Noelle Q de Jesus publishes her second short-story collection

At 51, like many women her age, author Noelle Quintos de Jesus has spent much of her life making a home, earning an income and raising a family. But that hasn’t stopped people from asking her why it’s taking so long to finish writing.

“Nobody ever asks male writers how old they were when they wrote their first novel,” she exclaims with mock indignation, followed by her characteristic belly laugh. “The truth is, I feel like I’m in my element at this age. I’m more experienced at life and more cognizant of different perspectives.”

Born in the US, raised in Manila and residing in Singapore for the past 20 years, the author will be launching her second short-story collection, Cursed and Other Stories, at the Singapore Writers Festival on November 6, four years after her first anthology, Blood, was released to critical acclaim. Another Immense Sky, a novel, is now in draft mode and will hopefully be available next year.

“There are days when I think a little too highly of myself and there are days when I think everything I write is terrible,” chuckles de Jesus, who is one of the first authors to be represented by Penguin Random House Southeast Asia, which opened its Singapore headquarters in February. “Rejection letters keep me honest.”

Much of her fiction explores politics in the world in parallel with politics in the family, global challenges alongside domestic ones, mostly told from the perspective of Filipino characters from different places, backgrounds and generations.

In her short story “Wanting”, part of the Cursed and Other Stories collection, she challenges perceptions of a Filipino family in pursuit of the American dream, while in “Michael”, she considers political justice in her home nation.

De Jesus says that she writes what she knows: “I’ve been married long enough, I’ve raised two children and sent them off to college, so I have experienced many types of domestic conflict. I am Filipino but also Singaporean, though I wasn’t born in either location. I relate very much to the Filipino sensibility, and yet do not. I am able to see us and our culture and problems as an outsider.”

She admits that like most writers, she is motivated by a desire to change hearts and minds. “Great literature changes perceptions, persuades readers of certain themes, so that their world opens up a little. I am also driven by rage and dissatisfaction at what people do and believe. I channel that into my fiction; it gives the words power.”