Lina Sagaral Reyes was the keynote speaker and special guest panelist to the recently concluded Davao Writers Workshop 2012 held at Lispher Inn last October 15 to 19. The address below was her lecture at the opening of the workshop.
Being with you, a youthful crop of writers grown on the rich soil of Mindanao cultures, I also come home to the Writers Workshop, as a bond of people claiming and reclaiming the right to write.
I come home to the community ritual of writers: for the fellows, a rite of passage; for the panelists, the rite of relaying wisdom (as well as folly?) to the next generation.
It has been a long journey home. This is my first ever workshop in 19 years. The last workshop I attended was held in UP-Baguio in May 1993. On my way home to the island of Bohol via Manila, I hitched a ride on the fellows’ bus to Manila. My seatmate on that transitional ride home was Ricky de Ungria.
But I did not have an inkling that in eight months, I would find myself in the shores of Dapitan, Zamboanga del Norte.
Nineteen years later, as early as February this year, it is the same Ricky de Ungria, now like me also a migrant worker on Mindanao, who would ask me to come and join this workshop.