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Southern Stories and Strays
This collection of fiction and nonfiction pieces is peopled by women who live or come from Mindanao, that “faraway” place in the Philippine South known for its political wars and religious strife. But this book is not about that. It is about a warehouse, fermented fish, water pipes, bougainvilleas, houses with stairs to nowhere, dogs, a hamburger, and a stolen kiss or two all told by a child, a teenager, a teacher turned OFW, a sixty-year-old woman in love, a daughter, a niece, an aunt. These stories are about those middle spaces where there will always be more than one thing, all at once: logic and love, truth and imagination, tradition and transitions, presence and loss, madness and choices, grief and life.
133 pages
Published January 1, 2017
4 people are currently reading
27 people want to read
About the author
Maria Elena Paulma
2 books8 followersMaria Elena L. Paulma was born in Butuan City, and spent her summer vacations at her grandparents’ farm in Tiniwisan across the Agusan River, or in Cebu City, an overnight ferry ride away. She earned her degrees in creative writing and comparative literature at the University of the Philippines. She teaches when she’s not writing or traveling.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 9, 2025
4.5☆ It seems like every time I picked this up, it ended with me crying. I'm sure it will stay that way the farther I get from home.
Another reviewer mentioned "Three Kisses", and I will do the same because it left me sobbing in a Popeye's. Love is so real, so back, so soft, so steady.
Another reviewer mentioned "Three Kisses", and I will do the same because it left me sobbing in a Popeye's. Love is so real, so back, so soft, so steady.
February 23, 2018
I read Maria Elena Paulma’s “Three Kisses” in 2010 when the piece was awarded first prize for the fiction category in the Palanca Awards. Being very young, I did not yet fully comprehend the maturity of the piece. I found it cute, yes, but I simply lacked the wisdom gained only through some years of loving and losing and loving. Almost eight years after I first stumbled upon the piece on the Palanca website, I am very happy to have rediscovered the joy of second chances and second readings.
“Three Kisses” is puppy love for old people. Its main characters are senior citizens--a Filipina and a Belgian man-who found each other at sixty years old and decided to get married and spend their remaining days in Belgium. As with all other relationships, there is an end to the honeymoon stage. Theirs was depicted in mechanical routines, clashing personalities, and cultural differences all told in language that shows rather than tells:
“The half light of the early morning filtered through the coral blue curtains which she had chosen for this room, half-drawn across the window to satisfy both her need for it to be pulled back and his desire for it to be fully drawn.”
The passage above shows how the two characters try to live with each other’s differences by reaching a compromise. The whole piece is replete with suggestions on how the couple politely put up with each other. As the story progresses and conflicts arise, the narrator ultimately walks the reader through the rediscovered beauty of familiarity and companionable love.
“Three Kisses” ends the whole collection—and Paulma was right to put it in the finale for it is her strongest piece. Her other stories also explore the pains and joys of the ordinary as experienced in the female perspective. “Where I Write From” is especially noteworthy for its poetic language. “The Bougainvillea” uses the eponymous plant as a central image wherein the neighborhood story revolves. “The House My Mother Built” explores the complexities of a mother-daughter relationship. It also attempts to define “home” by navigating the house that the author’s mother built and the histories behind its odd architecture, crammed interior, and empty rooms.
Stories from the fiction section (“The Bougainvillea,” “Poko,” etc.) somehow share the same tone, atmosphere, and voice as the stories in the creative nonfiction section (“A Bodega Stands on Pili Drive,” “And the Water Flows in Tiniwasan,” etc.); one is somehow indistinguishable from the other, thus challenging the boundaries between fictional and nonfictional truths.
The collection contains a handful of stories that classify as young adult fiction and are reminiscent of Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo’s Catch a Falling Star. This shows Paulma’s range in narrating the female experience--from a young girl in a declamation contest, pining for a mother’s approval (“The Contest”, to an old woman resigning to the toll of old age with a man she married at sixty years old (“Three Kisses”).
Paulma’s stories, either fiction or creative nonfiction, chronicle the shared experience of growing up and conjure a familiar feeling. In a way, reading the stories is like going back home.
“Three Kisses” is puppy love for old people. Its main characters are senior citizens--a Filipina and a Belgian man-who found each other at sixty years old and decided to get married and spend their remaining days in Belgium. As with all other relationships, there is an end to the honeymoon stage. Theirs was depicted in mechanical routines, clashing personalities, and cultural differences all told in language that shows rather than tells:
“The half light of the early morning filtered through the coral blue curtains which she had chosen for this room, half-drawn across the window to satisfy both her need for it to be pulled back and his desire for it to be fully drawn.”
The passage above shows how the two characters try to live with each other’s differences by reaching a compromise. The whole piece is replete with suggestions on how the couple politely put up with each other. As the story progresses and conflicts arise, the narrator ultimately walks the reader through the rediscovered beauty of familiarity and companionable love.
“Three Kisses” ends the whole collection—and Paulma was right to put it in the finale for it is her strongest piece. Her other stories also explore the pains and joys of the ordinary as experienced in the female perspective. “Where I Write From” is especially noteworthy for its poetic language. “The Bougainvillea” uses the eponymous plant as a central image wherein the neighborhood story revolves. “The House My Mother Built” explores the complexities of a mother-daughter relationship. It also attempts to define “home” by navigating the house that the author’s mother built and the histories behind its odd architecture, crammed interior, and empty rooms.
Stories from the fiction section (“The Bougainvillea,” “Poko,” etc.) somehow share the same tone, atmosphere, and voice as the stories in the creative nonfiction section (“A Bodega Stands on Pili Drive,” “And the Water Flows in Tiniwasan,” etc.); one is somehow indistinguishable from the other, thus challenging the boundaries between fictional and nonfictional truths.
The collection contains a handful of stories that classify as young adult fiction and are reminiscent of Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo’s Catch a Falling Star. This shows Paulma’s range in narrating the female experience--from a young girl in a declamation contest, pining for a mother’s approval (“The Contest”, to an old woman resigning to the toll of old age with a man she married at sixty years old (“Three Kisses”).
Paulma’s stories, either fiction or creative nonfiction, chronicle the shared experience of growing up and conjure a familiar feeling. In a way, reading the stories is like going back home.
April 11, 2025
i've recently been on the short stories/essays binge provided by the UP Press and UP Law Center and this collection, in particular, resonates more than others simply because i live so close to, and have traversed many times over, the settings such stories are suspended in. the quaint Butuan, hectic Cebu, and every hidden barangay in-between. i've never seen these places depicted so wistfully before, my Bisaya represented much like Sigrid Marianne Gayangos' "Laut: Stories," and all the other knick-knacks of culture spread throughout; those i've grown to appreciate as markers of identity less celebrated in the Philippine popular consciousness. there really is a narrative to conjure about anything. how beautiful it is to finally connect.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews