AN AMERICAN SCHOLAR urged Thomasians to explore historical fiction or narratives that draw on significant past events.
“I think what historical fiction can do is to relay, communicate or dramatize subjective experience. It [allows] you feel what it felt like to be alive at a certain time,” said Andrew Warren Calvert in his talk at the UST Center for Creative Writing and Literary Studies (CCWLS) last Feb. 2.
Calvert said historical fiction allows readers to reimagine events or situations of a certain period in history.
He clarified, however, that historial fiction does not “change facts” or offer an “alternative history.”
“Another role of historical fiction is for readers to have fun, delight them in history… or for them to ‘de-mythologize,’” he said.
Calvert also shared his research interest on the Thomasites who arrived in the country in 1901 to establish a new public school system for Filipinos.
Calvert, a Fulbright lecturer who will be in the country until May, earned his master’s degree in fine arts from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2017.
