Midterm Period

(Week)

21st Century Literature from the Philippines and the World

Lesson 7: Central Luzon Region Writer Focus: John Jack G. Wigley

Objective:
Lesson Content:

Fast Facts About the Author – John Jack G. Wigley

- Director of the University of Sto. Tomas (UST) Publishing House and is

also a full-time professor of the same university.
- Was born and raised in Angeles City, Pampanga
- Struggled in his Filipino identity for being a “G.I.” or an American
serviceman baby. Today, it is commonly referred to as Amerasian.
- Father was a US soldier at Clark Airbase and Mother was a bar girl in
Angeles.
- Proud member of the LGBTQ+ community

His Known Works

- The memoir, “Falling Into the Manhole,” a humorous examination of

his experiences as someone who was always ‘different.’ As he himself
says in his explanation of his poetics in the University of he Philippines
Writer’s Workshop of 2013, “Looking back, I realize now that these
hurdles were blessings in disguise. They have become the rich
material needed for writing. I have analyzed the interrelationship of
race (because I am half-white), class (because I was born poor), and
gender (because I am gay), how these structures have shaped my
experiences and how they have provided me with the ‘voice’ I am using
in telling my stories.”

Style or Substance?

While the expression “style oover substance” implies a shallowness or a lack

of depth in whatever is being described, we need to realize that style is
always present. The question that is more is whether the style lends anything
to the “substance,” or material, being styled.

A direct narration of the events in Wigley’s essay would have led us too have
a very different reading experience from the one we actually had. Wiigley’s
“stylistic” interventions – the lighter tone, the use of local dialogue, the
presentation of his mother as this unperturbed individual in the light of
overwhelming disaster – all contribute to a unique reading experience.

Looking at it another way, Wigley uses humor here not to emphasize emotion,
but actually do the opposite. He uses the tone as a way of defamiliarizing the
reader, enabling the reader to see events in a different, and slightly more
distant, light. Humor does not necessarily mean that the object of the humor is
being ridiculed. In this case, humor as a writing style enables reader to
examine other issues that the author presents with a considered distance.