Magical Realism – Mythopoetry – Speculative Fiction

art by Kevin Lapeña

The other day, a young Pinay writer emailed, to ask some questions about magical realism, how I define it, which communities of writers write it, what are some books falling under this category. While the question kind of came out of nowhere, coincidentally, I’d been thinking about issues tangential to or intersecting with magical realism.

I’ve been thinking that magical realism is that thing you call ethnic literature when you don’t know what to do with their “folk” beliefs still existing and manifesting themselves in the modern day. You don’t know why those old beliefs still exist, and why the mythical and spiritual are so incorporated or fused into their everyday modern lives.

Teaching Poetic Form in Philippine Studies

I am on a search for some English material on the balagtasan. As I have previously blogged, I gave a cursory introduction to my students a couple of weeks back. What few specific things I know of balagtasan come from the transcript of a lecture given by Virgilio Almario at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at UCLA in 2003.

I have found the book Balagtasan: kasaysayan at antolohiya (Ateneo de Manila University Press), by Galileo S. Zafra, and it looks like I just have to bear down on the written academic Tagalog and stop being intimidated by it. I am having a rather invigorating email exchange with a Filipino poet and grad student at Princeton, and he is interested in my interest in Philippine poetic forms. They are dying, the creators and performers of balagtasan, he says, and certainly, such a performative poetic form (I have always loved the phrase, “con todo forma,” spoken with exuberant rolled r’s and a hand flourish) needs its performers in order to continue to live.

Save the Date: 12/06/09 PAWA Achiote Press Emerging Writers Panel @ SFPL

Craig Santos Perez has drawn up a flier (below) for our upcoming emerging writers panel at SFPL. I blogged about this a while back (read original post, which is really part of an ongoing series regarding the MFA Industrial Complex), that information and guidance about writing programs should be free and accessible to emerging writers of color, and that there are many of us in our communities with experiential knowledge to share and be a resource.

In yesterday’s blog post I wrote that the point of our literature and arts movements and orgs, from where I am standing, is not to replicate existing institutions but to build formidable institutions based upon alternative visions. I believe hardcore in literatures of resistance, communities of resistance, and cultures of resistance, and I have to believe all of my individual and collaborative work contributes to these.

Here is the 12/06/09 event information: