Eighteen Red Pencils: A Seminar on the Craft of Connection

I arrived at the Quezon City university-extension seminar carrying eighteen red pencils, a recorder, and the sort of confidence that has previously made me say a colleague’s favorite romance was “easy.”

Not bad. At least I did not say it during a wedding toast. I said it in a campus café while my colleague explained why she reread the book every January.

“Easy,” I added, with the serene ignorance of someone who believes a soufflé is just an egg having ambition.

She looked at me over her paper cup. “Easy how?”

Reader, I performed a small death by adverb. I meant accessible. I meant emotionally clear. I meant two adults speak honestly, make difficult choices, and arrive somewhere earned. Instead, I waved my hand in a manner suggesting that timing, restraint, comic rhythm, class detail, and reciprocal regard could be assembled during a tea break.

Then I tried to write an easy scene.

For seven days, two adult neighbors in my draft stood beside a lobby noticeboard and failed to decide whether to attend a tenants’ meeting. They spoke in circles. They misunderstood a sentence about repair fees. One of them held a tote bag for so long that I began to suspect it had become the protagonist. The scene performed like a laptop update stalled at two percent: technically underway, emotionally suspicious, and preventing all useful activity.

By Friday, I had three pages, two depleted pens, and the realization that my colleague had been correct in the deeply inconvenient way colleagues sometimes are.

**Comfort is not a synonym for easy.**

That sentence sat at the top of my legal pad as the seminar began. Beneath it, I had drawn five empty teacups for later scoring, because rating a public conversation with crockery is either criticism or a request for administrative leave. Possibly both.

The extension room held plastic chairs, a whiteboard marked with the remains of somebody else’s algebra, and a table of paper cups that gave off the determined smell of instant coffee. Adult readers arrived after work carrying backpacks, tote bags, folders, and the particular tiredness of people who had chosen one more commitment because books had asked them nicely.

Milagros Santos, the program coordinator, stood near the front with a neat stack of reading packets. At forty-eight, she had the calm precision of a person who could locate an extra chair, a missing handout, and the actual point of an argument without making anyone feel foolish.

Crisanto Velasco, thirty-five, took a seat near the aisle in a blue work shirt, his transit card clipped to his bag. He introduced himself as a civil engineer and commuter-reader, which sounded to me like the title of a novel I would immediately put on hold at the library.

Yvette Dizon, twenty-nine, arrived with a notebook full of tabs and the watchful expression of an emerging novelist who had probably already noticed every weak verb in the room, including several of mine.

My recorder’s red light appeared. One pencil rolled from the table and made a determined escape toward Crisanto’s shoe.

“Captured for posterity,” I said.

“Your pencil?” Yvette asked.

“My humiliation,” I said. “The pencil is merely its assistant.”

A few people laughed. My shoulders lowered by a fraction. GIF-in-words: one anxious reviewer attempting to organize feeling with stationery; stationery filing a complaint with human resources.

On the recording, I introduced myself as Caridad Ramos, writing as aurorax7, and confessed the entire “easy romance” incident before anyone could uncover it through rigorous academic gossip.

Milagros folded her hands over the reading packet.

“Good,” she said. “Then we can begin somewhere honest.”

Caridad: “Please do not tell the room I have made this worse already.”

Milagros: “I think you have made it useful. Before any of us defend romance, may I ask the room something?”

She looked from the commuters to the writers, the readers with marked-up pages, the people still holding their coffee as if it might offer a syllabus.

“What do readers mean when they call a story comforting?”

For several seconds, the room gave its notebooks urgent attention, which is what adults do when asked a personal question in a public room with fluorescent lighting.

Crisanto lifted his transit card from his bag strap.

“Comforting, to me, means I can trust a story not to punish people for wanting decent treatment,” he said. “Characters can make poor choices. They can send reckless texts. But the book does not treat their need for care as a punchline.”

Caridad: “So comfort is not a guarantee that nothing goes wrong.”

Crisanto: “No. It is a guarantee that what goes wrong matters.”

I wrote that down with a red pencil, then immediately worried the pencil had made it look more dramatic than he had intended. This is why reviewers should perhaps be issued softer stationery.

Crisanto settled back in his chair.

“Most nights, I read on the northbound train after site work. The carriage is crowded. There are backpacks, damp umbrellas, somebody watching videos at a heroic volume, and at least one person conducting a phone call as if the entire rail system had requested an update.”

A few people laughed in recognition.

“I hold the rail with one hand and my phone with the other. By then, I have spent the day checking plans, solving practical problems, dealing with delays. Romance gives my brain a smaller question with real stakes: will these adults listen to each other? Will they choose fairly? It is a private reset.”

Caridad: “Which is more order than public transport usually offers.”

Crisanto: “Exactly. A train can stop between stations for twenty minutes. A good novel still knows where it is going.”

That was annoyingly elegant. I put a small star beside it and considered asking whether a civil engineer was allowed to be that good at metaphor without a permit.

At first, Crisanto said, he kept his romance reading discreet. He lowered his screen whenever another commuter looked over. An illustrated cover, even one showing fully clothed adults standing near a café or an apartment building, seemed to require explanation.

“I thought somebody might decide it was silly,” he said. “I could read a technical manual in public and nobody cared. But a love story felt like information about me.”

**A private pleasure can still make a public claim.**

It is strange what we ask readers to defend. A person holding a history of naval campaigns is presumed to be learning. A person holding a romance may be asked whether they know it is fictional, as though fiction has only just been discovered and urgently needs warning labels.

Caridad: “When did it stop being private?”

Crisanto smiled, not at me, but at the memory.

“Another adult commuter saw an author’s name on my screen. She asked if I liked the book. I expected a joke. Instead, she gave me three recommendations and told me about a bookstore reading circle.”

He joined the circle. Then a group chat. Then this seminar.

“I found people who could say, ‘That scene did not work because nobody listened,’ and nobody treated that as a silly complaint. They understood that care is craft.”

I looked around the room: office workers, graduate students, writers, readers with creased packets and tired faces. Who gets called a serious reader, I wondered, and who gets asked to explain why a story made room for them?

Crisanto answered before I could ask it aloud.

“I work with structures,” he said. “Nobody asks whether I take specifications seriously. I read a novel about two adults trying to treat each other well, and suddenly I am expected to prove I have an intellect.”

My legal pad received another star.

At this point, I consulted my scorecard, because I had promised teacups and feared public disorder if I failed to produce them.

**Seminar welcome: 4½ out of 5 teacups.** Clear directions, readable name tags, and no icebreaker requiring us to describe ourselves as weather. Half a teacup deducted because my name tag attached itself to my sleeve with more commitment than either neighbor in my stalled draft.

**Reading list: 4½ out of 5 teacups.** The selections promised range without behaving like homework in a trench coat. I reserved the remaining half-teacup pending closer inspection, because criticism without a tiny procedural anxiety is merely enthusiasm wearing spectacles.

**Refreshments: 3 out of 5 teacups.** The biscuits were dependable. The coffee had the determined personality of a committee meeting, but it had arrived hot, and that counted for something.

Milagros glanced at the packet in her hands.

“So,” she said, “if pleasure does not cancel thought, why do so many people act as if it does?”

Milagros placed the reading packet flat on the table, as if it were about to make a reasonable argument and expected us to keep up.

Milagros: “Because pleasure is often treated as a confession of lowered standards. If a book satisfies you, some people decide it cannot also ask anything of you.”