The column as creative work

There is something about the column that deserves closer attention. It is one of the most familiar forms of public writing, yet it is also one of the forms most easily misunderstood. A column may occupy only a few pages in a newspaper, magazine, or digital publication, but within those pages can exist research, argument, observation, memory, interpretation, language, voice, and imagination. It can inform, question, criticize, remember, document, interpret, and create meaning. It can speak to a general audience while carrying the intellectual and creative labor of its author. For this reason, I have become increasingly interested in thinking about the column as creative work.

The phrase itself is important. To describe the column as creative work is not to suggest that every column is automatically literary or that every newspaper article should be treated as a creative output. Rather, it is to recognize that the column can be a carefully constructed form of intellectual and creative production. Its value does not depend solely on the platform where it appears. It depends on what the writer does with language, information, experience, research, argument, and observation. A column can be a space where knowledge is not merely transmitted but interpreted and transformed.

This distinction matters particularly within the university. As academic institutions establish offices, programs, desks, centers, and mechanisms dedicated to creative work, we are being asked to reconsider what we mean when we use the word “creative.” We have become more willing to talk about creativity, but we have not always developed the institutional language necessary to recognize the different forms through which creative intellectual labor takes place. The column is one of those forms.

To appreciate the column as creative work, we first have to appreciate the labor behind it. A finished column may look simple. It may consist of only a thousand or a few thousand words. It may be written in a language accessible to a general audience. It may not contain footnotes, tables, statistical analyses, or the formal apparatus of an academic research paper. But none of these absences should be mistaken for a lack of intellectual work.

A column may begin with a question, an observation, a conversation, a place, a historical detail, a public event, a book, a monument, a word, or even a moment of discomfort. From that small beginning, the writer may read documents, verify information, revisit places, conduct informal research, examine historical sources, remember experiences, test arguments, consider opposing perspectives, and revise the language repeatedly. The writer has to decide where the piece should begin, what information deserves emphasis, what should be omitted, how the argument should develop, and what final thought should remain with the reader. These are creative decisions, but they are also intellectual decisions.

The brevity of a column should therefore never be confused with the simplicity of its production. A poem may occupy one page but require years of writing. A photograph may capture one instant but involve years of developing a visual practice. A short story may be read in twenty minutes but may have taken months to construct. The same principle applies to the column. Its physical length tells us very little about the intellectual and creative labor behind it.

This is particularly important when we consider the column as a form of creative nonfiction. Creative nonfiction is grounded in reality, but it does not merely reproduce reality. It interprets reality through language and form. It works with real people, real places, real events, memory, history, observation, and research, while allowing the writer to shape these materials through voice, structure, narrative, reflection, imagery, juxtaposition, and argument. The column can operate in precisely this space.

A cultural column, for example, may begin with a public monument but eventually become an essay about memory and heritage. A discussion of a changing neighborhood may become an exploration of displacement and urban development. A reflection on a local word may open a larger conversation about language and identity. A discussion of a book may become an examination of reading culture. A personal experience may become a way of understanding a larger social or cultural reality. The column allows the writer to move from the particular to the universal, from observation to interpretation, and from experience to knowledge.

This is one of the things I appreciate most about the form. The column creates a meeting place between the personal and the public. It allows a writer to begin with something observed and end with something understood. It can transform an ordinary encounter into an intellectual question. It can take a familiar place and make the reader see it differently. It can make a local issue part of a wider cultural conversation. In this sense, the column is not simply a container for opinions. It is a form of thinking through writing.

This distinction is particularly meaningful in Western Visayas, where literary and cultural production does not always fit neatly into the categories developed by academic bureaucracy. We have writers working in Hiligaynon, Kinaray-a, Aklanon, Capiznon, Filipino, and English. We have teachers who write poetry, researchers who write essays, journalists who write literary criticism, translators who produce original interpretations of texts, and academics who document local histories and cultural practices through forms that are neither purely scientific nor purely literary. The column belongs naturally within this intellectual ecosystem.

A regional column can document a changing city. It can preserve a disappearing expression. It can question how heritage is being treated. It can examine the relationship between language and place. It can bring literature into everyday conversation. It can make regional experiences visible beyond the region. It can also allow writers to participate in public intellectual life without having to abandon the literary and creative practices through which they understand the world. This is why the column should not be appreciated merely as a form of communication. It should also be appreciated as a form of intellectual production.

