WHEN MOST WRITERS are asked to explain why they write, they evoke the usual responses: they are heeding the call of the archetypal storyteller, and they are perhaps also trying to approximate the divinity of creation. Thomas Berger once famously said, “Why do writers write? Because it isn’t there”—with such pronouncements, the writer aims to be God-like in the piecing together of a universe peculiar to his literature.
But the Pulitzer Prize-winning James A. Michener may have said it best when he tried to explain why he wrote stories: “I write at eighty-five for the same reasons that impelled me to write at forty-five; I was born with a passionate desire to communicate, to organize experience, to tell tales that dramatize the adventures which readers might have had. I have been that ancient man who sat by the campfire at night and regaled the hunters with imaginative recitations about their prowess. The job of an apple tree is to bear apples. The job of a storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation.”
I like that word “obligation” that Michener uses, because the fact of the matter is—and this all of us here may know to be a throbbing truth—nobody really forces anybody to write stories, and in fact one can handily go through life without knowing how it is like to write well, or to read well.
And yet we write. And we back our choices up by constructing a sense of personal aesthetics that would explain why indeed we write, and why we write what we do write.
Which is as well—but what is not often considered in the general landscape of literary psychoanalysis (at least by the same amount of scrutiny that writing gets as a tool for both entertainment and creation) is that writing may be a way for fictionists to begin to understand his own self and his world. As Elizabeth Bowen said of it: “Any fiction … is bound to be transposed autobiography.” In other words, to write is often a way for the writer to process whatever it is that occupies or even troubles him, and to render that process into words is his way of inscribing that act to seek understanding.
In considering the writing trajectory that I have had so far, I notice that where I am currently and where I sense I am going is a direct offshoot of where I came from. Which takes me back to my first stories—the first ones that I worked on which displayed a conscious literary design.
Years ago, while cleaning out an old closet, I came across several stories that I wrote for The Junior Sillimanian, my high school paper. When I was a freshman, I wrote a story I titled “The Australian and My Auntie Lita,” which was about a boy in a small provincial barrio telling the story of his young aunt who has just become a mail-order bride for a blond Australian man. When I was a sophomore, I wrote another story titled “Philodendron,” which was about one summer in the lives of two best friends, both boys, who get a taste of forbidden attraction. When I was a junior, I had written another story titled “My Short(age of a) Story,” which was about a male high school feature-writer who, to survive the fast approaching deadline set by his paper adviser, desperately embarked on a literary collaboration with a female classmate named Maria Fe, a partnership which soon proved to be a recipe for disaster and high jinks. It was fiction for the Sweet Valley High crowd. Upon publication, the story proved so popular that I was ordered by my editor to write a sequel. Reading all these stories sixteen years later, I thought of them as cute embarrassing little things—but I don’t hold them in disdain the way most writers behold their own sophomoric writings.
They are to me artifacts of a writing history. This is
where I came from, these stories.
In the end, this was also true: those stories were perfect photocopies of the real in my own life. There were indeed several young aunts in my family who made it a tireless vocation to become pen pals with foreign men. There was a childhood best friend with curly hair, a Spanish nose, and a sweet disposition. And there was a high school deadline, a quagmire of a writing block, a classmate named Maria Fe, and a desperation to write something, anything. I remember writing them to understand things that were happening to me: Why was my family like this? Why did I feel this way for another boy? What could I write when I couldn’t write about anything else? I had blended elements from real life, and out came the first fruits of my own fiction—the wonderful paradox of creating stories.
Like Cesar Ruiz Aquino, who keeps confessing that he is incapable of writing fiction that is divorced from his own reality, autobiography was the name of my own stories—barely disguised attempts to fictionalize my wanderings into my psyche, which may be why the first story I ever published for a mainstream publication, the Sands and Coral literary journal, was titled “My Name is Not Oscar Wilde.” Emphasis on the words “my name.” Emphasis on the negation of an icon. It was a story of a gay boy trying to come to terms with his own burgeoning sexuality, which he himself does not understand.
The stories that followed, especially those that came after my own stint as fellow for fiction in the 2000 Dumaguete National Writers Workshop under National Artist Edith Lopez Tiempo, were perhaps more mature renditions of the same tendency to look inside my own self, in an effort to understand myself better—and perhaps also in an effort to make other people understand who I was.
One of my earliest stories, “Pete Sampras’s Neck,” which was first published in the Philippines Free Press, contains the whole emotional drama of my first, ultimately doomed, relationship with someone with curly hair and a Spanish nose (shades of “Philodendron”). It was something resplendently and unabashedly autobiographical: I even used real names and real places. I was a dramatic boy with “fiction” as his weapon, I suppose. I remember telling my best friend in college this: “If I don’t write this story, I’ll die.”
