This writer was looking forward to seeing two things on the day of the interview with UP professor and Palanca Hall of Famer (and recently a finalist in the Man Asian Literary Prize) Jose “Butch” Dalisay, Jr:

His Moleskine, which was his travel companion for three years before it retired, and his Macbook Air, Apple’s newest baby and a treasure everybody is so excited to see (and touch and be photographed with), as you’ve probably read about in the blogs of those who attended last Saturday’s “A Conversation with Butch Dalisay” at Serendra’s Kape Isla.

I was not disappointed on both counts. But the one thing that made my day was seeing some of the fountain pens from Prof. Dalisay’s large collection and learning the stories behind each each one. And yes, I even got to try out writing with one of them (I am humbled to say my preferences in writing instruments are limited to a Rhodia pencil and a Parker ballpoint pen, or one of those South Korean-made gel ink pens).

I must admit I had this surreal feeling in meeting Prof. Dalisay for the first time because–and I write this with a huge embarrassment–I have been a big fan of his since my college days, when my constant buddy Naomi and I first discovered Killing Time in a Warm Place. We would sit outside his office, wanting to get a glimpse of this man whom we journalism majors would speak of only in reverent, hushed voices (that was probably stalking, but we didn’t know the word then–and no, we never got to see him, ever).

More than a decade later, I found myself in his house for an interview, armed with questions sent in by PinoyCentric readers (special thanks to you all who sent e-mails and posted comments), finally meeting the writer I had looked up to for much of my writing life. It was good to have come full circle.

In this Innerview, Prof. Dalisay answers questions on how writers can expand their horizons, his work in progress, and how he reconciles the digital with the analog notebook-and- fountain-pen lifestyle.

What was your first piece that got published internationally?
It was probably a story titled “Pig” in the Indiana Review sometime in the mid-eighties. It was a story about a pig–a wild boar–in a forest who was trying to survive. It’s from his point of view. It’s a story about how animals fight each other just to stay alive. It was something like an allegory about human society. That was a rather obscure story. It came out in my book, Sarcophagus and Other Stories, later on.

Before the Internet, did you ever try to get yourself published abroad? How did you go about it?
You had to send your work out by snail mail. You had to find out what magazines accepted work. I must say I have never done that because my first priority was always to get published here. If I did get published abroad, it was usually because people were putting together a collection of Philippine literature or a special issue on the Philippines.

I’m not saying this is a bad idea. Certainly we should do it. But I don’t think I’ve ever been bitten by that New Yorker bug thinking I’d write a story here and send it out to the New Yorker. Eventually we had to do that, and some people, I suppose, are doing that, but I’d really still much rather be read here first than over there.

What do you think does it take for the Pinoy writer to break into the international market?
Many Filipino writers, especially young ones, think they can break into the international market by trying to write internationally, meaning they forget that they’re Pinoys, and that’s absolute nonsense. The few Filipino authors who have been published in top-rank US magazines, somebody like Eric Gamalinda, got published not by trying to write as a Manhattanite but by writing about Sampaloc.

In other words, our being Filipino and the Filipino material that we employ is precisely our comparative advantage. That’s what distinguishes us. It’s what editors look for. So we shouldn’t pretend to be Americans or British or try to eliminate the Filipino element from our work. Precisely we should highlight that and trust that something in that work, some universal element, will appeal to the foreign reader.

One of the frontiers you mentioned in Philippine literature is that “we write for a specific audience who look and sound a lot like ourselves.” Can you please expound on that? How can we improve on this?
I think one of the problems why Philippine literature isn’t connecting with the Filipino reader is that it is being written by people like me: middle class, college educated. Not just that, but middle-class, college-educated Filipinos who are very strongly influenced by what they read from American and other foreign kinds of literature and also from the movies, and by movies I mean art films.

In other words, we deal with subjects that tend to be treated with a lot of subtlety. For example, we’re not writing about the things that many of the Filipinos are concerned about: crime, poverty, and the dramas that come with separation produced by our OFW experience. We still write about issues of alienation, identity–these are important things, but we’re not resonating with the more ordinary Filipino readers to whom what goes on in the tabloids and the headlines are really the more immediate things. There are no Filipino crime stories as a genre. We’re writing in denial about a lot of things.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s stories have a third-world setting. He wrote them in Spanish and later got them translated. What do you think is the lesson in his commercial success, or that of any other Latin American writer, for that matter?
The lesson is that we probably shouldn’t get too obsessed with language but rather with material and treatment. It isn’t whether you write in English or Filipino.