I have nothing against science. Universities must protect the rigor of scientific research. Experiments, statistics, fieldwork, laboratory procedures, quantitative analysis, and systematic investigation require appropriate standards. But the existence of scientific standards does not mean that every other form of intellectual work must imitate the scientific paper.

A poem is not a failed research article. A short story is not a research paper without a methodology section. A literary essay does not become intellectually inferior because it does not contain statistical tables. A cultural essay does not cease to be serious because its evidence is woven into narrative and reflection. The same should be said of the column.

To appreciate the column as creative work is not to lower academic standards. It is to understand that rigor takes different forms. A scientific paper may demonstrate rigor through methodology, reproducibility, data, and statistical analysis. A creative work may demonstrate rigor through research, form, language, structure, originality, sustained revision, factual responsibility, and depth of interpretation. Different forms of work require different forms of attention.

This is where the growing conversation about creative work offices in universities becomes significant. Such offices should not exist simply to organize literary festivals, poetry readings, exhibitions, workshops, and cultural celebrations, although these are valuable. They should also help universities develop an institutional understanding of creative intellectual labor.

Such an office should be able to recognize the difference between a poem and a press release, between a literary essay and an institutional announcement, between creative nonfiction and ordinary reporting, between promotional writing and cultural criticism, and between a routine opinion piece and a carefully researched cultural column.

The column deserves a place in this conversation because it sits at an interesting intersection. It can be literary without being fiction. It can be scholarly without looking like a research article. It can be personal without being merely private. It can be public without being merely promotional. It can be critical without abandoning creativity. It can be accessible without becoming intellectually simplistic. That complexity is precisely what makes the form valuable.

The legal framework in the Philippines also provides an important starting point for thinking about written creative production. Republic Act No. 8293, or the Intellectual Property Code of the Philippines, recognizes various forms of literary and scholarly expression, including articles, writings, periodicals, newspapers, and other literary, scholarly, scientific, and artistic works. Copyright protection and academic recognition are, of course, different matters. A work may be protected by copyright without automatically constituting a significant academic contribution. But the broader principle remains useful: writing can constitute original intellectual creation even when it does not resemble a conventional research paper.

This should encourage universities to think more carefully about the status of writing, including the column, as intellectual and creative production. Of course, not every column should automatically be classified as creative work. This qualification is important. Some columns are announcements. Some are institutional reports. Some are promotional pieces. Some are routine opinion articles. Some are journalistic commentaries. Some are written primarily to provide information. The form alone does not determine the classification.

But the existence of these different kinds of columns should not prevent us from recognizing those that genuinely demonstrate creative and intellectual craftsmanship. A column can be creative work when it possesses recognizable qualities of creative nonfiction or literary-cultural criticism. It may have a distinctive voice. It may demonstrate research and reflection. It may construct an argument through narrative. It may employ metaphor, irony, memory, historical context, close observation, or other literary techniques. It may interpret cultural realities rather than merely report events. Most importantly, it may transform information and experience into a carefully crafted intellectual and aesthetic form.

This is where appreciation becomes important. We often ask whether a column qualifies as creative work, but perhaps we should also learn to appreciate what the form makes possible. The column gives writers a regular space for sustained thinking. It allows ideas to develop over time. It creates a continuing relationship between writer and reader. It allows a writer to return to recurring questions such as language, literature, memory, cities, culture, politics, heritage, books, education, or everyday life and examine them from different angles. A column can become an intellectual practice.

When I write a cultural column, I do not experience the process as simply providing a public service. I read. I investigate. I look at historical material. I revisit places. I remember conversations. I examine language. I question assumptions. I draft and revise. I think about how an argument should begin and where it should end. I consider whether a particular word is strong enough, whether a paragraph is carrying too much weight, whether the tone is too aggressive or not aggressive enough, whether a historical claim is accurate, and whether the reader will understand why the issue matters.

Sometimes the writing begins with something very small: a monument, a word, a building, a public space, a book, a cultural practice, or a sentence someone said to me. But the writing eventually becomes an attempt to understand something much larger. That movement from the small to the large, from observation to interpretation, is part of what makes the column a creative form.

