Clarion 2014, week 4: In which everything breaks down and is eased back together

Before the actual post starts, let's be clear here: Week Four Syndrome is a thing. But one will never be prepared for it no matter how many Clarion blogs one reads. I know I certainly wasn't. In general, it's usually the week when all the physical, mental, emotional, and psychological exhaustion comes to a head in…

Clarion 2014, week 3: Reaching for and seeing stars, and writing with them out

There it is, real life is already catching up. I'd been trying to write this post these last few days, but I was simply too busy with work and technological failures to do so. I think that after Clarion, the challenge is reconciling the disparate sizes of two different parts of your life: re-learning to see…

Clarion 2014, week 2: Ready? Let’s dial everything up to 11

Every day this week, I’m going to blog about a week in Clarion (which honestly feels like a semester each). I took the least amount of pictures during Week 2 (also, my phone malfunctioned before all of the pictures it lost could sync to my Facebook account), so I'm just going to pepper the post…

Clarion 2014, week 1: All things shiny and new, raring to go

Every day this week, I'm going to blog about a week in Clarion (which honestly feels like a semester each). I suspect my first few posts will have more delineated days, as everything was so new and left sharp impressions; the days for the other weeks will blur into longer paragraphs, probably. Apparently, my class…

A funny thing happened while I was at Clarion: On Filipinoness in writing

  So, one of the grandest adventures of my life ended a few days ago. I'm back home and my jet lag and letting everything soak in and reconsidering a lot of things. I may not have blogged during all my time there like I planned, but I think I'll be posting a series of…

A busy bookworm’s mid-year resolution

So here I am following the tweets of my Clarion classmates like a creepy stalker, when I come across one thread concerning two of them talking about how many books and short stories they've read this year. One guy's read 20 books, the other one 8 (although he says he's read more short stories). I…

In which I battle with my heritage of smallness, pre-Clarion

*It is not within the scope of this post to define exactly what Filipino culture is, on the whole and overall. I will not attempt it because I do not know and because I may not be able to catch myself from thinking Tagalog-centric thoughts that will discredit the other regions, tribes, and languages. The Philippines is…

This is how much I’ve begun to obsess about Clarion

I've been wolfing down blog posts from previous Clarion grads, I've read Kate Wilhelm's Storyteller, and I just got through Catherynne M. Valente's latest story collection (review up soon). Been scouting around for more of the short fiction of my instructors-to-be. Waiting on my inbox for days with a new email from the workshop coordinator. Of…

Book Review: ‘Storyteller’ by Kate Wilhelm

I never thought I'd get to read Kate Wilhelm's Storyteller: Writing Lessons and More from 27 Years of the Clarion Workshop for reasons other than a passive interest in how the Clarion Workshops came to be. But now that I actually stand a damn good fighting chance at going to Clarion San Diego, Storyteller immediately rose to the top…

Clarion UCSD 2014

I got accepted into the 2014 Clarion Writers' Workshop in the University of California, San Diego.