RENOWNED writer and UST literature professor Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo is set to launch 50 years’ worth of short fiction stories in a new book titled, “Complete Stories and Tales.”
Found in the book are Hidalgo’s popular and award-winning collections of short stories, “Ballad of A Lost Season and Other Stories (1987),” “Tales for a Rainy Night (1993),” “Where Only The Moon Rages (1994),” and “Catch a Falling Star (1999).”
The book also included tales from her novels “Recuerdo (1997)” and “A Book of Dreams (2001),” along with works from her early years, three new flash fiction pieces initially shared on Facebook, and one story from the Likhaan Anthology of Philippine Literature.
“[Compiling it was] not tedious. Ginamit ‘yung former collection (Collected Stories and Tales), tapos dinagdag lang ‘yung ‘Catch a Falling Star.’ So it’s more complete,” Hidalgo told the Varsitarian.
“Complete Stories and Tales” will be launched by the UST Publishing House at the Manila International Book Fair (MIBF), which will be held Sept. 11 to 15, 2024.
Hidalgo said it was in 2019 when she first attempted to compile all her short fiction works under the title “Collected Stories and Tales.”
This collection, however, did not include her work “Catch a Falling Star (1999).”
“Its original publisher, Anvil Publishing, had not given us permission to include [‘Catch a Falling Star,’] because the book was still in print, and because they had scheduled the release of the book’s 20th anniversary edition also in 2019,” Hidalgo wrote in the preface of “Complete Stories and Tales.”
Apart from travel and biographical essays, Hidalgo, director of the UST Creative Writing Center, also wrote modern fairy tales in the speculative genre.
“[I] started with realism and then I wrote two fairy tale collections, modern fairy tales, which was also new by the way. Speculative fiction was not yet widely recognized in the country. I’m one of the forerunners,” she said.
“Writing fairy tales was not deliberate. I just felt the desire to write fairy tales, but I didn’t want to write fairy tales that were Western. So I looked up our myths and legends and realized that our culture is similar to Latin American culture; it is best expressed via marvelous or magical realism,” she added.
Hidalgo said her works were a manifestation of her mentality and environment at the time.
“Looking back at my past works, hindi naman cringe. Kasi, I think [it captures] my age at the time when I wrote that, and the kind of environment that I was a part of — kasi you are a product of your class, your religious beliefs, your political beliefs, etc. So I don’t cringe, I stand by the stories,” Hidalgo said.
Reflecting on her growth as a fictionist, Hidalgo said that much of her epiphanies had to do with how difficult it was to be a woman writer.
“My discoveries, if you can call them discoveries, had to do with women writers. And one of them is that it is so difficult for women. Always has been,” the literature professor said.
“If you want to be a writer and you are a woman, you have to really want it very badly. Because it’s not easy,” she added.
Hidalgo, a former Varsitarian editor in chief, teaches literature and creative writing courses at the UST Graduate School.
Her short story collections, “Catch a Falling Star,” and “Ballad of a Lost Season” have won three Carlos Palanca awards for short fiction, essay, and novel, and several National Book Awards.
In 2023, Hidalgo received the Southeast Asian Writers (S.E.A. Write) Award, a prestigious honor given by Thai royalty to the region’s top litterateurs.
