| National Artist Francisco Arcellana, 85 University of the Philippines National Artist Francisco Arcellana passed away last August 1, 2002. He succumbed to pneumonia and kidney failure at the National Kidney Institute where he was confined for a week. His remains lie in state at the Delaney Hall, UP Chapel in Diliman, Quezon City. He was 85. Arcellana’s fellow writers held a necrological service on August 3, Saturday, at 7 p.m. at the UP Chapel. The UP Community is scheduled to hold another service on August 5, Monday. Arcellana – a Professor Emeritus at the UP Department of English and Comparative Literature, a member of the CWC Board of Advisers – was the first director of the CWC from 1979 to 1982. Arcellana was born 6 September 1916 at Santa Cruz, Manila. His writing career was launched with the publication of his story –“ The Man Who Would Be Poe” – in Graphic when he was a sixteen-year-old student. Two years later, he became the editor of Expression – a quarterly of experimental writing. Consequently, the venture gave birth to the Veronicans: “a radical coterie of thirteen prewar writers whose bold works were rejected for publication by magazines at the time.” Arcellana steered parallel careers in journalism and literature for two decades. He had stints with Woman’s World (1939), Herald Mid-Week Magazine (1939-41), Acta Medica Philippines (1941), Philcross (1945-53), the International News Service (1947-48) and This Week (1948-50), where he served as either writer, columnist or editor. In the meantime, he published the germinal short stories, poems, and essays that formed the body of his work: “ Trilogy of Turtles” (short story, 1935); “The Mats” (short story, 1938); “Prayer” (poem, 1939), “Through a Glass Darkly” (column, 1948-49), “The Flowers for May” (short story, 1951), “The Wing of Madness: I” (short story, 1953), “The Wing of Madness: II – The Yellow Shawl” (short story, 1953) and “To Touch You,” “I Touched Her, Yes” and “The Other Woman” (poems, 1953). His books include Selected Stories (1962); The Philippine PEN Anthology of Short Stories (1962), Fifteen Stories: Storymasters 5 ( 1973); and The Francisco Arcellana Sampler (1990). He joined the DECL in 1953. He started as an instructor and he retired in 1982, with the rank Professor VII. In 1979, he was appointed the first CWC Director – a post he held until 1982. He was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Iowa and attended the Breadloaf Writers Conference at Vermont, 1956-57. Aside from Palanca and Free Press awards, he was a Smith-Mundt Leader Grantee (1955) in the teaching of Creative Writing and received the Patnubay ng Kalinangan Award for Literature (1981). He was declared a National Artist for Literature in 1990 by then President Corazon Aquino. URL: http://www.up.edu.ph/arcellana.htm
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