Creative Non-Fiction G12 Module Jan 11-29

NOTRE DAME OF NEW ILOILO, INC.
A Diocesan School
NEW ILOILO, TANTANGAN, SOUTH COTABATO
Tel. No. (083) 229 – 1113
Email Address: notredamenewiloilo@gmail.com
SUBJECT: CREATIVE NON-FICTION GRADE LEVEL: TWELVE

QUARTER: THREE WEEK: THREE [January 11-29, 2021]
I - OBJECTIVES: At the end of the lesson, students are expected to:

1. analyze the theme and techniques used in a particular text;
2. write samples of the Literary Elements Based on One’s
Experiences
II - PRE-ASSESSMENT
Direction: Read and answer the following statements. Encircle the
correct letter of your choice.
1.Non Fiction
a. reason for which the author writers c. writer tell his own story
b. writing that is true d. writer gives and explanation of ideas
2. Autobiography
a. writer tells someone else’s story c. writing is not true
b. writer tells his own story d. gives a description of a topic
3. Informational Non-Fiction
a. Intent informing the reader about the topic
b. writing that is not true
c. writer tries to convince the reader
d. original materials that have not been altered
4.Biography
a. writer tells his own story c. writer tells the story of someone else’s
b. short form of literary composition d. writing gives explanation of ideas
5. Any short work of non-fiction offering a part of a magazine,
newspaper or book
a. article b. diary c. novel d. blog
6. A type of nonfiction writing that includes personal thoughts and
reflections.
a. memoir b. biography c. autobiography d. compare and contrast
7. This pattern of writing shows the order of events occurred
a. categorical b. expository c. chronological d. compare and
contrast
8. What is included in background information?
a. claim b. main character c. conflict d. setting
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9. Quote, question, study and statement about life and all are all
examples of ______.
a. conflict b. text evidence c. resolution d.leading statement
10. The theme of a story is______________.
a. the problem the character is facing
b. how much is the main character solves his problem
c. the location of the story
d. the lesson or big idea the author is trying to teach about
III - CONTENT/ DISCUSSION/ INFORMATION

Module 1 - ANALYSIS ON THEME AND TECHNIQUES USED IN A
PARTICULAR TEXT
What is Creative Non Fiction? Is a genre of writing that that uses

literary styles and techniques to factually accurate narratives; these
includes autobiography, biography, literary journalism, reportage,
personal narratives, travelogues, reflection, essay, flash nonfiction or
flash essay. It is important to know that creative nonfiction articles must
be factually accurate and written with attention (Wikipedia).
Identifying Themes and Literary Analysis
Read the following story for analysis:
Many Mansions
Small World
Ledesma St., San Juan
It probably was a small house, but size throws off a child. What
seems modest to an adult is extravagance to a little one. It was the
world to me. It certainly seemed ample then. There were three
bedrooms, which we called blue, green, and aircon. Children’s names,
these; one bedroom was painted blue, one green, and one had a new
air-conditioner. I don’t remember what we called it before the air-
conditioner arrived, but it was yellow, with a parquet floor and a deep
dressing area. It was the room of my parents, which is why the new
Sony color TV and Betamax were there. The old TV was in the living
room downstairs, a Zenith in a large cabinet with doors that slid open. In
front of it was a coffee table and the blue sofa where Tito Bing, when he
was visiting, would sit shirtless, leaving a deep, sweaty impression on
the vinyl.
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My mother sent most of us to piano lessons, and soon enough, a
piano took its place in our living room. We went to a music studio in
northeast Greenhills, a short walk from the Greenhills shopping center.
To us that whole complex was simply Unimart, where my mother bought
groceries; then came Virra Mall, a modern marvel, not yet a seedy
haven of smuggled goods. This was my small, well-traveled universe:
Ledesma Street to Unimart; further down Ortigas to Meralco, where my
father worked and where we played tennis on Sunday afternoons; and
then on to Ateneo, where I had studied since grade school.
San Juan seemed pretty much the whole city then, because even
my relatives were there. On M. Paterno Street, adjacent to Ledesma,
lived Tito Pepot with my father’s parents. Tito Tito and the Litonjuas
lived in another part of Greenhills, with Tita Letty and the Mendozas
nearby on Mariano Marcos Street. Sundays we heard mass in Mary the
Queen, where I would marry my wife years later.
The big round dining table was new, and I suppose like a lot of
families, we experienced that moment of bliss when, having changed
from a long table to this round one with a novelty called the lazy susan,
we were liberated from the forced courtesies of asking people to pass
this or that dish. I wonder though if something was lost, if the
convenience of just turning an inner platform set on marbles until what
you wanted was right in front of you did away with the learned cordiality,
the togetherness with one’s table mates that taught you the give and
take of community.
There were orange glasses and a matching orange pitcher, and at
meals we’d have it and a blue one on the table. Tito Bing would pour
orange juice into his coffee, forgetting that the water was in the orange
pitcher, the orange juice in the blue one. Ledesma Street was a short
one, and quiet. Our house was unassuming, with walls of a modest
height and a green gate. The gate opened to a long three-car garage.
We’d play football there, and Bombit, the eldest, once fell on his wrist
and broke it. On birthdays there would be parties, with folding tables
from one end to the other, balloons, spaghetti, hotdogs, ice cream, and
our painfully cute posing for pictures.
Our next-door neighbor made coffins, or so they said. I don’t
remember seeing any. Actually, I don’t remember seeing anyone in that
tiny gray house on our left. My mother says that some of the people
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there had gone insane. Somehow, coffin-making and insanity come
hand in hand, as we’ve learned from old horror movies.
In high school I discovered the perilous thrill of chasing after girls.
Going to soirées, meeting them, getting their phone numbers, calling
them up – how crazy it all was, to daydream an entire afternoon away,
my books on the living room coffee table, my head in the clouds. The
studying could go to hell as my mind floated in its hormone-induced
bliss. It was a heady time, reveling in the rush of taking risks, then
wallowing in the crushing despair of rejection.
The Assumptionistas wouldn’t let you stay on the phone with them
more than fifteen minutes. The Scholasticans would talk for hours, and I
loved that. Niña and I would talk often, it would be daylight out, then it
would be dark and I wouldn’t even get up to turn on the lights, and we’d
talk some more. But I should have seen how that affair would turn out:
