Conversations “Over a Cup of Ginger Tea”

The title of the book reads like an invitation, and this is precisely what writer Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo intends with Over a Cup of Ginger Tea: Conversations on the Literary Narratives of Filipino Women. Hidlago says what she wishes to do is “start a conversation with the reader… much as I try to do with my students when I teach literature. I try to interest them in stories, which for different reasons have fascinated me all these years.”

Published by the University of the Philippines Press, Over a Cup of Ginger Tea is a collection of “literary essays” in that they are about literature and written in a style that makes reading them “as a pleasant experience for the readers as the reading of other types of literature.” The essays range from the narratives of several generations of women writers, from Maria Paz Mendoza and Edith Tiempo to FH Batacan and Tara Sering; cover conventional realist novels and short stories, as well as fairy tales, chick lit, crime fiction and war memoirs.

Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo has worked as a writer, editor and teacher in different countries and has received many awards for both her fiction and nonfiction. She is a professor of creative writing and literature, and has been the coordinator of the UP Creative Writing Program. A former director of the UP Creative Writing Center (now the UP Institute of Creative Writing) and director of the UP Press, she is at present vice president for Public Affairs of the UP System.

Over a Cup of Ginger Tea: Conversations on the Literary Narratives of Filipino Women is published by the UP Press and available at Aeon Books on Katipunan Avenue, Popular Bookstore on T. Morato, Solidaridad, Powerbooks, National Book Store, Bound Bookshop, Fully Booked and at the UP Press bookstores in UP Diliman, Baguio and Davao.