A column is also a form of public scholarship. This matters because universities increasingly speak about public engagement, knowledge translation, community engagement, and social relevance. We want knowledge to move beyond the university. We want academics to communicate with communities. We want research to matter beyond the campus.

Yet when an academic writes for the public, that work can sometimes be placed in a lower category simply because it does not resemble conventional academic writing. There is an institutional contradiction here. We ask academics to communicate knowledge beyond the university, but we do not always recognize the intellectual labor involved in doing so effectively. We value public impact but sometimes undervalue public writing. We encourage knowledge translation but may fail to recognize the creative and interpretive work required to translate knowledge into language that ordinary readers can understand. The column can help bridge that gap.

In Western Visayas, this becomes even more significant when the writing concerns language and culture. Writing about Hiligaynon, Kinaray-a, Aklanon, local history, literature, heritage, architecture, public spaces, regional publishing, or cultural memory is not simply entertainment. Such writing participates in the production and preservation of knowledge.

A column can document cultural change. It can challenge dominant narratives. It can preserve memory. It can bring regional questions into national conversations. It can make visible communities and experiences that are rarely represented in mainstream academic publications. It can allow a region to speak about itself in its own languages and through its own cultural experiences. This is why the column can also become a form of cultural work.

If universities are serious about recognizing creative work, they should develop criteria that allow the column to be evaluated according to what it actually does. We can consider authorship, originality, research, editorial selection, publication context, literary craftsmanship, argument, voice, cultural significance, factual responsibility, critical reception, and professional recognition where relevant. These criteria do not weaken standards. They make standards more appropriate to the work being evaluated.

The real problem begins when institutional evaluation becomes obsessed with sameness. We sometimes assume that if two outputs are both intellectual, they must be evaluated using exactly the same template.

This is where creative work begins to suffer. We can evaluate poetry rigorously without asking poets to produce statistical analysis. We can evaluate creative nonfiction rigorously without forcing writers to imitate research articles. We can evaluate a short story through narrative structure, characterization, language, originality, and thematic depth. And we can evaluate a column through its research, argument, voice, structure, originality, literary quality, cultural significance, and editorial context.

There is nothing anti-academic about this approach. In fact, it can be more academically responsible because it recognizes differences between disciplines and forms of knowledge. A university that understands only one model of rigor is not necessarily rigorous. Sometimes, real rigor requires us to understand why different forms of intellectual work require different methods of evaluation.

The scientific paper and the poem should not be judged by the same instrument simply because both were produced by university faculty. That would be like judging a symphony according to the standards used to evaluate a microscope. The instruments are different because the objects being evaluated are different. The same principle applies to the column.

There is also a larger issue concerning regional universities. If we continue to recognize only forms of scholarship that are easily visible within international academic databases, we risk creating an institutional hierarchy in which regional creative production remains invisible. A poem written in Hiligaynon may not generate the same citation profile as an international scientific paper. A Kinaray-a short story may not appear in the same indexing systems. A cultural column about Iloilo may not produce the bibliometric evidence that universities have become accustomed to seeing.

But cultural value is not exhausted by bibliometric visibility. A column can preserve memory, develop language, influence readers, challenge assumptions, inspire younger writers, document regional realities, and contribute to the intellectual history of a community. Its significance may be found not only in how many times it is cited but in what it makes possible: a conversation, a memory, a question, a reconsideration, or a new way of seeing.

This is why the recognition of creative work is also a question of cultural justice. If universities are institutions of knowledge, they must be capable of recognizing knowledge that does not always arrive in the dominant language or dominant academic form.

Western Visayan languages should not merely be treated as objects of research. They should also be recognized as languages through which research, literature, criticism, scholarship, and creative thought are produced. A university that claims to serve its region must be capable of recognizing the intellectual work that emerges from that region.

For me, this discussion is not abstract. I have spent years moving between publishing, teaching, writing, translation, literary work, cultural programming, and university work. The more I move between these spaces, the more obvious the artificiality of some of our categories becomes.

Outside the university, people understand that a writer writes. A publisher understands that a manuscript represents months or years of labor. A literary editor understands that revision is intellectual work. A translator understands that choosing one word instead of another can change the meaning of an entire text. A cultural worker understands that documentation and interpretation can shape how a community remembers itself. The column belongs to this world of work.