In the case of Garcia Marquez, first he writes as a Colombian, reflecting Colombian reality in a very different way, and that’s I think what we should be doing here. I’m not saying that we’re not trying to do that except that the horizon and the coverage of our fiction, especially Filipino fiction in English, seems to be fairly narrow. They deal with the concerns of our class, but sometimes, I suspect, the most superficial ones, like personal anguish.

Among the stories or screenplays you’ve written, which one do you love the most, or which one is your favorite?
That’s very difficult for the writer to say. I may have certain favorites. I would say, for example, that I like the story “Penmanship.” I don’t think it’s my best one technically, but I like that story a lot because of the story behind the story, which is that, as I’ve often recounted in my writings and even in my blog, this is a story that began with finding one of the holy grails of pen collecting in Scotland.

So I bought this antique 1934 Parker fountain pen for a fortune, charged it to my credit card, and then immediately began feeling guilty for having spent so much. So I thought I better write a story to recover the cost, so I started writing that story from scratch and I just made it up as I went along. After about four, five days, it was done, and I felt I had written something worth the pen.

As it turned out, it was, because the story won first prize in the graphic fiction awards. It made its cost back. It’s a kind of story that has a lot of feeling in it. It starts with an object. Many of my stories try to do this: I have things in them, and then from the thing we turn to human emotion, and that’s a quality I strive for, at least in my more mature stories. I really want to engage the reader’s feelings because I think it’s a neglected area in our writing. We can be way too intellectual and forget the dramatic.

When you begin a story or a novel, is the idea that the output will sell part of the motivation?
No, not ever, because first of all there’s hardly any market here for literature. That shouldn’t be the case, but it is. Many Filipino writers–and I am one of them–begin by writing what they want to write, and we do it the best way we can, because whether it’s good or bad, there’s no market for it anyway. It’s ironic, but the fact that you really can’t sell things enables or empowers you to produce the best art you can. On the other hand, we really have to do a lot on improving our marketability.

I have nothing against developing the market and writing for it, and that is where literature is headed. Writers and publishers are beginning to discover that there are specific markets for specific things like chick lit or genre lit, and that’s good. I would like to get into that market myself at some point. But personally I write for a living in many other ways and this is probably an important thing to point out.

I’ve always been a professional writer in the sense that I write screenplays, brochures, audio-visual scripts, company reports, speeches of politicians, all kind of things. Writing to me is a livelihood. It’s not something I look at romantically. So that when I write for myself, meaning when I write a short story, that’s where the element of marketability comes in last, because everything I write, I sell. Your story is really not for sale. You don’t really write them to make money.

As a professor of literature, are you bothered by the fact that many Filipinos are not familiar with Pinoy writers?
I should, but I understand that because we are competing with a lot of alternatives. Like my friend Charlson Ong and I remind each other, we are legends in our own minds because Philippine literature and Filipino writers don’t matter in the society, and that’s because Charlson and I aren’t really each other’s competitor. Our competitor is someone like Neil Gaiman or John Grisham. If you’re a young Filipino and you have P500 in your pocket to buy a book, you go for Gaiman or Harry Potter. We understand that. This is not to say we shouldn’t write our own version of Harry Potter, but [this fact] tells us something about the economy and the market. We just don’t have enough money to spend on ourselves. We are the least of our priorities.

What story or issue are you tackling in your current work?
Right now I am putting finishing touches on my second novel, and again it’s taking me a long time. This is about an OFW, but it’s really about the people she left behind. It’s about how our society is changing because of all the people who go out. I really have felt this for the past 10 years, that the defining issue of our time–the one thing that will change Philippine society the most–is the fact that one-tenth of our population is living and working abroad.

As a keen observer of contemporary culture, what do you think of the explosive sexualization of Philippine entertainment?
It’s been there for a long time actually. In a sense we might say it was probably just as bad or worse in the seventies. I am not bothered by this only in the sense that the marketing of sex has gone on forever in various ways and forms.

Of course it’s a problem if it involves things like child porn or trafficking of women or people, but even that’s not going to go away. What I think we should be more focused on is providing alternatives to that, just as compelling that people will want to look at.

I have to say that I have never been for censorship of any kind. Again, only when children or people who do not have the capability to make up their own minds are involved–perhaps some degree of censorship is acceptable. Otherwise I’d say, let the people make up their own minds. Otherwise censorship will turn us into idiots, and I certainly do not trust this government or this state to make up our minds for us in any way.

Do you ever write in Filipino, aside from the screenplays you’ve done?
I really can’t write imaginative prose in Filipino. I am not Tagalog. I was born in the Visayas, so I had to learn my Filipino. It’s true for English too, but because my reading in English is much wider, I have a much wider vocabulary in it, so my imagination can move around much better in English than in Filipino. It’s som