing is a way to address these forms of oppression and a strategy to emancipate myself. These writings have become my tangible attempts at self-preservation.

Secondly, these memoirs are an approach to uncovering, rediscovering, and recovering the past. So many of the experiences I had in the past were just plain memories. Initially, I thought of them as a pile of completed events and encounters that will no longer be associated with the present. I did not understand or, at least, did not give much thought to the consequences or effects of these events and encounters. Writing about them gives me a chance to revisit them and understand and flesh out who I really was when these were happening. Memoirs are, after all, literary representations of memory.

I kept a diary when I was thirteen and a first-year high school student. There, I would write all my activities and the rantings of a typical teenager about his life and the world he lived in. But then life got boring. I felt that I was writing the same entries repeatedly – boy crushes, school assignments and projects, the things that made me happy or worried, the kids with whom I had quarrels, etc. There was nothing new to write about. Also, I feared my sister and brothers would discover my innermost thoughts and secrets. So, I decided to stop keeping a diary. My only writing experiences were the articles and essays I had to finish for our school paper. I was a member of the editorial board of our student paper, both in high school and college.

But I knew deep down that one day, I would write my personal stories. At that time, I only wrote in English. I never wrote in Filipino, Kapampangan, or Bicolano, even if I was fluent in both oral and written languages. I guess I was one of those who believed that English was the only language that mattered. My high school, college, and graduate school English teachers were my heroes. I used to think that the only measure of intelligence was the ability to speak and write in English.

However, my adviser told me that I am equally good, if not better, in Filipino. In our daily conversations, she would catch my attention whenever I say phrases like “pinanday na siya ng panahon” or “nagtutunggali ang dilim at liwanag.” She would ask me, “What did you say?” Sometimes, I would roll my eyes and fail to remember what I said because of instant self-consciousness. She encouraged me to write in Filipino. “You don’t know that your command of the language is good, and that’s beautiful because it flows naturally to you.” Eventually, the succeeding books I wrote were in Filipino.

I wrote these narratives because I felt that the understanding of my past would help me better understand myself today. Maybe these memoirs I wrote will provide me with a depiction of what Germans call Bildung – what I have learned so far in my journey. In a sense, I am still looking for answers. Perhaps, I thought, I would find some of them as I wrote these stories.

I wrote these narratives because the need stemmed from a more profound necessity to clarify myself – to reflect, to examine personal demons, and to reassess myself.

MY WRITING STRATEGIES

I have realized that all my narratives contain the element of humor, even the ones that were difficult to confess, such as the narratives on my first discovery of the cinema and the initial experience of watching the Miss Universe pageant. At first, I didn’t intend them to be funny. They were written this way because that was how I remembered them.

In the introduction to his book Inventing the Truth: the Art and Craft of Memoir (1985), William Zinsser says: “Humor is the writer’s armor against hard emotions—and therefore, in the case of memoir, one more version of the truth.” (4) When I became conscious about memoir writing, I rewrote some of the narratives, injecting humor into them. This has become my tone; it has become my voice – humorous, to an extent, self‑deprecating. Humor cushions the abrasive edges of the experience. It prevents the story from being too morbid or tragic. I wanted to capture the innocence of who I was as a child. As a child, all one cares about is whether his mother will buy him ice cream or let him play outside. One is not yet conscious of internal conflicts or social injustice.

As a writer, I think this is how I want to portray the subject, who is me in the narratives. I guess I might be considered a happy person. Students, employees, and lovers find me funny even when I am dead serious. However, I also know that happiness is a camouflage. In comedy, the tears are consistently below the surface. The good thing about being funny is that people are instantly drawn to you. The unfortunate thing is that you cannot easily be taken seriously.

There seems to be some bias against comedy in literary circles. In literary awards, very few humorous or funny stories win. Perhaps they are not taken as seriously as tragic stories by judges of contests. However, humor is a strategy that marginalized people utilize to cope with even the most trying of times. It is the language of the oppressed. As a child growing up plagued by so many insecurities, I realize now that being funny and having a cheerful disposition helped me overcome all the trials I had to experience.

So, conscious or not, my stories will always reveal something funny or humorous. As a writer of humorous narratives, this is my blessing and my curse. However, I believe that, ultimately, one is what one writes.

I found out the importance of the present in uncovering the past. I used to think that the past is past. It is constant, and one cannot change it. One cannot go back to it no matter how hard he tries. Later on, I realized that over the years, the personal stories I had kept inside my head had changed so much that I could no longer distinguish between memory and imagination. Did a thing actually happen? Or did I unconsciously embellish and distort? In other words, the present has altered the past. I need the present to talk about my past. But I also need the past to explain my present. Both the past and the present are necessary when writing personal narratives, especially memoirs.

I had to change the names of some people in my stories.

Narratives are told from a specific point of view – mine – and persons' privacy issues would therefore be compromised. I understand that there might have been other versions of these narratives, if they are told from their perspective. So, I intentionally changed their names to protect them.

I wanted to write several short personal narratives instead of one long narrative. I do not see my life story as a single entity following a specific linear course. In fact, I see different and variegated versions of myself who could well be different characters in conflict, enacting different plots – the “I” never being the same again. When we recollect events in our past, do we not only do so in broken and fragmented parts and not in toto or as complete, organic wholes? Life is not linear and progressive. Neither are my narratives.

The stories I have written focus not on a life lived in its entirety from birth to the present. They are vignettes—fragments of a perceived life story. But I have arranged them in roughly chronological order – because I believe that the reader will be better able to participate in the narratives, i.e., to engage with the experiences narrated, if he or she can “place” them within the context of the phases of my life.

The pronoun “I” is very evident in all the narratives because they deal mainly with my feelings in the circumstances I describe – getting stuck in the manhole, listening to the Miss Universe pageant with ears pressed to the wall, watching a Nora Aunor movie inside a dim movie house for the first time. More important than the events themselves are my feelings and impressions as they took place as a child and my insights into them now as an adult.

I have titled my first book, “Falling into the Manhole: A Memoir,” not only because there is a narrative in the collection with this title but also because I am deeply fascinated by the concept of falling and the steps people take to get up from the mire. When I fell and was stuck in the manhole for a time, I had a different view of the world – vehicles were more prominent, people were taller, and everything seemed ready to swallow you up. It was a frightening feeling. When I was a child, I had that same kind of feeling. Everybody was smarter, older, stronger, taller, and better looking than me. But I guess I chose to survive. I got up from the pit.

Sometimes, we all fall into pits of self‑hate, which is why the manhole is a metaphor for my narratives. We just have to remind ourselves that after we fall into the manhole, we need to get out of it.

I have appropriated an “I” who seems to derive pleasure in relating his most embarrassing moments, “washing his dirty laundry,” so to speak. This is not mere self‑indulgence. The “I” does not wallow. He picks himself up, and the same voice is that of someone wounded who is a survivor. And I hope this voice resonates through all the narratives.