she lived on Vito Cruz, way beyond my familiar orbit. At a certain point,
we saw each other at a volleyball game in La Salle Greenhills, then
asked "Was that you?" later in the evening when I called. When you
don’t know what each other looks like anymore, the courtship has
officially failed.
Then we transferred. It was 1984, I was fifteen and finishing my
second year in high school. When we were about to leave, we felt the
excitement of moving to a new house, a bigger one, in a more upscale
neighborhood. It meant good things that we were moving up in the
world.
When We Were
Rich Heron St., Greenmeadows
There were no phones. For some reason, our application for two
lines had been held up. Having just moved, I became acutely aware of
the lack of communications, a serious shortcoming in the eyes of a
fifteen year-old. In such ways were an adolescent boy’s inept attempts
at wooing adolescent girls doomed before they hardly had a chance to
succeed.
To communicate with the outside world I simply upped and went to
a friend’s house, Gerry’s in Xavierville or Abe’s in La Vista. I would
simply show up and take them by surprise. Was there some
emergency? They would ask. Why had I gone all the way there? Then
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they realized that without the ability to call them, I had little choice but to
pop up unannounced at their houses, ready to make myself at home
and partake of their meals. Teenagers can get away with such blithe
effrontery.
But even with its isolation, remedied a few months after we moved
in when the phone company finally deigned to be of service, the house
had its attractions. In fact, in many ways it was a dream house. It sat on
some eight hundred square meters, more than twice the size of the San
Juan house we left behind. And since the house my civil-engineer father
designed used up less than half the lot, we had more room to roam than
we had ever had, or ever would.
I was especially fond of the wide backyard. Half of it was concrete,
on which we thrashed around playing our tortured brand of basketball
with an undersized ball and a makeshift board and ring. The other half
was a garden, green and expansive; all we had at the back of the
Ledesma house was a patch of dark soil where nothing would grow.
Afternoons I’d take the cover off one of the round patio tables and
spread it on the prickly Bermuda grass. I’d lie there on the thick
tablecloth that was just long enough for me and gaze wistfully at a blue,
blue sky. The open space of the backyard gave me a vantage point to
the heavens I haven’t had before or since. Not a bad place to live in for
someone who sometimes wanted to just ponder the sky, who wanted
the occasional chance to escape to it.
I did that often, sitting on the sidewalk outside vigilantly watching
the sun setting over what to me was Greenhills (where the girl of special
interest to me lived), or lying on that tablecloth in the garden. Or sitting
at the balcony that joined the rooms of my parents and Pixie, my sister,
on the nights I’d suffer an insomnia attack; my sister asleep in the
master bedroom, I’d bring a chair from her room onto the balcony. An
insomniac, who sometimes has no choice but to be awake when the
dark gives way to light, can always treat himself to the dawn sky. For
the growing teen, perhaps the most important thing about the new
house were the bedrooms.
For the first time I had my own room, no small thing in a household
of five boys and one girl. An only girl must have her own room, mother
reasoned, and we used to envy Pixie her privilege. When we moved, I,
the third child, finally had mine. This was important. As a child staggers
into adolescence, he grows increasingly ornery when it comes to
matters of privacy. At last I had a place where my things, and thoughts,
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could be left undisturbed. Late afternoons and early evenings I’d turn off
the lights and play something on my stereo – Barbra Streisand’s
"Somewhere" or Boston’s "More Than a Feeling" or "Amanda," U2’s
"With or Without You" – anything that soared, and turn up the volume.
I’d lie in bed facing the window. Or I’d open the window and sit on the
sill, my feet in the plant box, and let the music take me up into the
deepening darkness.
It didn’t take long, though, before I felt that I didn’t quite fit here.
Neighbors can do that to you. On the asphalted tennis court at the park
I played mostly with kids from around the village, kids ten, eleven,
twelve years old. And they were kids in their brash, self-absorbed way. I
was never comfortable around them, and I put up with them only
because I enjoyed the game.
On the basketball court things were worse. The brash, self-

