Articles about Ricky Lee

Right smack in middle of the lockdown, when cultural events were grappling with going online, what that means, where it will lead us, Ricky Lee rode the wave and sat in front of a massive Zoom meeting of over 400 participants. It was a capsule one-day workshop on writing a story, one that was part of the online Cinemalaya 2020, one that I messaged him about as the Cultural Center of the Philippines’s website kept timing-out on its registration process.

 

But Sir Ricky, as he always does, asked if I really wanted to this, it’s too short a workshop, he said, you already know what’s in it, he insisted. Why don’t you wait for the face-to-face workshop, he suggested.

 

I registered anyway.

 

At the workshop, he starts by telling everyone, all 400 of us, to turn on our mics—it was bad enough he was seeing half-bodied participants in square boxes, he said, worse to feel like he’s the only one in the room. This of course meant he would be interrupted countless times throughout the session—imagine ambient noise from across 400 homes—but it was something he was willing to adjust to.

 

In the course of those four hours, what one realizes is the magnitude of that decision. It is the mentor adjusting to the demands of the present, given the needs of students who wanted to hear themselves speak, who were reacting in full volume, unmindful of disruption. It is the teacher who has the generosity to share space and frequency—who even insists on it—because it is what he deems necessary.

 

It is a writer who has the ability at humility, recognizing that his is but one voice, and it is not all that matters.

 

When Sir Ricky said I might know what was already in this workshop, that there might not be enough for me to learn here, he couldn’t be more wrong.

 

​Balancing Power

Eighteen years doing a free workshop doesn’t seem like a major feat when one considers that the local writing workshop has been with us since the 1970s, a by-product of American education and fashioned after the American writing workshops. In that traditional workshop, a panel of “experts”—generally those considered as “established writers”—choose from works prospective participants submit, using criteria that’s devoid of transparency, and is rarely talked about.

 

In that writing workshop, the panel’s power is established in many ways. Panelists sit on one side of the room, as participants are relegated to another. The submissions of participants are held up against the light each day, one at a time. The works, and its writers, face the panelists, one-by-one, like standing in front of a firing squad.

 

Here the power relations are clear, and the risks are high. Panelists are usually writers from the same institution that offers the workshop, or editors of magazines and other publications, or are publishers themselves. Participants are put in their place, in this common space that dictates behaviors and intellect, in much the same way that a classroom does, except this time what is on the line are dreams and egos. That panelists might be generally oblivious to the precarity that is here is of course part of keeping this structure going. As much as this space is created by the institutional power, it is also one that maintains it.

 

This is the power structure that Sir Ricky undoes, given the way he has practiced the writing workshop. Designed from his screenwriting manual, the workshop as he has established it is a consistent and deliberate effort at balance, if not at completely destroying that structure that dictates facilitator versus participants, teacher versus students. It of course seems like a simple enough strategy: enter the discussion with your knowledge and expertise, with your lectures all mapped out, but allow for all other voices in the room to take part in that discussion. Let people speak, and speak up, and louder and louder.

 

This simple, almost common-sensical strategy though, would only be a success with someone who doesn’t mind the erasure of his own privilege altogether. And this is the rare gift that Sir Ricky has: it’s that very clear sense of how his privilege draws a very clear line—even a gaping hole—between himself and those who want to learn from him. The balance he strikes, as such, is really an erasure of that privilege.

 

He wants to be heard, but he wants to listen. He is the central figure in this particular space, but he also deliberately decentralizes the discussion to include everyone else within it. He is Ricky Lee, but also, he is just like all of us: writer, cultural worker, artistic laborer. Figuring out which stories might work, and letting go of those that don’t. Finding as much solace in others who have stories to tell, even as he has already told the stories that have tided generations over.

 

This process allows for student and mentees to value their own voices, their own thinking, their own stories. They are not here to follow what Sir Ricky says, nor to tell stories in the way he does. Instead they are allowed their own ways of telling, their own views on how stories might unfold, their own selves relative to the writer they are learning from. He is not out to create minions, or echoes, as he is out to allow people to become writers with their own minds and creativities.

 

This exercise seems easy, but in practice, it is gargantuan. Because in this context, writing institutions are built on privilege, and the cultural establishment lives off its power over the majority of its workers. And it is in this context that Sir Ricky, and his undoing of the workshop, is extraordinary.

 

Demystifying Writing

It was at another moment, years ago, at a writer’s event at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, that I first heard Sir Ricky talk about his life of writing. And what floored me was how honest he was about the task of writing, the work of the writer, and the kind of labor this requires.

In that interview Sir Ricky talked about the kinds of struggles he faces as a writer, as someone who has stuck to it all these years, who didn’t find the need to shift to directing or producing, who just sought to continue writing stories, doing film then TV, to writing novels. He talked about how writing was and is his bread and butter, and how this means compromising on some stories, sometimes delivering on what is needed, as opposed to what he wants. Throughout that one hour conversation the thread of need and want and struggle was clear. The writer is no special being, no magical creature who can churn out words that will become classics. Instead he is writer. Laborer. Someone who knows only to do this work, and so must do it well.

 

The conventional writers’ workshop is a space that invariably and incontrovertibly romanticizes writing. Here, “the writer” is “chosen,” by the panelists who hold positions of privilege and power. Here, the writer is honed and fashioned after forebears, based on the kind of writing that is deemed acceptable or worthy or worthwhile. Here, a community of writers is created, one that is clear about the privilege it holds, one that lives off its perpetuation, until the proverbial torches are handed over, the next generation the same as the one before it.

 

Sir Ricky eschews this romanticization of writing. He denies his students the ego-stroking one equates with the writing workshop, refuses them the pedestal reserved for “writer.” Instead he brings them—all of us writers—down to earth, bare feet if necessary, walking the streets of the spaces we grew up in, seeking less familiar routes to the same destinations.

 

He wouldn’t be the first one to eschew the romanticization of cultural work, but the value of having someone like Sir Ricky extricate himself from this enterprise cannot be underestimated. The task of deliberately dissolving his privilege, while also erasing the romance with writing and what it means, can only be empowering. Because more than demystifying writing, it also humanizes the writer.

 

And it’s this humanity that is crucial, as it informs the most important conversation that we rarely have, dominated as our discourses are with notions of specialization and stardom, refusing as we do to engage in the parts of creativity and cultural work that aren’t about the pomp and pageantry. Sir Ricky’s practice of the workshop—one that spans the yearly batches he teaches from his own home to the ones that are simply about conversations, to even the zoom workshops as the pandemic has forced him to do—extricates the task of writing from these discursive practices.

 

In so doing he disentangles writing from pedestals and ivory towers, and instead insists on it being a lived practice. And he doesn’t mean “lived,” as in cloistered and separate from the community, as it is lived with these communities, where stories begin and end, where narratives evolve, where our thinking and understanding expand. It is in those communities one didn’t know existed, the ones we encounter when we walk new streets, the ones we see when we decide to go beyond the proverbial box, away from our comfort zones, straight into what we do not know.

 

By humanizing the writer, Sir Ricky also forces on us the conversation about the precarity of the writer as cultural worker. Taken down from the pedestal, disengaged from the enterprise of mystification, we are forced to admit to, understand, and grapple with the difficulties and struggles we face in the task itself of writing. It is never just about how to write in terms of getting beyond the blank white page, as it is about how to write given hunger and need. It is about how to build a writing practice that is sustainable, one that allows an amount of security that the state of cultural institutions cannot provide.

 

The survival of the writer is a discussion we can only have when we finally decide that they are human. Sir Ricky allows us this conversation as he talks about his own humanity, constantly and incessantly, as part and parcel of the work that he does, but also of the work he sees the rest of us do.

 

Practicing Generosity

In the context of cultural institutions that are bound to structures of power and privilege, and given a predisposition towards notions of utang-na-loob and patronage politics, Sir Ricky’s praxis is one that doesn’t just undo the workshop, and demystify the writer, as it is also—and probably most importantly—about a generosity of spirit.

 

Freed from the limits of an institutional writing workshop, and liberated from the notions of the writer-as-extraordinary, what is revealed about him is the ability at generosity.

 

While the conventional writing workshop can so easily claim to be bound to this same kind of magnanimity, between the power relations it lives off and its romance with writing, this is nothing more than an empty claim. One is hard-put to see generosity in the insistence on privilege, and certainly there is little fairness in the preservation of a system that’s akin to a firing squad. There is also a lot that might be said about the ways in which the writing workshop is out to create clones of old writers, where new writers fashion their works to fit the mold that is expected and accepted, where what we see is a preservation of the kind of intellect and aesthetics, content and form, that has been published since time immemorial.

 

The dissolution of these power relations, his own erasure of his privilege, and his insistence that writing is a laborious task that is about thinking and living, community and nation, might not completely erase the possibility of participants and mentees fashioning stories after Sir Ricky, but certainly it allows for the workshop to be a mechanism that seeks to liberate instead of stifle, that encourages not a repetition of works but a multiplication of the multifarious.

 

Certainly, the decision to share one’s knowledge is not devoid of politics, and the act of teaching is one that is ideological. But in a Ricky Lee workshop, you are encouraged to battle with the ideological. You aren’t being created into a clone, as you are encouraged to go crazy, build on those stories you’ve had in your head for years, create from the things that make you vulnerable and unknowable.

 

And this only works because Sir Ricky is generous enough to let you have the floor, take it whole, destroy it if you need to, in order to tell your story. It works because he is not one to be insecure about the stories that these new writers might tell, and he cares little about discovering the seed of a story that he himself did not imagine doing. It works, because the man in the center of the room can at any point deliberately and consciously and knowingly, move to the corner and watch other people’s stories unfold, with no envy or insecurity, not even a smidgen of resentment, that some new writer might take his place.

 

This works because at some point in this Ricky Lee workshop, as space, praxis, and institution, everyone is just a writer—facilitator and participants, mentor and mentees, all. They are all human, laboring through a creative process that is also always bound to the bigger struggles of the cultural, and also necessarily, the national. The challenge in Sir Ricky’s workshop is not just to tell our stories (or to take out the ones we’ve hidden from others for years); the challenge is to think about the stories worth telling, to talk about why these stories are important, and to engage with the urgencies of the present, no matter how tangentially, in the narratives we fashion. Because here and now (and maybe now more than ever), we are bound by this moment, seemingly on pause, or on very very slow motion, and we are trying our hardest to find our voices, speak up, louder and louder until it is deafening. In Sir Ricky’s workshop we are allowed to do this. We are allowed to think loudly and write freely, and vice versa.

 

“Everyone is a writer here” is a powerful and empowering stance in a time and space that would otherwise draw a line between writer and writing students, facilitator and participants. The erasure of that line, the insistence on seeing us all as writers, the demand that we see ourselves as writers, can only come from an incomparable generosity.

 

And the daring erasure of privilege. It is after all, also an insistence on sameness that allows for this kind of openness and humility and kindness. That all of those adjectives might inform the kind of writing we should all aspire to do, is precisely the point that needs to be made here.

 

About Ricky Lee, sure, but also just about Sir Ricky, his mentorship, his writing, and his humanity. ***