The Spy in the Sandwich

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This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

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Bibliography

The Great Little Hunter

The Boy The Girl
The Rat The Rabbit
and the Last Magic Days
Chapbook, 2018

Republic of Carnage:
Three Horror Stories
For the Way We Live Now
Chapbook, 2018

Bamboo Girls:
Stories and Poems
From a Forgotten Life
Ateneo de Naga University Press, 2018

Don't Tell Anyone:
Literary Smut
With Shakira Andrea Sison
Pride Press / Anvil Publishing, 2017

Cupful of Anger,
Bottle Full of Smoke:
The Stories of
Jose V. Montebon Jr.
Silliman Writers Series, 2017

First Sight of Snow
and Other Stories
Encounters Chapbook Series
Et Al Books, 2014

Celebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop
Sands and Coral, 2011-2013
Silliman University, 2013

Handulantaw: Celebrating 50 Years of Culture and the Arts in Silliman
Tao Foundation and Silliman University Cultural Affairs Committee, 2013

Inday Goes About Her Day
Locsin Books, 2012

Beautiful Accidents: Stories
University of the Philippines Press, 2011

Heartbreak & Magic: Stories of Fantasy and Horror
Anvil, 2011

Old Movies and Other Stories
National Commission for Culture
and the Arts, 2006

FutureShock Prose: An Anthology of Young Writers and New Literatures
Sands and Coral, 2003
Nominated for Best Anthology
2004 National Book Awards

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jessica zafra rules the universe

lessons from the school of inattention

the marocharim experiment

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philippine genre stories

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Tracking Sandwich Eaters

IAN ROSALES CASOCOT

Saturday, April 16, 2022

1:32 PM | From Peg to Illustration

I began writing The Great Little Hunter in the summer of 2018 with the hopes of entering it into an international picture book competition. I knew I wanted to write about a boy confronting his fears, and I also knew I needed the story to be steeped in local culture. And then the idea of a child “mangangayam” [or hunter] came about. After a few days trying to bring the story down to less than 500 words, I thought of only one person who could bring my vision of this story to life: Hersley-Ven Casero. But before even meeting him, I needed to prepare the visuals for each spread of the potential book, so that my story and his potential illustrations would perfectly sync into the structure of a book. These are the pegs I prepared, culled from various art I collected online. [I didn't have the energy or the time to properly draw.] Hersley was quickly on board. Two months later, Hersley showed me his work — and I was astonished at how much he was able to flesh out the world of Ngayam, making the story also his own: it was his idea to make each canvas/spread bleed into each other like in a continuous scroll, making all sixteen spreads part of one very long work, with the last spread bleeding into the first one. And every canvas hides all sorts of flora and fauna Hersley studied while making the work. Part of the fun is identifying these!