absorbed kids of the tennis court were replaced by brash, self-absorbed
grown-ups. They found me quiet, but what was there to talk about? I
didn’t smoke, do drugs, party till dawn, or fawn over cars. In my eyes
they were moneyed men in the aimless, petty way I imagined you grew
up to be if you didn’t see anything much that made sense beyond what
you could drive, wear, eat, smoke, or screw. I had nothing to say to
them.
I sensed that it was a matter of time before I had to leave. The
land surrounding our house was empty, but for how long? Houses were
going up all around the subdivision. How long until the banging and
clatter of construction work drove away the quiet, the burgeoning
houses encroaching upon us and obstructing our view? How long
before the whole place was filled with the arrogant, chattering, idle
people I thought my neighbors were?
The parish church didn’t make me feel any better. It was just
outside the village, and Sundays we heard mass there with the rest of
the subdivision and nearby villages. I never liked the church. I thought
the immense bug-eyed statue of Christ above the altar, to which all
eyes had to turn, was ill-proportioned and hideous. It only added to the
feeling of strangeness I felt among my expensively coiffed, dour-faced
neighbors. And then there was the sound. No matter what they did, no
matter how they tried, an echo always bounced off the walls and made
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it hard to track the priest’s words. The word of God deserved better
acoustics.
Maybe it was no accident that my crisis of faith occurred at about
that time. It was hard enough grappling with soul-piercing questions of
faith; it became tougher to hang on to God in a place that didn’t seem to
want you to. How could faith smolder in a house of worship cold as
this? I stopped going to that church, or any other. I see now that
such thoughts could probably weigh heavily only on the mind of a mid-
teen, one grown attuned, excessively perhaps, to the hollowness of
conformity. I was fighting my quiet rebellions, against family, school,
social classes, God – the things that boxed me in and told who I should
be, what I should believe in, how I should behave. I was concerned,
maybe too much so, with the incongruence between who you were and
who you pretended to be. It was too easy to judge.
And perhaps a teenager feels more acutely than others that he is
an outsider. Was I one of them? Yes and no, and I squirmed at the
contradiction. There I was in their midst, living a comfortable life in one
of their cushy houses. I wanted the money and what it could buy (in a
family of six children one feels that there is never enough to go around).
But I spurned the accoutrements of such a life, the status symbols, the
badges one wore to prove membership in what I thought was a vacuous
elite. I felt uneasy knowing I wasn’t poor, that my skin was pale, that I
spoke in competent English, that my tastes weren’t lowbrow, that I ate
well, that we had cars and maids and an eight-hundred square-meter
house in a posh private subdivision, that I studied in an expensive
exclusive school – that I was part of a narrow stratum of society that did
exceedingly well at fending for itself. This was who I was, and it wasn’t
all right with me. I had become what I scorned: a rich kid. It was one
other thing to fight.
In the end, perhaps all this – the uneasiness, the awkwardness,

