The home of writing: Journalism Workshop

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the best-selling "Eat, Pray, Love" gave us a hint on where our home is: that something you love more than you love yourself. Just like Elizabeth, writing has always been my home, and I am more than willing to share my writing to anyone who's willing to learn. I have been requested to conduct a five-day workshop on Journalism writing to both teachers and students in my alma mater Mercedarian School, which started last Friday. I was honored to give something back to my elementary school and was more than willing to teach the teachers and students there.

I was informed that the writing skills of both the teachers and students should be honed better for them to develop critical thinking and apt writing and comprehension skills, and so I started with the basics of writing and composition and paragraph writing. It was good enough that the teachers were very inquisitive and proved that they want to improve their writing skills by volunteering their answers every time I gave them an activity on writing. The school's guidance counselor, Mr. Ted asked very good questions that went beyond critical thinking. Other teachers raised questions and gave good answers whenever I asked them to prove their answers to my questions. 

The third leg of the workshop will be on letter writing which is very essential for the students for they shall write request letters, business letters and the like all through out high school and college. Finally for the Journalism club, the fourth and fifth lectures will be on Article writing which includes news, features, sports and editorial writing, and lay-outing and designing of a mini newspaper or newsletter.

I would not have shared this knowledge to my alma mater and to the teachers and students if not for my good foundation and training under Ms. Josephine Bonsol, school paper adviser of LHS Courier in Lagro High School who also graduated at UP Diliman and continues to write in her blog www.jobonsol.net. She has been my mentor since second year high school and I keep coming back to sit in her classes in Journalism every now and then.

Book Review: Utterly Yours, Booker Jones

I do believe in writer's block. But then I also do believe that sometimes writer's block is a product of our own inner problems, of radical changes in our lives that we can't seem to solve.

Mom was scavenging for old albums and books in their room and piled a number of old reads in the table when I found the book "Utterly Yours, Booker Jones" by Betsy Duffey, which I have read since I was in high school. The story revolves around a frustrated but hopeful at the same time writer Walter "Booker" Jones, who wants his fictional novels like Space Cows and Worms from the Planet Spaghetti to get published one day. Just like bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love Elizabeth Gilbert, the 12-year-old boy frequently annoys different publishing companies with his very bad stories and novels by sending each chapter of his book. But every time a reply goes 'We're very sorry but your story do not meet the demands of our list.' In other words, he gets rejected every time.

But the story does not only revolve around Booker's passion in writing and his failures to publish his novels, but also revolves around how he has changed when his favorite grandfather, who is also a published author and columnist, got sick and fell and moved in to their house. This meant giving up Booker's room, living and doing long division problems under the dining table with drapes and a sleeping bag, and a virtually messed up family of a hopeless mother, a busy father and a bitch 'sistoid'.

The conflict started when Booker was trapped by his best friend Germ to write a speech about the rally because the PTA wanted to change the name of the school mascot Wolf Pack into the Fighting Pickles. Booker was currently writing his book on Space Cows and he didn't seem to get the hang of writing a speech. It entailed a deadline, an anxiety, another problem that can't be solved. A writer's block.

On the day of the rally, Booker was empty-handed. However, he began to realize the importance of writing with his grandfather's clippings of columns and realized that his Pop deserves being just a nuisance and a problem in the house. He began to rearrange his room and transferred all his grandfather's things to his room, while he moved his things to the dining room where he currently lives and sleeps.

"This is your room now, Pop," he had said. The rally was looming, but he felt peace, and for the first time in a long time, an idea popped into his mind about his speech for the rally. With nothing but a pen and a rally rag, the words flowed like a river from his hands. During the rally, he was able to pull off his speech and a lot of people especially the parents were moved. It was his first successful speech, and what's more, the newspaper reporter asked him if they could publish his essay to the daily newspaper the next day. It became his first ever huge break. He was not Booker Jones, person anymore; but Booker Jones, author.

I can really relate to the book because I also love to write and I've been breathing it since elementary; I wrote fan fictions about my favorite series Dragon Ball Z when I was ten, tried to make a novel about me and my crush at 12 and joined the journalism club in high school for three years. I started to blog four years ago and I still keep writing. During high school my mentor Ms. Josephine Bonsol always gambled me to schools press conferences but I always lost. I had my huge break in 2011 when my essay was published in The Philippine Star. I joined the same essay writing contest four times and got published twice. I felt I was invincible.

But I also experienced my writer's block in third year college when I was writing a linguistics paper. Something happened and I could not seem to add anything better for my paper and ended up submitting a really terrible paper to my professors. This was a radical part of my life that I could not seem to comprehend and so my writing was also affected.

But then I regained in the rainy season of July 2014 when I was 'reset' and I realized that I love writing more than anything else--it is not just a distraction, a way to pass the time, but a passion that I will always look for because it is my home.