During informal conversations with some writer-friends, we have been encouraging each other to write stories for children — the kind that will be used in classrooms. The kind that will contain our culture and the values that we want to instill in our children. This is even before the MLE because we see the dearth in materials for classroom use.
As to retelling of folktales, I don’t recall any occasion discussing it with writer friends, but VF and I had talked about it sometime last year, before the launch of the Cabie-PINILI. We wondered about copyright issues should we start re-telling Ilocano folk lit. He calls it sarsarita di ugma — the kind that we heard from our grandparents. In fact, he tried to write two from memory, and one of them I have posted in Bilingual Pen. We both think his version needs some tweaks to make it more interesting for children.
I also have copies of the books by eugenio (borrowed from the NCCA library) and there really are so many interesting materials in there!
I would be interested to make projects such as this, not only because VF and I had talked about doing something like it, but because I really dream of writing (or rewriting) stories for children because frankly, I don’t want to read stories about weak women and other stereotypical western stories to my would-be children!
My observation among our writers is that they are able to produce good materials when there are contests (this includes me), because contests are good motivators, not because of the awards, but because they set deadlines and guidelines. There’s something about deadlines that fire at the writers’ creative juices. In fact, without contests and deadlines, I don’t think I could have written as much stories as I did last year. All of my stories were written three days before the deadlines some, even less.
If we can come up with programs, contests, activities etc, that could trigger our writers’ creative juices, it would really be good.
(Sorry manong no ti la napnapanan ti kunkunak. Diak suren no nasungbatak ti kunkunam dita ngato, basta nagtypeak lattan. Thanks. I hope I made sense. Hehe).
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