the wanting to be both in and out of the club – was simply part of the
growing pains, endured during an adolescent’s labored and fitful
evolution toward a higher form of being. Perhaps I was simply suffering
the displacedness one first comes to notice as a teenager, the universal
feeling of not quite being at home anywhere, even in one’s skin. I’ve
never lost that feeling. It’s probably just another part of the turmoil of
living in a world that turns and turns without asking if it’s all too fast for
you.
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Soon enough, my father told us that we had to move out. He no
longer wanted to stay in the construction arm of Meralco, which he had
served for decades. He wanted to strike out on his own with a new
company, with his own people. And that meant earning less. The house
had to go, or rather, we had to let go of it.
In August of 1989, two months into my last year as an
undergraduate in college, some five years after we first moved in, we
trundled out of the house on our trusty old Hi-Ace and a small truck my
father borrowed from the office. Years later, we would look back at the
years we spent there and chuckle: those were the days when we were
rich, the days of our brief but failed foray into the ranks of the wealthy.
When my mind wanders back to those days, I’m often back on the
balcony outside my sister’s room, up at daybreak because I haven’t
slept a wink, and I watch the darkness turn into a thin gray, then a blue
that grows more and more vivid, the wisps of clouds streaked with red,
herald of the arriving sun. "Night’s candles are burnt out and jocund day
stands tiptoe on the misty mountain top," wrote Shakespeare. Those
years in that house when I had a balcony seat to the break of day I
knew exactly what he meant.
The House on Stilts

Mariano Marcos St., San Juan
We called it Ortega, but it wasn’t really on Ortega Street. It was on

Mariano Marcos in San Juan, but we had called it Ortega all our lives,
and Ortega it still is. That was how we called it, the way the house on
Ledesma Street is "Ledesma," the house on Heron Street
"Greenmeadows" (not Heron); the way my wife calls the Malate house
she was born in "Vermont," though Vermont Street has been J. Nakpil
for ages.
It felt strange, karmic in a bad way, that we were moving into it.
My Tita Letty and my Mendoza cousins had stayed in that house all the
years I was growing up, and they had just moved into a none-too-posh
subdivision in Marikina, not like the grander ones in the Ortigas area we
were leaving. We knew it was going to be a step down.
It was. From the surface sheen of Greenmeadows to this. The
house seemed old, and more importantly, run down. It stood on stilts,
as we kids called them, the house raised from the ground a few feet, in
the style of older times for some purpose we no longer thought
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applicable. The doors didn’t have knobs, just handles and hooks. They
closed because of springs attached at the top. You’d hear them bang,
the spring’s squeak, when someone passed through. When typhoons
hit, the house made a low rumble as storm winds made the doors and
windows jitter, as if it all would finally come apart.
The interiors were tighter, the corridors narrower, and – perhaps
the surest sign of our harder times – there were fewer bathrooms.
There were no marbled floors as in Greenmeadows, just narrow
wooden planks worn away at some places, and they creaked under
your step. The windows weren’t sheets of tinted glass on large metal
frames; they were made of wooden and capiz panels, in the style of old
houses I see only in Manila or the provinces.
This house sat on an unusually shaped corner lot, with one road
(Smuth, which we never did learn how to pronounce) rising sharply
upwards from Mariano Marcos, creating a pizza-pie slice of land. At the
thin end of the pie slice was the gate, which opened to a long driveway
of concrete that was broken in some places. When it rained, opening
the gate was a chore; it was low, water collected just under it, and my
mother eventually bought boots and left them by the front door with an
umbrella. The plan was for us to stay here while our new house in
Marikina, in the same middle-class village our cousins had transferred
to, was being built. We didn’t know how long that would take, but it
seemed to slow down when the Gulf War broke out and prices shot up.
That was the attitude: we were here only in transit. When you walked
into the master bedroom, you could tell we didn’t intend to stay.
Together with my parents’ queen-size bed were single beds, a red sofa,
and wing chairs, all refugees from the house on Heron Street that was
no longer ours. They seemed to be biding their time, waiting to be
restored to their rightful place, to a room more in keeping with their
status.
The house may not have been much to look at. And commuting to
anywhere was harder since it was a long walk toward the nearest
jeepney routes. The drive to Ateneo was longer. But it wasn’t without
charms. It had wide open spaces, for one thing. There was a garden,
which wasn’t like the manicured, sculpted showcase in Greenmeadows;
it was thick with grass green and wild, not prickly bermuda. The earth
was soft under your running shoes. In the evenings I’d look out from the
living room window at the grass shimmering in the ghostly moonlight.
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At dusk fat flies hovered eerily in the air, after darkness had
relented but before the sun had come out, as if presiding over some
solemn ceremony in which the night gave leave to the day. I saw that
strange but wondrous rite several times because of my insomnia
attacks. One summer I suffered a particularly severe one. I’d go to bed
at ten then be awake at two, unable to sleep anymore. I’d get up and
play games on the computer, watch tapes, read. When my mother got
up at dawn I’d help her heat some water for coffee, put ice in and fill the
water jug, and sit at the kitchen table. We weren’t talkative at five in the
morning, so we would just drink coffee. When it started to get light out
I’d take a walk or jog, pounding the concrete and the soft earth and
grass, making small circles in the yard, the fat flies that buzzed softly
paying no heed. I’d come in and eat a heavy breakfast, sleep the whole
afternoon, then go through it all again that night. Somehow, after weeks
of this, I was finally able to fall asleep at midnight and wake at eight. I
counted my blessings, old house included. The end came soon enough.
The owners of the lot had sold it to a townhouse developer, and we had
until the end of March 1992 to move out. It had been nearly three years.
We packed up and started shuttling between this place and the
next, but moving seemed like more work this time than when we left
Greenmeadows. The trips to Marikina were longer than the ones from
Ortigas to San Juan, and the traffic had only grown heavier. We’d be
able to make only two, maybe three trips a day before pleading
exhaustion. The HiAce got worn down quickly. On our last trip we
stuffed everything that would fit into the cars, just barely fitting into them
ourselves, and drove out for the last time it was also my last day as a
teacher in the Ateneo High School: March 29, Sunday, graduation day.
I’d taught there two years. That last year I’d met Hilda. On my first date
with her in the middle of August, I came home at six in the morning. We
had been on the couch in her living room talking until two, fell asleep,
and woke up at five thirty, my head still on her lap. My mother opened
the gate, a look of worry on her face, as if afraid she’d lost me to
someone else. She did. One week later Hilda agreed to be my
girlfriend, my first ever. Five years later we were married.
After two years on probation at Ateneo High, my contract wasn’t
renewed, and on that last day I stuffed what was left of my things into
plastic shopping bags and, after the ceremony and a complimentary
dinner, threw them into a car and drove off into the night. No job, new
house, no teary farewells. A few days later, my mother would go back to
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try to retrieve some more things. The gate was open, she said;
someone had shit on the driveway. Faucets and other fixtures were
gone, tiles torn out, the place a mess. I’m glad I never saw that. Then
they torched the house, easier and cheaper than tearing it down, and I
suppose that was good, as good a way as any to go.
Five Brothers, One Mother

