I believe in literature, even more so than journalism. So I'm starting a writer's workshop for local authors who work in English. Here's why: It wasn’t the newspapers and journalists who freed the Filipino people from hundreds of years of Spanish colonialism. It was literature. Jose Rizal’s novel Noli Me Tangere (Touch me not) is widely credited as having fanned the flames of the revolution that eventually overthrew the Spanish and led to an independent Philippines. The book, which I picked up and read during my travels in the Philippines, is an emotional, character-driven account of life under Spanish occupation. It…