Writers, wherever they are in the world, are always compelled to write about their homeland/s, whether tackling the diaspora, the racial divide, or ancillary matters that conjure home.

As far as five Filipino-American writers were concerned, this was very much true.

A literary forum organized by the University of Santo Tomas Center for Creative Writing and Literary Studies, “The Filipino-American Project: Writers in Conversation,” was held last July 23 at the Benavides Building, UST campus.

The forum featured Amalia Bueno, author of the poetry collection “Gabriela’s Daughters”; Fidelito Cortes, Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University; M. Evelina Galang, a teacher of creative writing at the University of Miami; R. Zamora Linmark, an associate professor in creative writing at the University of Hawaii and the University of Miami; and Lara Stapleton, author of the short story collection, “The Lowest Blue Flame Before Nothing.”

Galang, who has done research about comfort women in the Philippines, said that it is important for her to write in the perspective of a Filipina living in the United States.

“In the United States, trying to write stories about the all-Americans, I found myself when I dig deep I really try to write stories [which] comes from the heart of a Filipino-American,” she said, adding that she considered herself an American-born and raised as a Filipino.

For Stapleton, being a mixed-race person living in the US certainly had a lot of complications.

“As a person of color, there are issues of race in the US,” she said. “The thing that drives me [in my writing] is that I love Filipino culture. I love the warmth and vibrancy.”

Moreover, Bueno, who grew up in a very Filipino family of “wild men and loud women” in Hawaii, said she always writes about violence, displacement and discrimination. She admitted that even though there is a very large population of Filipino people in Hawaii, there remain economic and social challenges that they constantly face.

Cortes, born and raised in the Philippines, said he moved to the US late in his life. It was because of his upbringing that he always felt compelled to come back to his homeland.

Writing as negotiation

Asked about what kind of audience they write for, Linmark, author of the best-selling novel “Rolling the R’s,” believed that the audience comes in during the revision of the work.

“As writers we have to negotiate between the facts and the not-so-factual,” he said. “I think as individuals, we decide as to whether we want to champion imagination over realism, or specificity over imagination. We are authors because we make the decision. Our editors may not agree what we are writing about but at the end of the day we are authors because we decided that is how we want to portray whatever we are trying to portraying.”

Sapleton said that although she always thought of writing for the global reader, she cannot help but “communicate to someone who has read what an English major has read.”

Discipline

As a poet, Cortes said discipline is key to the craft of writing poetry, but admitted that he sometimes procrastinates with his creative projects. However, you cannot procrastinate when writing fiction, he said.

“As a poet, you are dependent on inspiration,” he said. “It rarely comes. But when it comes, I welcome it.”

Echoing Lorrie Moore, Galang said that writing a novel is very much like marriage because you have to be committed to it. In contrast, she said short story writing is like dating because you could abandon it if things did not work out.

Meanwhile, Linmark said that writing is a validation of one’s existence. He underscored the importance of imagination in writing.

“We have crucified our imagination in exchange of the literal,” he said. “We have to return to the imagination.”