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BY PETER SOLIS NERY
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Monday, January 16, 2017
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ONCE there was a woman who worked as director of a publishing company in Manila that produced very respectable Filipiniana books. She was nearing retirement, and was thinking she had more years in her to do the thing she loved, which was to produce books and help authors. So, she planned to retire from the company, and with her retirement money, invest on her own publishing house. She did what she wanted, and gave birth to Giraffe Books, a sometime key player in the publishing of Filipiniana right before and after the new millennium.
After 20 years or so, Giraffe Books is now sold, and dissolved; but the things this great woman did has been the stuff of legend in Philippine publishing that quite early on in the history of Giraffe, she was given the Lifetime Achievement Award in publishing by the Manila Critics Circle, no doubt in great part because of her good job and forward-thinking ideas while head of her former company.
The woman was Gloria F. Rodriguez, and she worked for New Day Publishers before establishing her own Giraffe Books in 1993. I always think of her as my publisher because she gave me my break in publishing.
In college, in my junior and senior years in Biology, I was editor of Pagbutlak, the student publication of the College of Arts and Sciences. Although my forte at that time was journalism, and news writing in particular, I got mixed up with the literary bunch, especially with the poets Felino S. Garcia, Jr. and Evee Huervana who were my seniors at UPV.
I’ve always admired Felino’s writing, but between him and me, I would still want to be editor. At Pagbutlak’s qualifying exams, I ranked number one, largely because of my campus journalism background from high school, no doubt. Felino came in second, with a lot of literary flair. He was a year ahead of me in college, and came from the Social Sciences Division.
I was on my third year of Biology, and poised to make yet another career record as just the second Biology student to edit the college paper. Can I handle it? Or, do I give way and give the editorship to a more senior and seasoned writer like Felino?
I decided I was ambitious, and justified my choice to be the editor by rationalizing that the whole paper is not just poetry and creative writing. So, I took on the challenge and asked Felino to be my Associate Editor. During my time, the Editor-in-Chief was first offered the job by the Dean. Then, on the basis of the result of the qualifying exam, which showed each writer’s strength and expertise, the editor composed and elected his/her staff.
I’ve known Felino’s reputation as a writer from the previous issues of the Pagbutlak, and I have always been awed. But I guess, when I came out number one in the staff qualifying exam, he had no choice but to be awed by me, too. We became fast friends, and he was my biggest defender in more ways than one. There’s a college Comelec story, but that’s really another story for another time.
I love Felino; he always supported my decisions as editor-in-chief, so we ended up going around traveling. When we went to UP Los Baños and formed Pahayag, the alliance of various college publications from all over the UP System, Felino pushed me to be the national treasurer. If there is/was a Congressman Teddy Casiño, and he was from UP, he was our Pahayag president. And I think there is/was a Juliet Labog connected with the Philippine Daily Inquirer; she was the vice president or secretary.
So, anyway, with Felino as my ally, and he was a prolific writer, too, we produced a record breaking, or record making, four issues in an academic year. That year, under my watch, Pagbutlak also won as Best College Publication at the College Press Awards (COPRE) in Region VI. The win was to end the 15- or 16-year drought of the Pagbutlak at the COPRE.
For my work at Pagbutlak, I, of course, won another Iwag Award for Outstanding Campus Journalism from the Philippine Information Agency. I won my first Iwag Award upon graduation from high school, three years prior, when the agency was still called Office of Media Affairs. If you don’t remember, the name change was caused by the first EDSA Revolution and the first Aquino administration.
Because Felino was writing a lot of poetry at that time, and he was pushing for a literary folio, or at least a literary issue, if funds cannot afford a folio, I started writing my own poetry, too. Since, I did not understand poetry as much as Felino did, I opted for the more dramatic stuff and wrote about the street children, and children in conflict or difficult situations.
My writing was steep on social realism and relevance; while Felino’s work was soaring with eroticism and great metaphors. That’s why I always think of him as the bigger poet. My work is quite pedestrian; but in fairness to me, my works always attracted people. It’s like I am the easier read, and I give my readers something graspable and satisfying. They love me!
Emboldened by that thought, I continued to write “poems” about abused and neglected children in the Hiligaynon; and towards the end of my university days, I started translating them into English because, well, I wanted to be a published writer, and there were no Hiligaynon book publishers at that time.
Right after I was out of college, I started sending my poetry manuscript around in Manila. This is the untold story of Peter Solis Nery: if you think I was always a winner, that’s not very true. My first book, I Flew a Kite for Pepe, suffered at least six rejections, maybe seven, before it reached the desk of Mrs. Rodriguez, my publisher. (To be continued)/PN
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