It’s taken writer and editor Sarge Lacuesta twenty years of writing fiction to compile his new book of short stories titled City Stories, which debuted at the Manila International Book Fair this past weekend.
The short stories collected in City Stories is Lacuesta’s ode to every city he’s visited and its familiar backdrops: bright lights, busy streets, foggy skyline, and the resulting feelings of both isolation and happy surprises that occur in this urban sprawl.
“The book is really a selection of my personal favorites among all the ‘urban fiction’ I’ve written and published all these years across different books — with many of the stories undergoing serious revision,” said Lacuesta to Coconuts Manila via e-mail.
For those who may be wondering what urban fiction is, Lacuesta explained it as “the feeling of being alone in a crowd, of clinging to the nearest stranger, or of recognizing and finding ourselves in strangers.”
He added: “I hope readers will find refuge in them, as I have.”
This is also why the author deliberately chose a smaller size for the book, which was published by the Ateneo de Manila University Press (AdMU) under its Bughaw imprint: “So it feels compact and easy to carry around one’s own personal city,” said Lacuesta.
The book’s cover art was created by artist Rommel Joson and depicts colossal men and one woman towering over a Lilliputian city, with heads billowing large clouds of smoke that fill up a foggy sky overhead, like large human smokestacks. Joson also did the cover art for Lacuesta’s previous book, Stay: 21 Comic Stories.
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“I had no other artist in mind, and I was so fortunate that he had the time to do it,” Lacuesta said. “I sent him the manuscript and he sent over three fantastic studies to choose from. Simple as that. But you can tell just how much thought and consideration he put into the art.”
Lacuesta, who is also editor-at-large at Esquire Philippines, also elaborated on how his work as an editor informed the writing process for this particular book: “Being an editor has given me a great gift, that of being able to look at my text coldly, as though it were written by someone else. I think that has helped me improve it constantly. Funnily enough, it has also kept me extremely self-critical. The writing and editing cycle has allowed me to see how sloppy and ugly my writing can be — and I’m thankful for that.”
Pointing to the flourishing local literary scene, Lacuesta reaffirmed his desire to write stories that connect with Filipino readers: “The huge crowd at the annual MIBF should be proof that there is a huge Filipino reading public. This is fantastic because the Filipino is who I will always write for first, and who I always write about. As long as Filipinos keep writing and Filipinos keep reading them, the scene will continue to be exciting.”
When asked about which place he identifies as his own hometown city, Lacuesta said that Cebu is the city of his birth, while Davao City is his hometown.
“Davao City is where my father and mother grew up, and where I frequently stayed as a child. But I was brought up in Manila,” he said. “But all three places figure strongly in my consciousness — so much that I don’t see myself as a ‘Manileño.’ I’m a Filipino, and I live and work in Manila.”
As for what’s next, Lacuesta is already in the process of working on new creative projects, including writing and developing films — some of which are “drawn from real life, [while some are] drawn from my own fiction.”
At the end of the day, however, the short story is “still the form I look forward to writing the most” since “it has remained such a relevant and exciting form of literature, unencumbered by the pressures of marketing or having an ‘audience.’ In a way, writing a short story is just me talking to myself — the way we talk to ourselves in our heads when we walk through the city.”
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