Going to Japan as a student in 1997 provided a new twist in that personal literary journey. In a sense, the whole sojourn made me break out of the Dumaguete box—which was full of suffocating memories. I wrote three juvenile pieces on the vagaries of love and the politics of family and acceptance—“The Painted Lady” (published in 2006 in Story Philippines), “The Players” (published in 2004 in the Philippines Free Press), and “Private Journeys” (published in 2002 in The Sunday Times Magazine). You will take note that it took me a long time to publish these stories, and all three of them in reverse order of their completion: they were too raw, perhaps, for me, and were a precise rendering of my own inner turmoil. I had to take the distance of time to feel comfortable enough for other people to read them. But I do remember writing them in white heat: I frequented an abandoned Japanese taizanso (an old tea house with Zen garden) in the early mornings of my Tokyo days, and I would just write and write in a blue notebook. Writing took my thoughts away from crippling homesickness, and became the final exorcism of an intense love affair that consumed me. I consider these three pieces as hardier fiction than the trifle I produced before 1997. They also marked the first instance of a shift: I was now beginning to refract my own experience through different voices, different from the initial voice that was clearly my own—“The Players” is Brett Easton Ellis, “The Painted Lady” is Anne Rice, and “Private Journeys” is Alex Garland.
In 2002 and 2003, I wrote “Old Movies” and “The Hero of the Snore Tango,” perhaps the two stories I am best known for in my early days as a fictionist. For the first one, a drama about a mother and son and the only means—old movies—with which they can communicate, I channeled the minimalism of both Migs Villanueva and Isolde Amante. For the second, about the death of a father and its impact on his estranged family, I channeled Charlson Ong. Both stories, if you notice, are still in search of a voice. But they were also still highly personal, as they are both paeans to my mother and father. The second story, for example, sprung out of me one All Soul’s Day as I reflected on my grudging decision to visit my father’s grave. He died, you see, long before I decided I wanted to get to know him better, and I thought that writing a story was the only way I could do just that.
The first reviewers of my earliest fiction hinted of this tendency to evoke my own life in my fiction. The fictionist Timothy Montes, who was instrumental in urging me to take up creative writing when I was his student in Silliman University, one wrote of my stories: “The unabashed autobiographical basis of his fiction often unnerved me, and there were times when I intentionally would tell him to write about ‘somebody else.’ But it is precisely the way he rescues personal experience from the ephemera of travel and sexual limbo that makes his fiction a fixative art. Beautiful accidents litter his stories, like glass shards from a collision. One can actually read these as interlinked stories, and yet there is an irreality that suffuses them. The family past is one of penury, with a father who becomes a bus conductor after the golden age of sugarcane in Negros. The mother is fossilized in the celluloid memories of old movies, and life becomes just as melodramatic. The brother goes to Europe, gets a French lover, and the narrator traces his own sexuality to the trajectory made by the brother. Poverty is relegated to a historical backdrop as the narrator becomes a sophisticated and erudite college boy who goes to Japan and explores the fluidity of identity and sexuality. Somehow Ian has managed to create a coherent world from the artistic collage of his own emotional obsessions.”
Charlson Ong, in his introduction to my first story collection Old Movies and Other Stories, which was part of the UBOD writers series put out by the NCCA, wrote: “Casocot’s characters are not scions of the decadent, and now impoverished, hacendero. Some are comfortably middle class, … but there are those from poor families, those who travel to Manila and other cities across the globe in search of better, more meaningful lives. They are of course, transformed by their travels and realize soon enough that they can no longer return to the quaint, gentle city of their childhood. Every return home is also a journey towards a self which is ever slipping away. These stories are suffused with a sexuality—usually gay—that seeks not physically consummation, which is often present, but emotional redress. It is sex in search of love, that is, sustainable love.”
I take stock of what they have written of my earlier stories, and I realize now that my writing life follows a specific trajectory, which I believe exists in three parts:
First, I had written, with the intensity of the shamelessly confessional, of what I knew, cannibalizing the episodes of my own life to create my own brand of fiction.
Then, I wrote to escape what I knew.
And finally, I am writing, in a sense, to blend the two. But I must also say that here, in this part of the trajectory, the rendering of the autobiographical now goes beyond a masturbatory exploration of one’s inner life and personal skirmishes; now, it is also a discovery of place. Specifically, the place of one’s birth and memory.
READ ALSO:
How I Became a Writer Series
AND MORE FROM CECILIA'S BLOG:
A Book Fair to Remember (And Get Ready For), by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, Positively Filipino
Philippine Folktale - Los Siete Pecados, by Filomena Alesna Cuenco
An Afternoon with Exploding Galaxies, with Carlos Bulosan Book Club, PALH
Carlos Roxas Interview of Cecilia Brainard re Frankfurt Book Fair
Cecilia Brainard's Travel Report of Frankfurt Book Fair 2024
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