Renowned writer and UST literature professor Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo will publish 50 years of short stories in a new book titled “Complete Stories and Tales.”
The book includes Hidalgo’s popular and award-winning short story collections “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 includes stories from her novels Recuerdo (1997) and A Book of Dreams (2001), works from her early years, three new short stories first shared on Facebook, and a story from the Likhaan Anthology of Philippine Literature.
“(Putting it together was) not time-consuming. Ginamit ‘yung previous collection (Collected Stories and Narratives), tapos monday long ‘yung ‘Catch a Falling Star’. So it is more complete,” Hidalgo told the Varsitary.
“Complete Stories and Tales” will be presented by UST Publishing House at the Manila International Book Fair (MIBF) to be held from September 11 to 15, 2024.
Hidalgo said she first tried to compile all of her short stories under the title “Collected Stories and Tales” in 2019.
However, this collection did not include her works “Patrician Payatot“ found in “Catch a Falling Star (1999)”.
“The original publisher, Anvil Publishing, had not given us permission to include ‘Catch a Falling Star’ because the book was still in print and the 20th anniversary edition of the book was also scheduled for publication in 2019,” Hidalgo wrote in the foreword to Complete Stories and Tales.
In addition to 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 wrote two collections of fairy tales, modern fairy tales, which was also new by the way. Wala pang spec fic noon (there was no speculative fiction then). I am one of the pioneers,” she said.
“Writing fairy tales was not intentional. I just had the desire to write fairy tales, but I didn’t want to write fairy tales that were Western. So I looked for (Filipino fairy tales) and found that our culture is similar to Latin American culture,” she added.
Hidalgo said her works were an expression of her mentality and environment at the time.
“When I look back at my previous work, Hindi name shudder. Hello, I think it reflects my age at the time I wrote it and the kind of environment I was in – Kasi You are a product of your class, your religious beliefs, your political beliefs, etc. So I don’t flinch, I stand by the stories,” Hidalgo said.
Reflecting on her development as a novelist, Hidalgo said many of her realizations had to do with how difficult it was to be a 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. It has always been that way,” said the literature professor.
“If you want to be a woman writer, you have to really want it. Because it’s not easy,” she added.
Hidalgo, a former Varsitary Editor-in-Chief, is a professor of literature 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, essays, and novels, as well as several National Book Awards.
In 2023, Hidalgo received the Southeast Asian Writers (SEA Write) Award, a prestigious award given by the Thai royal family to the region’s best writers.
