MANILA, Philippines - Think of creative writers and you have Edgar Allan Poe getting drunk and crazy on absinthe and a cask of amontillado, Rimbaud trading slaves and the American lit brats doing things the Gucci Gang would surely envy.

So imagine the horror of my batch when UP National Writers Workshop director Butch Dalisay called us trouble-free.

I expected Nick Pichay, who horrified me 20 years ago when he said he ate cats, to react. The play he submitted to the workshop was even rejected by CCP's Virgin Lab Fest because it was deemed too controversial. The title of one of his winning poems cannot be mentioned here.

Lamb-like

Nick called himself "Mr. Troublemaker" in his essay but at that moment he was, with his white jacket, silent as a lamb.

Bobby Añonuevo, whose angry prose poems were a chestful of dynamite, was sipping coffee. Jun Lana, the third of the Palanca Hall of Famers (they won five first prizes) and then only defender of TV as a serious vehicle for writing, was doodling.

I surveyed the rest. Rica Bolipata-Santos, who surprised everyone by winning the Madrigal-Gonzales Best First Book Award and had us in stitches over what her next story was about (something about oral), was already thinking in her mind about what to sing during our farewell karaoke.

Tara Sering, whose winning the Manila Critics Circle Book Award for one of her chick-lit novels, caused gasps. How could someone so young and fashionable be so good? Now she was on to a 500-page novel about funerals.

Her prose reminded me of Walker Percy and Arundhati Roy and there she was looking pensive. She titled her novel "Good People," which prophetically described us.

Jun Balde retired as a government engineer and came out with what I called pleasant logorrhea, an effusion of socially relevant novels every year and each one winning an award. But at that moment he had just presented his piece on how he come out with his work and so was maliciously smiling.

Luis Katigbak, whom Balde called the Pinoy Nueromancer and who surprised us during his presentation when he thundered, "I am not Borges!," was, typically, listening.

Street magic

Mookie Katigbak submitted a poetry series on street magic with bees, wasp and Clapton blues hovering over it. At that time she was performing one of her magic tricks with her pencil.

Ateneo professors Vince Serrano (his poems on roads in Manila were deceptively cryptic and, again, Borgesian) and Allan Derain (his "Gospel of the Kumags," about small critters inheriting the earth and ruling the heavens, evoked Galeano, "The Far Side", Borges again, and Ted Hughes) were performing their late matins.

Casocot's novel

Ian Casocot of Dumaguete unveiled his novel-in-progress about the hidden and scandalous Negros and talked about Dumaguete as the red-hot center of Filipino literature, but at the moment Dalisay said his trouble-free remark, his mind was already in Sagada, where he planned to go next after the workshop.

So we were all silenced by the observation that we were a polite batch. I remembered batches where the fellows stripped in UP Diliman and Baguio, were getting crazy over some remarks made by the literary gods, and just plain hankie-pankies writers were expected to do.

Maybe we have mellowed: The UP workshop for the past three years has shifted from gathering young literary lightweights and flogging them, to gathering, shall we say, middleweights in mid-careers. Or blame the soothing pine trees around the Igorot Lodge at John Hay and the fog that crept on cat's feet.

Making it

Later, Dalisay would assuage our frayed egos by saying how we were chosen: "If your name doesn't crop up within five seconds, you don't make it."

Later, I talked to UP Press assistant head and workshop cinematographer Butch Guerrero about what it meant to be trouble-free and he said it was supposed to be a compliment.

"You're all fun to be with," he said.

And our skit during Writer's Night, where we played our teachers-National Artists Rio Alma and Bien Lumbera as well as Jing Hidalgo, Jimmy Abad, Vim Nadera, Jun Cruz Reyes, Joey Baquiran and Charlson Ong-was politely applauded.

Even our drunken evenings inevitably ended with no histrionics and only with Charlson singing softly the fog away.

Anyway, the phrase became an inside joke among us, and we had dear Tara who consoled us by saying we would be making trouble with our writings.

And then she sang "Bad Girls" later in the night to make her point.