'Light on the mountain'

(Second of two parts)

How did the Silliman University National Writers Workshop start? Dr. Rowena Tiempo-Torrevillas tells the story, beginning with her father, Edilberto K. Tiempo who as a young man over half a century ago, walked barefoot across the forest trails of Cuernos de Negros (oftentimes mistakenly called Mt. Talinis by people including myself) in Negros Oriental, gathering data about troop movements and the massacres of civilians wrought by the occupying Japanese forces. He was the historical data officer for the Seventh Military District of the United States Armed Forces of the Far East. The data was brought by submarine to the troops of Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Australia, and thence to the War Department in Washington, D.C. where they were later used in, among other functions, the prosecution of war criminals at the end of the war.

Immediately following the end of the war, the American Board of Missions  gave Ed a scholarship to study in the United States and asked him what school he wanted to go to. Ed said, “I would like to go where writers are being trained how to write. I have many stories to tell, and I hope to find the best way to tell these stories. If such a school exists.”

Ed was puzzled when told, “There’s only one place for you: Iowa.”

He said, “Isn’t that where corn grow?” Yes Iowa is still where one can hear corn grow, but until today, it is associated with a man named Paul Engle. By 1946 Engle’s Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, said Rowena, was the only academic institution in the world teaching creative writing as a “transmittable craft.”

Ed and Edith Tiempo were the first non-native speakers of English to enroll in Engel’s Workshop. When they returned to Dumaguete after completing their postgraduate degrees, they founded at Silliman University the first creative writing program in Asia.  Said Rowena: “The program was two-pronged: the academic component involved a degree offered for credit, that eventually expanded to include the MFA in Creative Writing and a Ph.D. in English and Literature with a concentration in creative writing; and the Summer Writers’ Workshop, that brought fellows not only nationally, but from all of Southeast Asia.”

Engle was in Dumaguete years later to visit the creative writing program that the Tiempos had founded — and the Workshop patterned exactly after the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Rowena recalled that her parents had “earned their graduate degrees in the art of writing and teaching writing: learning above all that you can’t grow talent; you can only teach writing by example, by providing a sense of community with a essentially lonely vocation, and by lending self-confidence to each writer, showing how one can avoid the wasteful pain of trial-and-error by pointing to where the pitfalls of storytelling lie, and how to construct a poem efficiently.” 

The three-week workshop held during the summer and attended by budding and even seasoned creative writers from across the country, said Rowena, was “the good Iowa seed corn, planted across the world to grow crop after crop of sturdy hybrids.”

That summer Paul Engle visited that “hybrid plot,” a Korean poet named Ko Won was enrolled in the workshop. Paul Engle would then take Ko Won and the Filipino novelist Wilfrido Nolledo to Iowa where they formed the nucleus for what became the International Writing Program. Twenty-three years after Paul’ Engel’s visit to Dumaguete, he became Rowena’s boss, when she went to Iowa in her turn, and found herself administering the IWP.           

Over the years, Ed Tiempo, related Rowena, sought and received funding to support the Silliman Writers Workshop from such funding entities as the Ford Foundation and the Agency for Christian Literature Development based in London; through Silliman University, he would invest the funding he’d raised, and the program operated on the interest accrued from the monies from abroad, sources which expanded to include agencies in England, Switzerland, and Germany.

When the Tiempos lived abroad for sometime, under exchange professorship programs, the Workshop continued to be administered by Silliman, under the stewardship of David Quemada and the poet Myrna Pena-Reyes.

Administrative changes led the workshop to seek support from external sources during the 1990s and much of the decade previous to that. The Creative Writing Foundation, composed of workshop alumni, notably Krip Yuson, raised funds and administered the program during this period, until full support was provided annually by the College Assurance Plan (CAP) College and CAP Foundation, under Atty. Enrique Sobrepena. The support from CAP, said Rowena, came at a particularly crucial time for the Workshop, and kept the program alive for those years of hiatus from Silliman.

Three years ago, Silliman resumed full support for the program. Said Rowena: “The visionary leadership of Silliman President Ben Malayang restored the Workshop to its place within the university. “ Ben’ s goal to build an arts campus, with the creative writing center as its heart, materialized with the rising of the Silliman University Rose Lamb-Sobrepena Writers Village, as the home of the Workshop founded by the Tiempos.

*   * *

Twenty-six years ago, Rowena learned that she was being sent to Iowa in her turn, to attend the International Writing Program. The weekend before she left, she and Lem  went up to their summerhouse, about 15 minutes hard walk uphill from where the Sobrepena writers’ village stands. It was there that Rowena wrote her dissertation for her doctorate degree and two books, and Lem wrote the plays and short stories that got them into the University of Iowa. She was told by friends in Dumaguete that they could see the light from her lamp, shining down, “a single light from the mountainside, visible in the town because, back then, it was the only light one could see on a clear night, shining from these hills.”

That summer afternoon, Rowena sat on the stone steps Lem had laid onto the grassy slope of the lawn, “And I cried, knowing it would be a long time before I’d walk these hills again.”

During the intervening years, Rowena would sometimes wake up on a winter night in their home in Iowa, “shaken by a dream that I was walking into the blue-and-gold light, on the back steps of what had been the lower cottage of the Silliman mission houses. In the dream, I’d be looking up through the pine trees at the mountain peaks, and my heart would be shouting, ‘I’m home!’ ”

When Rowena spoke to the 49th Workshop Fellows four weeks ago, she talked about lighting a lamp from the Camp Lookout mountainside. She said, “It is my hope today that each of you has found that light , and from it you’ll bring glowing embers to rekindle wherever you are . . . Davao, Manila, Cebu, maybe Bahrain - wherever life leads you.”

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