Bureaucracy often prefers things that are easy to count. A publication has an ISBN. A journal has a volume and issue number. A research article has pages, citations, references, and a DOI. A creative work can have all of these things, but its value may also reside somewhere less easily measured. It may reside in language, voice, originality, or in the ability to make a reader recognize something that was previously invisible. It may reside in cultural memory or in the transformation of an experience into a form that another person can understand. The column can carry all of these possibilities.

This is ultimately why I believe the column deserves to be appreciated alongside poetry, short stories, essays, and other forms of creative nonfiction. Not because every column is automatically literature, and certainly not because every writer who publishes a column should automatically receive academic credit for creative work. The argument is more precise. The column is a form. What makes it creative is the work done within that form.

Its classification should therefore be based on the actual work rather than on the assumption that newspaper publication automatically makes it public service. A carefully researched and artistically constructed cultural column can be creative nonfiction. It can be literary-cultural criticism. It can be public scholarship. It can be intellectual work.

The university should therefore develop clear criteria instead of relying on outdated binaries. It should distinguish scientific research from creative research without establishing a hierarchy between them. It should recognize creative nonfiction as a legitimate form of creative production. It should establish appropriate mechanisms for assessing literary and cultural outputs. It should also recognize that creative work may be published outside conventional academic journals and that this does not automatically make it less intellectually valuable.

The larger lesson is that universities must learn to recognize intellectual work in the forms in which people actually produce it. The world does not wait for academic categories before culture happens. Writers write. Communities remember. Languages evolve. Artists create. Critics argue. Translators interpret. Journalists document. Scholars investigate. Sometimes, one person does several of these things at once.

The university’s task should not be to force these activities into rigid boxes simply because the boxes are convenient. Its task should be to develop better ways of understanding the complexity of contemporary intellectual labor. And perhaps this is where the column has something important to teach the university.

The column teaches us that knowledge does not always arrive as a research article. Sometimes it arrives as a story about a place. Sometimes as a reflection on a word. Sometimes as a memory. Sometimes as an argument prompted by a monument, a book, a building, a street, a language, or an ordinary encounter. The form may be familiar, but the intellectual work within it can be complex. That is the value of the column as creative work.

A column does not become creative simply because its author calls it creative. It becomes creative through the work of shaping experience, research, evidence, language, and thought into a meaningful form. Its creativity resides not merely in imagination but in interpretation, craft, structure, voice, and the ability to create connections that were not immediately visible before the writing began.

The column therefore deserves not automatic recognition, but serious consideration. It deserves to be read, evaluated, and understood according to its own form. When it demonstrates research, originality, craftsmanship, intellectual substance, cultural significance, and creative expression, it deserves to be recognized as what it can genuinely be: creative work.

This is the conversation we need now, especially as universities in Western Visayas continue to strengthen their programs for language, literature, culture, translation, creative writing, publishing, and creative production. We should not build creative work offices that merely celebrate creativity while the rest of the university continues to treat creative production as secondary. If we are serious about creativity, then we must also be serious about the labor behind it, the policies that recognize it, the people who produce it, and the institutional structures that allow it to flourish.

A university should be a place where different ways of knowing can meet without one being forced to disguise itself as another. Science should remain science. Creative work should remain creative work. Scholarship should remain rigorous. But rigor should not become another word for conformity.

If a poem can be scholarship, if a novel can be scholarship, if creative nonfiction can be scholarship, and if a carefully researched and artistically constructed cultural column can produce meaningful knowledge, then the question is no longer simply whether the column is academic enough. The more important question is whether our definition of academic work has become too small for the intellectual and creative work our universities are already producing.

The column, precisely because it exists between the literary and the public, between scholarship and everyday life, and between research and reflection, is one of the forms that can help us make that definition larger.

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Noel Galon de Leon is a writer and educator at the University of the Philippines Visayas. He teaches in the Division of Professional Education and at UP High School in Iloilo. He currently serves as faculty-in-charge of the UP Visayas Language Program Office and as secretary of the National Committee on Literary Arts of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA). His poetry has been recognized by the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature.