The Manila Review interviews Katrina Stuart Santiago

by CAROLINE S. HAU AND MIGUEL SYJUCO  

Last April, literary critic and essayist Katrina Stuart Santiago wrote a controversial polemic about patronage and cliquishness in the Philippine writing establishment. MR editors Caroline S. Hau (CSH) and Miguel Syjuco (MS) probe deeper.

CSH: Your article, “Burn After Reading” (Rogue Magazine, April 13, 2012) is critical of the “us-vs-them” cliquishness of the Philippine writing establishment. You talk about “an unspoken/unconscious/unexplained set of rules” for gaining entry into the writing community, rules that you say have nothing to do with literary merit. What are these rules?

Read on

Comments

  1. “When I was writing that essay that later won the Palanca Award, I took conscious effort to write the way creative non-fiction is written in Manila”

    They’re quite stupid really. It takes time because of the way we are brought up (our authoritarian culture) and a lot of pain but when it dawns on you, it is really very simple. Some of them are quacks. Read their scholarly works. It’s full of quackery. Yung pa-mysterious-asian kuno.

    Their strengths become canon, while their weaknesses are ignored in other writers who are gifted with them. Intellectual corruption.