Taurus St., Cinco Hermanos, Marikina
The Marikina house wasn’t finished yet, but with an ultimatum

hanging over our heads, we had no choice but to move in. Just how
unfinished the house was became bruisingly clear on our first night.
There was no electricity yet, and the windows didn’t have screens.
There were mosquitoes. I couldn’t sleep the whole night. My sister slept
on a cot out in the upstairs hall instead of her room downstairs, maybe
because it was cooler here. Every so often she would toss and turn,
waving bugs away with half-asleep hands. I sat beside her and fanned
her. She had work the next day. In the morning someone went out and
bought boxes and boxes of Katol.
Work on the house would continue, but it remains unfinished eight
years later. All the interiors, after a few years of intermittent work, are
done. But the exterior remains unpainted, still the same cement gray as
the day we moved in, though grimier now. Marikina’s factories aren’t too
far away. The garden remains ungreened; earth, stones, weeds, and
leaves are where I suppose bermuda grass will be put down someday.
In my eyes the Marikina house is an attempt to return to the
successful Greenmeadows plan, but with more modest means at one’s
disposal. The living room of the Cinco Hermanos house features much
of the same furniture, a similar look. The sofa and wing chairs seem at
ease again. My mother’s growing collection of angel figurines is the new
twist. But there is less space in this room, as in most of the rooms in the
Marikina house, since it is a smaller house on a smaller lot.
The kitchen is carefully planned, as was the earlier one, the
cooking and eating areas clearly demarcated. There is again a formal
dining room, and the new one seems to have been designed for the
long narra dining table, a lovely Designs Ligna item, perhaps the one
most beautiful piece of furniture we have, bought on the cheap from
relatives leaving the country in a hurry when we still were on Heron
Street.
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Upstairs are the boys’ rooms. The beds were the ones custom-
made for the Greenmeadows house, the same ones we’d slept in since
then. It was a loft or an attic, my mother insisted, which is why the stairs
had such narrow steps. But this "attic," curiously enough, had two big
bedrooms as well as a wide hall. To those of us who actually inhabited
these rooms, the curiosity was an annoyance. There was no bathroom,
so if you had to go to the toilet in the middle of the night you had to go
down the stairs and come back up again, by which time you were at
least half awake.
Perhaps there was no difference between the two houses more
basic, and more dramatic, than their location. This part of Marikina is
not quite the same as the swanky part of Ortigas we inhabited for five
years. Cinco Hermanos is split by a road, cutting it into two phases, that
leads on one end to Major Santos Dizon, which connects Marcos
Highway with Katipunan Avenue. The other end of the road stops at
Olandes, a dense community of pedicabs, narrow streets, and poverty.
The noise – from the tricycles, the chattering on the street, the trucks
hurtling down Marcos Highway in the distance, the blaring of the
loudspeaker at our street corner put there by eager-beaver baranggay
officials – dispels any illusions one might harbor of having returned to a
state of bliss.
The first floor is designed to create a clear separation between the
family and guest areas, so one can entertain outsiders without
disturbing the house’s inhabitants. This principle owes probably more to
my mother than my father. After all, she is the entertainer, the host. The
living room, patio, and dining room – the places where guests might be
entertained – must be clean and neat, things in their places. She keeps
the kitchen achingly well-organized, which is why there are lots of
cabinets and a deep cupboard.
And she put them to good use. According to Titus, the fourth, who
accompanied her recently while grocery shopping, she buys groceries
as if all of us still lived there. I don’t recall the cupboard ever being
empty. That became her way of mothering. As we grew older and
drifted farther and farther away from her grasp, defining our own lives
outside of the house, my mother must have felt that she was losing us
to friends, jobs, loves – forces beyond her control. Perhaps she figured
that food, and a clean place to stay, was what we still needed from her.
So over the last ten years or so she has become more involved in her
cooking, more attentive, better. She also became fussier about meals,
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asking if you’ll be there for lunch or dinner so she knows how much to
cook, reprimanding the one who didn’t call to say he wasn’t coming
home for dinner after all, or the person who brought guests home
without warning. There was more to it than just knowing how much rice
to cook.
I know it gives her joy to have relatives over during the regular
Christmas and New Year get-togethers, which have been held in our
house for the past half-decade or so. She brings out the special dishes,
cups and saucers, platters, glasses, bowls, coasters and doilies she
herself crocheted. Perhaps I understand better why her Christmas
decor has grown more lavish each year. After seeing off the last guests
after the most recent gathering, she sighed, "Ang kalat ng bahay!" I
didn’t see her face, but I could hear her smiling. My father replied,
"Masaya ka naman." It wasn’t a secret. Sundays we come over to the
house, everyone who has moved out, and have lunch together. Sunday
lunches were always differently esteemed in our household. Now that
some of us have left, I sense that my siblings try harder than they ever
did to be there. I know I do. I try not to deprive my mother the chance to
do what she does best.
Epilogue
The dispersal began in the mid-eighties when Bombit went to the

