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. 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 an 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.