THAT is the title of my collection of gay short stories. One of them was written in 1994, for a projected anthology of love stories that never materialized. A few I wrote when I was still working as an editor at the Batasang Pambansa and a young teacher of English at Ateneo de Manila University.
But most of them were written overseas. I wrote them when I was taking my MPhil in Publishing Studies at the University of Stirling in Scotland. I had just read the fiction of Edmund White, including his foundational novel, “A Boy’s Own Story.” The modern fairy tales of Angela Carter in “The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories” as well as the vivid stories of Jayne Anne Philipps in “Black Tickets” also helped me write the stories. These books provided touchstones, paths of fiction in the woodlands without dead ends.
I also wrote them during a one-month international fellowship at the Hawthornden Castle in Lasswade, Midlothian, Scotland. I got free board and lodging in a 17th-century castle inhabited by a ghost, whose unexpected visit I had already written about in my book, “The Heart of Summer: Stories and Tales.”
Later, I received a one-year fellowship at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (National University of Malaysia) in 2003 to read the poetry of Southeast Asia. I bought many books at the storied Kinokuniya Bookstore at Petronas Towers, helped by a generous book allowance from the Asian Scholarship Foundation. Its executive director, Dr. Lourdes Salvador, was our mother, cheerleader and constant source of support as we read books and wrote our monographs.
I had time to spare, and so I read lots of novels and short stories from Asia, which I was funded to do. The fiction books of Shirley Geok Lin-Lim of Malaysia, Suchen Christine Lim of Singapore, Yukio Mishima of Japan, Rabindranath Tagore of India, as well as Jhumpa Lahiri and Amy Tan of the Asian diaspora, were my boon companions.
I also wrote short stories in Kuala Lumpur, as well as in Singapore, where I received a follow-up grant for three months. I spent my days at the wonderful library of the National University of Singapore, whose Department of English Language and Literature provided me with a well-appointed office. I still remember walking up the stairs and taking a look at the harbor on my left. In my memory, the ships are still sailing, triangles of white moving slowly in my mind.
I also bought many books at the Kinokuniya Bookstore on Orchard Road, this time by writers from Latin America and Eastern Europe: Jorge Amado, Carlos Fuentes, Pablo Neruda, Augusto Roa Bastos, Milan Kundera, Clarice Lispector and Gabriela Mistral. Then and now, I get lost in the world of words whenever I open the pages of a book.
The insights and images from these books also helped me write my own short stories. My one-year stay at Rutgers University as a Fulbright fellow also gave me the time and leisure to read more books. I took American literature and read the novels of Kate Chopin, Don De Lillo, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon and Richard Wright.
And lastly, my two successive fellowships in the most competitive of American writing conferences and residences sealed the writing of these stories. Against all odds, I applied for a fiction fellowship at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont, which has an admission rate of 10 percent. I sent an early copy of my novel, “Riverrun.”
When I got an email informing me I was accepted, I thought it was a scam and did not reply. Only when they sent me a follow-up email did I check the name of the sender, and she was the director of the Bread Loaf Conference. I flew from Malaysia to Vermont for more than 24 hours, which was the cheapest flight I could find, and stayed in the hills of Vermont for two weeks.
The names that you now see adorning the list of the best and the brightest in American literature were there, as either my cohorts or lecturers. Their fiction was well-written, although I found some of the poems dwelling too much on the “culture of complaint” that one graduate student has noted in contemporary American writing. That, and a “sad blanding” that comes from MFA creative writing workshops, as noted by a Filipino-American writer.
Finally, two years after that, I got accepted into another competitive arena, the MacDowell Arts Residency in New Hampshire, in the middle of an American summer. They asked me if I could come in the winter season, and I said that was too cold for me. They then asked me if I could come in the fall season, and I said I already have my teaching loads at Ateneo de Manila University and San Beda University. So, I said, it was either the summer season, or I could not come at all.
Only when I was already there did I know the reason why. The summer season was reserved exclusively for the crème de la crème: the winners of National Book Awards, National Book Critics Circle Awards and Pulitzer Prizes in the United States, or their finalists. I did not know that; all I knew was that my body could not take winter anymore, and I had work in autumn.
Winners they certainly were, but the artists were kind-hearted as well. I was lucky that half of my cohort were from foreign lands, so the conversation did not dwell mostly on the ill luck of a Donald Trump presidency. Aside from me, there were also artists from China, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom. I stayed there for one-and-a-half months. I was able to revise all of my short stories that would later go to my collection called “Green Roses.”
At the Frankfurt Book Fair in October of last year, I met the brilliant business team and management of Central Books Philippines, and they signed me up to be their author. This coming Friday the 13th, at the Philippine Book Festival at Megatrade Hall in SM Megamall, we will launch my latest books: “How to Read and Write Better,” and “Green Roses.”
The first book will be sold in bulk to the Department of Education. The second book already has 19 foreign editions in the works, even before our Philippine launching. This book took ages to write, but I hope that, like vintage wine, the stories have aged wonderfully and well.
Danton Remoto has published “Riverrun,” “Boys’ Love” and “The Heart of Summer” with Penguin SEA.