United States and never returned. He left some months after we’d
moved to Greenmeadows, yet I have no memory of him there. (In
memory there are no things, only worlds. Things never exist by
themselves, but only with and against other things, between
backgrounds and foregrounds, swimming in contexts. This is how we
can remember that something is out of place, like a fancy wing chair in
the master bedroom of a worn-down house, like an eldest brother in a
house he left behind. I remember him only in Ledesma, the rough
playmate, sometimes the bully who held us in his thrall, who would jump
on cockroaches with glee, who would take alarm clocks apart and not
put them back together. I remember him in the green station wagon,
pillows in the back, disappearing for days visiting his girlfriend in Manila.
In the US they would get married, have two kids, and divorce messily.
The guest room in the Marikina house is for him, for his hoped-for
return. The exodus resumed in 1996 when I got married and moved to
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Diliman. Pixie, my only sister, the fifth child, married in December 1999
and moved to Blue Ridge. Titus, the fourth, transferred to a Makati
apartment with his wife after their wedding this past March. Raul, the
second, and Mikko, the sixth and youngest, are left with my parents. My
father is what most people would call a man of few words. He was a
father of few words as well. These past few years I’ve tried to talk to him
more and more, which is special because we never did when I was
younger. We often talk about money. I am amazed to learn how little we
had in the first place, and I wonder how we could have afforded the
Greenmeadows house, how much he has lost keeping the company he
started afloat, how much he still owes here and there.
To me it makes more and more sense for him to sell the Marikina
house, use some of the money to pay off his debts, buy a condominium
with two or three bedrooms, and live off the interest on what remains,
which would still be substantial. I’ve mentioned this to him a few times,
and he seems receptive. But I wonder if there’s such a thing as a
transfer threshold, dislocation fatigue that accumulates over a lifetime of
setting up in one place then moving. By my count the Cinco Hermanos
house is my father’s eighth home. Will he and my mother be too tired,
too weary for another relocation? A few years ago my father and his
brothers and sisters sold their house in San Juan. Built in 1948, it had
lasted nearly half a century, sheltering my grandfather and grandmother
and their eight children. They had planned to build a condominium on
the lot, but the real estate bubble of the mid-nineties convinced them
that it would be better to just sell. It was sold. That was not my father’s
first house, though it seemed so to me. Born in 1935, he lived near
Pinaglabanan church, then in 1940 at the corner of M. Paterno and
Alfonso XIII, with relatives. In my mind the Paterno house was his first,
not just because I hadn’t seen the first two (the first is gone, the second
rebuilt). The Paterno house was where his father and mother lived, and
I’d always imagined them and their children making do in that structure
that weathered the decades. When we were little, my siblings and
cousins, we spent Sundays there. I learned how to ride a bicycle on the
long driveway. We played tennis on a neighbor’s court after climbing the
back wall. In the grassy front yard we played baseball, and I hit the first
homerun in that tiny ballpark. We fished for star apples with long
bamboo sticks, picked dewy santan, got caught in the thorny
bougainvillea bushes retrieving errant pingpong balls. The last time I
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passed by the lot the house had been torn down. My father would have
been thirteen when he moved into it; he was over sixty when he and his
brothers and sisters let it go. It made sense to sell it, but I wonder if
anything was bargained away in the transaction. He had lost his parents
years before. Was losing the house a final orphaning? Is this the last
one? Am I here for good? Or should I keep the boxes and packing tape
handy? Houses provided us the necessary certainties – somewhere to
come home to where you’d find your family, your things, a hot dinner, a
bed or a good couch. Write to me here. Call me at this number. But I’ve
changed addresses and phone numbers enough times to know better.
Perhaps that’s what houses are really about: the fundamental
uncertainty of life, the slowly learned fact that the reference points by
which we draw our maps and chart our course are ever shifting, and a
life’s cartography is never quite done. That isn’t necessarily a sad thing.
Perhaps the houses are no longer, but somewhere inside me I am still
marveling at the break of day, at the way the moon illuminates the
grass, at the way the lives of those I’ve lived with have crisscrossed and
intertwined with mine, no matter how tangled up it all sometimes got. I
count my blessings, the ghosts of houses past included.
This essay won First prize for the Essay in the 2000 Palanca
Awards
IV - ASSESSMENT
A – Direction: Analyze the text that capture the photo in Time
Magazine, November 1990 (Write analysis on the photo that
Humanized AIDS). Write your answer on the space provided.
The Photo that Changed the Face of AIDS
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Awesome Good Effort A Work in Just
Criteria
(4) (3) Progress (2) Beginning (1)
Makes a Makes a detailed Makes a detailed Description
complete and description most description some are not
detailed of the subject of the subject detailed or
description of the matter and/or matter and/or complete
Objective
subject matter elements seen in elements seen in
and/or elements the photograph the photograph
seen in the
photograph
Provides a Provides a Provides some Summary is
complete somewhat summary about not detailed or
summary of the complete the situation and complete
situation and time summary of the time period
Knowledge period shown, situation and time shown, and the
and the people period shown, people and
and objects that and the people objects that
appear. and objects that appear.
appear.
Forms a Forms somewhat Relates how Finds it difficult
reasonable reasonable photograph to interpret the
hypothesis about hypothesis about makes him/her meaning of the
what is viewed in what is viewed in fee personally. photograph.
the photograph the photograph
Interpretation
and is able to and is able to
support this with support with
evidence from the some evidence
photograph from the
photograph
Finds detailed Finds some Finds the time Does not find
information about information about period for the any
Future
the time period the time period photograph. information
Research
and relates It to and relates it to about the
the photograph the photograph. photograph.
Source:
http://www.cyberbee.com/artifacts/Photo%20Analysis%20Rubric.pdf
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B – Direction: Multiple Choice. Choose the letter that best answers the
given question. Encircle the letter of your answer.
1. Hints or clues as to what will happen?
a. mood c. personification
b. point of view d. foreshadowing
2. Contrast between what is expected and what actually happens
a. symbol c. simile
b. b. conflict d. irony
3. Perspective from which the story is told
a. mood c. tone
b. point of view d. personification
4. Time and place of action in the story
a. character c. setting
b. theme d. imagery
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5. The main event or sequence in the study
a. setting c. plot
b. character d. mood
6. This is referred to as the atmosphere of a literary piece
a. conflict c. climax
b. mood d. theme
7. The performers that do the action and speak dialogue in the story
a. plot c. character
b. story d. imagery
8. A representation using an object or a mood to represent an
abstract idea
a. character c. mood
b. symbolism d. foreshadow
9. The underlying message that a writer wants to get across such as
bravery, perseverance or undying love
a. tone c. mood
b. theme d. conflict
10. Literary elements of the story which is considered as the
turning point of a narrative work is it’s point of highest tension or
drama
a. climax c. conflict
b. characterization d. tone
V - FEEDBACK
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Creative Non-Fiction G12 Module Jan 11-29

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Creative Non-Fiction G12 Module Jan 11-29

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NOTRE DAME OF NEW ILOILO, INC.

SUBJECT: CREATIVE NON-FICTION GRADE LEVEL: TWELVE

I - OBJECTIVES: At the end of the lesson, students are expected to:

III - CONTENT/ DISCUSSION/ INFORMATION

What is Creative Non Fiction? Is a genre of writing that that uses

On the basketball court things were worse. The brash, self-

In the end, perhaps all this – the uneasiness, the awkwardness,

The House on Stilts

We called it Ortega, but it wasn’t really on Ortega Street. It was on

Five Brothers, One Mother

The Marikina house wasn’t finished yet, but with an ultimatum

The dispersal began in the mid-eighties when Bombit went to the

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