Happy Valentines! February Is Also PH National Arts Month – Where Is The Love Of Creative Writing?!

Did you know that the one honored on Valentine’s Day is Roman Catholic? St Valentine. He loved lovers, especially the young ones. And today, let me be St Valentine and encourage the young writers to cultivate Creative Writing as their love!

This month, February, is also “National Arts Month[1]” (Psyche Roxas Mendoza, 23 February 2021, BusinessMirror.com). Under the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), Ms Psyche says:

As stated in its mandate, the NCCA’s National Arts Month celebrates the country’s best artists and artistic movements in the fields of Architecture and Allied Arts, Cinema, Dance, Dramatic Arts, Literary Arts, Music, and the Visual Arts.

I’m a creative writer, and I know creative writing is an art – why does the NCCA list of arts exclude creative writing?

So what if the subject matter of my creative essays is almost always Agriculture, which is Science, which is a huge world, a technical universe, not understood if not explained? Which is why I write about it. Creative is creative!

If the NCCA “celebrates the country’s best artists and artistic movements” in the arts – how then can we creative writers as artists be celebrated?

Actually, the term “literary arts” means, by the dictionary (American Heritage) “creative writing[2].” So, in fact, we creative writers are included in the groups of artists celebrated during each February as the National Arts Month. Isn’t that wonderful?!

About agriculture & related sciences, with my original brainchild Communication for Development (ComDev), I have been engaged in for the last 13 years as far as blogging is concerned. You can google for my many blogs. You can start with iCRiSAT Watch, that which I began with my first essay on 04 February 2007, “The Yankee Dawdle. On Discovery Sorghum, The Great Climate Crop[3]” (https://icrisatwatch.blogspot.com). At that time, now Secretary of Agriculture William Dar was Director General of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), and I was a WFH international consulting writer.

Since that time, I have written and uploaded in many a differently named blog at least 5,000 long essays, each a minimum of 1,000 words – and each, I must emphasize, with a Beginning, Middle & End – not simply a collection of notes and random thoughts.

If truth be told, I’m 80 plus, thank God! I learned to be earnestly creative in 1965. In 1975, I began to hone that talent working as Editor In Chief of the 3 publications of the Forest Research Institute (FORI) based in the campus of UP Los Baños: monthly newsletter Canopy, quarterly technical journal Sylvatrop, and quarterly color magazine Habitat – in the Age of Dinosaurs (giant typewriters).

In 1985, I began to learn digital writing and editing earnestly at the office of Elpidio L Rosario, Director of the Farming Systems & Soil Resources Institute of the University of the Philippines College of Agriculture, now UP Los Baños.

ComDev. You don’t know how wonderful it is to be able to do your creative writing digitally!@


[1]https://businessmirror.com.ph/2020/02/23/the-2020-national-arts-month/#:~:text=Read%20more-,For%20one%20whole%20month
%2C%20in%20February%20of%20every%20year%2C%20the,and%20the%20Arts%20(NCCA).

[2]https://www.thefreedictionary.com/literary+arts

[3]https://icrisatwatch.blogspot.com/2007/02/yankee-dawdle.html

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