Last Saturday, May 30, 2026, the Davao Writers Guild and our young writing fellows arrived at Del Monte on Samal Island just as dusk was falling, marking the culmination of our closing ceremonies. Our destination, Sunset Hill, is an elegant private home perched gracefully beside the sea, featuring a wide patio perfect for intimate gatherings. Though we missed the actual sunset, it wasn’t hard to imagine how glorious it must have been as it descended over the Samal Strait.
For the DWG members, the preceding community outreach with teachers from 17 schools across Samal was an eye-opener. Most of these educators face the daunting task of teaching literature and creative writing to high schoolers today. They shared the reality of competing with the hyper-stimulating, algorithmic pull of social media and the instant gratification of generative AI. Jhoanna Cruz, former President of DWG, agreed, noting that the attention span of the younger generation has been cut down to a mere two seconds to be hooked by the written word.
Social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram reels have conditioned students to consume fragmented, fast-paced content, reducing their patience for sustained reading. Literature teachers struggle to engage students with dense, long-form texts when young brains are used to 15-second visual hooks. This creates a stubborn resistance to deep textual analysis and the slow, deliberate process of critical thinking.
Yet, this uphill battle is precisely why regional storytelling remains vital. For decades, mainstream narratives frequently painted Mindanao solely through the restrictive lens of conflict and neglect. The Guild has been instrumental in dismantling this image, replacing it with a literary landscape that is fiercely complex, multilingual, and profoundly alive.
Through the stories now emerging from our island, the persistent myth of Mindanao as a land of perpetual strife or a region relegated to the margins of development is slowly being dismantled. Even in the digital age, many in other parts of the country still harbor the outdated view of Mindanao as backward and slow-paced. However, the literature rising from this island, vibrant stories of abundance, resilience, and a thriving contemporary culture, is powerful enough to challenge those misconceptions and permanently reshape national perceptions.
“Poetry is a language by which we can understand the world,” Cruz said during her welcoming remarks at the forum—a sentiment that resonates deeply today. Since antiquity, leaders and thinkers have turned to poetry to illuminate complex truths that an essay simply cannot capture. Even revolutionaries who altered the course of history, such as Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong, were poets who used verse to articulate the raw realities of their struggle and the future they envisioned for their nations.
During our gathering, Errol Merquita, one of our prominent Binisaya writers, read his piece entitled “Unsaon Pagpatay Ug Ok-ok” (How to Kill a Cockroach) in a tongue-in-cheek, darkly comedic style that hit the mark perfectly.
On the surface, the act of exterminating an ok-ok is an everyday chore born of disgust. Yet, rendered through Merquita’s contemporary Mindanawon lens, this domestic nuisance transforms into a powerful political allegory. The cockroach—a resilient scavenger thriving exclusively in darkness and decay—serves as a potent symbol for the systemic corruption, historical distortions that fester beneath the surface of our collective consciousness. Merquita captures the insidious nature of modern institutional violence and marginalization. It forces us to confront an uncomfortable reality: the most devastating forces of erasure in our society rarely announce themselves with a loud bang. They occur quietly in the shadows, out of public view. His work challenges us to illuminate the dark corners of our history before the things that scuttle in the dark consume us entirely.
By the time our evening wound down, the moon had become a heavy yellow orb struggling to maintain its brightness amid the gathering dark clouds. A quiet settled over us as we finally began to make our way toward the vans waiting at the gate.
In the end, we think all that matters is that we keep writing, keep teaching, and keep telling our stories, hoping for a little bit of change. Basin pa diay.
