JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

You’ve always wanted to write, but you don’t know how to get started.

You used to write, but you haven’t done it in a while and you feel rusty.

You’re sort of interested in writing, but you’re afraid to even admit it.

You’ve started many stories, but you ran out of steam.

You think you can write, but you need a second opinion.

You have a writing project that you’ve been putting off, and you just looked at the calendar and it’s almost 2018.

You want to learn the basics of storytelling.

(Or you have a friend who is any/all of the above and you want to give them a little push.)

Join our Writing Boot Camp! The objective is simple: to start and finish a piece of writing (a short story, a personal essay, or a piece of fanfiction) in two weekends.

Dates: July 22 and 29, 2017, from 1-5pm.
Venue: WSI Corporate Center, Metropolitan Avenue, Makati (near the Makati fire station at the end of Ayala Avenue)
Cost: Php6,000, but if you pay on or before June 30, 2017, you only pay Php5,000.

No pressure, no tears, no time like the present.

For inquiries and to book a place, email saffron.safin@gmail.com.

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Excerpts of work produced in previous workshops

In the Faculty Center
by Will Liangco

By the time the semester was winding down, one thing had become apparent: Anna Marie, our block president, feminist to the core, University Scholar, Gabriela member, was fucking Mr. Julian Dimatulac, Jr. in his room at the Faculty Center.

There is absolutely no judgment on my part, as we have always assumed that the hallowed halls of the Faculty Center are hanky panky central. I, for one, have had my episodes of hurried unbuttoning and frantic unzipping in one of the professors’ rooms. At one point my dick almost got lacerated when I zipped up my pants too rapidly because a student, Tufu, was knocking on the door at the ungodly hour of 8pm to protest the B- that he got, the grade-conscious twat. I would never be able to justify to Tufu why I was inside a teacher’s room, drenched and panting, so I hid under the table and you would not believe the amount of unchecked essays, bluebooks, and other useless crap piling up under those tables.

The point of contention, then, was not that Anna Marie was having sex with our creative writing professor, but that her lewd, disgusting actions were utterly incongruent with her 90s angry womyn feminist views. No Eleanor Roosevelt slash Lualhati Bautista slash Alanis Morissette-quoting factory would so unabashedly lust over a total loser.

The Safe and Solemn Transfer
by Ilsa Malsi

Monica looked at their Jesus and noted that He did not have a body. He was carved out of wood, His face recognizably Jesus-like, but His body isosceles and scalene and acute, sharp and though not made of meat, giving an impression of leanness.

She did not expect the exam to be given inside an Anglican church. She was early and so she sat on a marble bench behind the straight lines of iron-wrought wall, looking out onto the compound. These were not the deep, natural greens of the local trees but rather neon Bermuda grass, red brick meeting right, hedges trimmed squarely, the triangle-Jesus keeping her company while she waited. The signs were white block text painted on chalkboard green. They reminded her of the signs at her old school— “Pere Fourier Hall”; “Mere Marie Madeleine House” and this comforted her somewhat.
Here the Jesus did not have a bleeding body and there were no fleur-de-lis.

She swum in the new blue uniform; she asked her parents for the old size, although she was used to getting new things, the school being one of them. She did not mind the wait.

Inspecting her shoes at the beginning of each quarter, her old classmates would joke that it was her birthday yet again. They were nice to her on the actual day because Merlin would come in and distribute cake. It was some sort of cosmic joke that their errand boy was named Merlin and that he had been assigned the task of feeding thirty fourth-graders cake. He looked like he could use some of it himself.?

Untitled memoir (early draft, has been revised since the workshop)
by Chuck Ryan Smith

I’m adopted. It’s not hard to tell that I am. One look at my family and it’s obvious. They have brown skin, I am white; their eyes are brown, mine’s hazel or green; their hair is black, I have black hair too, but with a few strands of red. And the most telling: their last name is Carlos, I’m a Smith.

So I should have gathered easily enough that these people are not actually related to me. But no. It was eight or nine years old when I found out.

A neighbor’s maid asked me if I was really the son of Pepsi Paloma.

“Sino yun?” I said, maybe. It was a feeling I would experience several times as an adult, that other people knew more about me than I did.

Then I remembered all the reasons my parents cited as to why I am a Smith and not a Carlos. My brother’s wife, an American citizen, wanted to adopt me, and being a Smith would make the process easier. I am my mother’s son with a Puti. I am my father’s son with a Kana.

So, one morning, I asked my mother.

“Ampon ba ako?”

“Oo, anak,” she answered without hesitation, as if she had anticipated this question all my life.

“Anak ba ako ni Pepsi Paloma?”

“Chuck,” she said. This time, she paused. “Regalo ka ng Diyos sa amin.”