JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

How to write a short story. How to build characters who breathe. How to create a setting, set a tone, figure out point-of-view. How to invent a plot and ratchet up conflict. How to find your style and discover your voice. Where to get ideas for stories. How to form the habit of writing.

Join Jessica Zafra’s Writing Boot Camp. Oct 10, 17, 24, 31. Four sessions from 3-5pm on Zoom. Fee: Php10,000. Early bird rate: P5,000 if you pay before Sept 10. Email us at saffron.safin@gmail.com to book your place.

This is last Sunday’s Cinemaclub Pelikula discussion of The Spirit of the Beehive by Victor Erice.

To watch The Holy Innocents by Mario Camus today and tomorrow, go to the Instituto Cervantes Vimeo page.
Password: clasicoscontigojulio10

To join the Cineclub Pelikula discussion tomorrow at 5pm, go to
https://zoom.us/j/96949757066

You’ve been doing a lot of thinking in isolation. About who you are and the face you show the world. About your old life and what your new life might look like. About how you got to this point, and where you want to go next. About the times when you were happy or miserable or yearning or fed up, but never stopped to figure out what was really going on.

Write it all down.

Sign up for Jessica Zafra’s Online Writing Boot Camp. Saturday afternoons, 3-5pm from August 8 to 29. The objective is to finish writing a personal memoir by the end of the sessions. Workshop fee: P10,000. Early bird offer until July 5: P5,000. Email saffron.safin@gmail.com for details.

Participants have to be over 21. No writing experience required. No one has ever had a nervous breakdown at our workshops.

Chair, get it? Thank you to the Ateneo for this honor.

The Department of English, School of Humanities, Ateneo de Manila University invite you to the Fr. Henry Lee Irwin, SJ Memorial Lecture on March 3, 2020, 5-6:30 p.m., at the Escaler Hall.

This year’s lecture is “Manananggal Terrorizes the Ateneo: Fiction vs. the Apocalypse” by author Jessica Zafra.

In the lead-up to her writing workshop at the Ateneo de Manila, Zafra talks about books in an age of mass distraction. She details her writing practice, recounts the true stories behind her fiction, and explains how writing is a survival skill.

Jessica Zafra is a fictionist and TV presenter, ex-columnist and talk radio host. Best known for the bestselling book series Twisted, she was the acerbic voice of a generation that grew up in the 1990s and the early 2000s. Aside from Twisted, her books include Manananggal Terrorizes Manila (1992), The 500 People You Meet in Hell (2006), The Stories So Far (2014), and Twisted Travels: Central Europe (2018). She has won three Palancas for her fiction and a National Book Award for Twisted. She continues to attract a large, somewhat emotional following.

Zafra is this year’s recipient of the Fr. Henry Lee Irwin, SJ Chair in Creative Writing. The chair was instituted by former students of Father Irwin in memory of his work as a professor of English, theater, and rhetoric at the Ateneo de Manila.

Copies of The Collected Stories of Jessica Zafra, published in 2019 by the Ateneo de Manila University Press, will be sold at the venue.

Admission is free. RSVP 8426-6001 (loc. 5310) or lsanchez@ateneo.edu.

Our Bibliophibians book club selection for February is The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, a melancholy novel set on an island where things disappear and people are required to forget they ever existed. It’s science-fiction, or is it?

The next book club meeting is at 4pm on Saturday, Feb 29 at Tilde Cafe on Matilde Street in (Backwell) Poblacion, Makati. Everyone who reads the book is welcome.

They’ve run out of copies of The Memory Police at Fully Booked, but new stocks are arriving this week. Thank you, Fully Booked, for the quick response.

Time to write your story before we all run out of time.

Jessica Zafra’s Writing Boot Camp consists of two Saturday sessions from 1-4pm. The Nexus Center is at 1010 Metropolitan Avenue, Makati.

On March 21 we will discuss the writing process, do writing exercises, and plan what you’re going to write.

On March 28 you will present your first draft for analysis and comments.

It’s easier than you think, and it makes for good therapy. (And no one has ever had a nervous breakdown in our workshops. I don’t believe in crushing your ego, the world will do it soon enough.)

Cost: P10,000 including snacks.

Early bird rate if you enroll before Feb 15: P8,500.

You have to be over 21 to join this workshop.

To book a place, email saffron.safin@gmail.com.

We will accept only 30 participants.