These Constellations is a space opera fairy tale about the galleon trade and the abuses of Spanish colonialism.
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The House that Creaks is a story about the horrors of the Martial Law era-and the monster House loves a Filipino-Chinese family and their baby. For me, it’s not necessarily a conscious choice-but it’s what feels right for the stories I want to tell. Most of my stories do have Filipino or Filipino-Chinese characters. Do you make a conscious effort to include Asian Diaspora characters and themes in your writing and if so, what do you want to portray? Horror is a natural language for expressing that experience-living through the ways your agency is stripped or compromised how you are othered. If you’re queer, if you’re Filipino, there’s so much beauty and horror in our history and in our present. Horror inherently has themes of transformation -and about agency in the face of human and inhuman horrors (and there is so much). I think I’m drawn to horror because it’s such a perfect vehicle for exploring the what it’s like to live on the margins-in my case, what it’s like to be a member of a diaspora community, and what it’s like to be queer. It took my friends to point out I was writing horror, even in pieces I primarily thought of as SF-I was writing about parasite caterpillars brainwashing their foster sisters and oracles who had their nervous systems connected to galleon ships. I haven’t seen IT or Candyman even though I really want to see these seminal works of horror canon-because I am a giant chicken. It’s funny because I didn’t think of myself as a horror writer-I hide in my girlfriend’s shoulder during the scary parts of a movie. What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it? Then, without intending it, I veered off into horror.
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And I realized that was the story I wanted to write. It was like recognising your own accent, wandering lost on a foreign street. But it was very distinctly a Filipino story -you recognised the world as soon as you stepped inside it. It was a fairy tale-a story about a young woman on a quest. A friend introduced me to A Kite of Stars by Dean Francis Alfar.
ELDRITCH ACADEMY HALLS PROFESSIONAL
I didn’t start pursuing professional writing-the work of writing and submitting to markets until I was in my twenties. We’ve always been compelled to tell stories in one form or another whether it’s ghost stories whispered at each other in school halls, fan fiction about our latest fictional crushes, or roleplaying games on lj (now, sadly obsolete and disappeared into the ether). I’ve always loved writing and stories-I think that’s true for many writers.
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She has been published in the Bram Stoker winning anthology Black Cranes:Tales of Unquiet Women, in Pseudopod, Strange Horizons, Lackington’s, The Dark, and Rocket Kapre.
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She is the 2021 Eugie Foster Award recipient for “The Genetic Alchemist’s Daughter” and has been nominated for the BSFA, Aurealis and Ditmar Awards. She now lives in Melbourne with her partner, their faerie child and their two small cat children. She loves eldritch creatures both real and imaginary, ’80s pop stars, and caffeinated drinks with too much sugar. She grew up in Manila where there are many, many creaky old houses with ghosts inside them. Elaine Cuyegkeng is a Chinese Filipino writer.