When I was a kid, I thought that the popular Cops and Robbers Game was such a bore. Surely there was something more fun that just sitting in a circle while a “killer” slaughters “villagers” through death winks?
So I made my own interactive version where three groups of “cops”, “robbers”, and “children” chased each other; faked their identities; and engaged in an intense trade of fire tree flowers, sticks, and golden leaves.
My addiction to creating new things came in handy when I was studying Creative Writing in Ateneo de Manila. There I wrote a poem about my first pimple, another poem about a seductive apple, and a Mallarmé-inspired concrete poem about insanity.
For my fiction class, I wrote short stories about a dystopian society that went crazy for gory Barbie dolls, a chick lit short story (with a feminist twist in the end) about a woman CEO who had to embark on a mad hunt for a husband before her ovaries succumbed to cysts, and a short story about a kinky carnival that puts the concept of freedom into question.
With such written pieces, not only did I graduate Cum Laude, but I also received Ateneo’s Creative Writing Program Award. After college, I decided to become a lifestyle writer, and since then, I have been published in The Philippine Daily Inquirer, The Philippine Star, Cosmopolitan Magazine, and FemaleNetwork.com.
Now I work as an art reporter for a newspaper. I cover art exhibits, plays, cultural events, and more. I have the best job in the world, but I can’t kick the habit of creating, so I decided to build Freewriting Adventures—a rebel in the midst of classroom-bound writing workshops.
To write creatively, I believe that the learning process must be creative as well. That’s why I’m going to free you from the four corners of your classroom and unleash you into the world. Immersed in the grit of reality, we will write what we see, hear, and feel. Experience will be our ink; the everyday, our muse.
This is the process that I teach because I am an experiential writer. I have a knack for processing, analyzing, and verbalizing personal experience. I am also drawn to ordinary things, to the ugly and unappreciated, to kooky streets, to unglamorous lives.
