THE DEADLINE for the Palanca Awards this year was May 31.
The awarding of prizes was originally scheduled for November 15, but is now moved to November 30.
How did I know? Haha.
***
Anyway, if I really wanted to win a Palanca award this year, I would have prayed really hard all the months of June, July, August, September, and the first part of October while the judges were deliberating to choose the winners.
Well, I really wanted to win!
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I wanted at least one more gold medal in my collection of Palanca awards to make my final count to ten.
And I wanted it from the Hiligaynon short story category.
You see, I already have four gold medals in that category:
“Lirio” – 1998
“Candido” – 2007
“Donato Bugtot” – 2011
“Si Padre Olan kag ang Dios” – 2013.
I wanted a fifth, just for a sense of completion.
After all, it takes five Palanca first prizes to get to the Hall of Fame.
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I mean, I was already inducted in the Hall of Fame way back in 2012.
But that was for Hiligaynon stories up to “Donato Bugtot”, with help from “The Passion of Jovita Fuentes (full-length play English, 2008), and “Punctuation” (poetry for children English, 2012).
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Since 2012, I have increased my five gold medal count to nine courtesy of “Padre Olan” (2013)
“Gladiolas” (one-act play Filipino, 2014)
“The Rainbow Collection” (poetry for children English, 2015)
“Tic-Tac-Toe” (one-act play English, 2016).
Would it hurt the Palanca to award me one more gold to complete my medals to ten?
I am such a completist. Haha.
***
Before the pandemic, and the Palanca Awards freeze in 2020 and 2021, I had no wins in Palanca 2018 and 2019.
My last win was for “Ang Milagro sa Ermita” (short story Hiligaynon, 2017).
If that story won first prize, I would have already retired from the Palanca contest.
But it wasn’t meant to be.
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Because of the two-year Palanca drought, and two more years of the no-Palanca during the pandemic, I felt a great hunger to win some.
To win more than just one!
And so I wrote, and submitted, entries to six (!) categories.
You could almost hear my cry for “relevance” in the 2020s.
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Does Peter Solis Nery, the Palanca award-winning writer, still matter post-pandemic?
Does #ThePSN still have what it takes to win a Palanca?
Or is he reduced to just soc-med posts now?
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The Palanca suspense is killing me, if not many others.
And I do not know if the “big reveal” could come before November 30.
But this much I know: I want to win in the Hiligaynon short story category.
I want a gold for my story this year.
And I have done some crazy dance rituals for that to happen. Haha.
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I also know that if I win in the children’s poetry category, even if it will just be a second prize, I’d still stand proud as a promoter of children’s literature.
Most people think of me only as the great Hiligaynon short story writer so that they forget my award-winning contribution to children’s poetry in English, of which I have four:
“The Shape of Happiness and Other Poems” (second prize, 2011)
“Punctuation” (first prize, 2012)
“Those Colorful Parts” (third prize, 2014)
“The Rainbow Collection” (first prize, 2015).
Still, would it hurt the Palanca to reward my work this year another award to make it five?
Completist! Haha.
***
Incidentally, I also have a winning collection in tulang pambata/ poetry for children in Filipino.
It’s “Sa Mundo ng mga Kulisap” (second prize, 2012).
But Filipino is just not my big language.
Or maybe, it is; it’s just that there are many others who are better at it than I.
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The key to winning a Palanca Award is the will to win.
You must want it hard enough.
You must write with a purpose.
Purposeful literature is sexy./PN
