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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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Sunday, August 10, 2025

entry arrow9:00 AM | My Mother, The Muse

My mother Fennie—Ceferina in her old birth certificate—has been a lot of things in the nonagenarian counting of the years she has lived her life: an orphaned girl raised by grandparents, a dreamer who wanted to be a nurse, a very accomplished hairdresser, an unlucky sugar planter, a party-loving socialite in a small town, an impoverished peanut butter maker and vendor, a fervent born again Christian, and an inspiration.

She will turn 94 on August 17, which is also my birthday, and here I am writing about her as my muse. All artists invariably have muses. Sometimes they are friends or family, often they are lovers, occasionally they are strangers glimpsed just once on the street or in a café but makes such indelible impression on the art maker that they soon possess the imagination, enough to engender creation.

Sometimes they can even just be the mere idea of someone, or an ache in the shape of a person long gone. But a muse, if one thinks deeply about it, is not merely a subject. They are a mirror that shows the artist a self they cannot see alone, a catalyst that makes their work urgent. Art-making is, at its heart, a conversation between the maker and the made-for, which is sometimes tender and sometimes savage. A muse sharpens the stakes for the artist: the painting must be worthy, the novel must reach the fever pitch of confession, the dance must breathe like a lover’s sigh. The art they cause to being are really love letters to these people, to moments with them, to lives perhaps already slipping beyond the reach of the artist. Inspiration, one can say, is always a kind of pursuit of these fleeting things.

For the painter Frida Kahlo, the muse was her husband, the artist Diego Rivera, equal parts tempest and harbor, the storm that broke her and the light that also made her paint again. For the musician Leonard Cohen, it was Marianne Ihlen, the woman in the Grecian dress who became “So Long, Marianne” and all the other songs he wrote to chase her ghost. For the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, it was his wife Zelda, who was a dazzling and self-destructive Southern belle whose brilliance and fragility flickered in every line of The Great Gatsby. Theatre director Peter Brook found his muse in Natasha Parry, his actress-wife, who for decades animated his vision of theater as a sacred and living exchange. The choreographer George Balanchine had a litany of muses such as Maria Tallchief and Suzanne Farrell, who were not just ballerinas but virtual architects of the very movements he conjured, their bodies the ink in which his choreography was written.

For me, my heartbreak stories have been occasioned by the results of erstwhile lovers, but my true muse—the person who inspired me to write the steadiest of my fiction—will always be my mother.

One of my earliest stories, “Old Movies,” which won me my first-ever Palanca in 2002, is my wildest incarnation of her: the character of Charo is my imagination of my mother as a fragile Tennessee Williams character, given to drama and Scotch. I wrote of her this way in that short story: “On bad days when she is not Ava Gardner, or Kim Novak, or Lolita Rodriguez, Mother is a weeping shadow, her room locked and curtained off—her darkness as dramatic as the lull before an evening’s last full show.” Totally the opposite that my mother has been in my life—and yet I am perfectly aware that when I was writing this character all those years ago, the face she bodied was my mother’s face.

In “The Hero of the Snore Tango,” the story that won me my second Palanca in 2003, I made an attempt to write a story about my father. Invariably, that character has a wife, and she is my mother as I knew her in the early 1980s—an embattled woman who used to have big dreams, but was now reduced [not a good word] to peddling homemade peanut butter, which she would deliver house to house to rich people who used to be her close friends.

In “Things You Don’t Know,” which in 2007 won me the very first of my first prizes for the short story in the Palanca, there is the character of the grandmother who willfully ignores the secret travails of her daughter and her jobless son-in-law, and who spends her days in her bedroom watching The 700 Club on television. That detail is taken after how my brothers and I convinced my mother to consent to us finally getting a television set in the late 1990s. “If we have TV, you could watch The 700 Club all you want!” we told her, targeting her religious streak. In real life, she did say yes—but she never really got to watch the shows she wanted: we, her boys, were all over controlling the watching of shows in the days when cable TV was quite new to Dumaguete.

These three stories are collected in my first collection, Beautiful Accidents, published by the University of the Philippines in 2012. I brought out another book that year, this time a collection of my speculative fiction, Heartbreak and Magic, published by Anvil Publishing. Not a lot about my mother in that collection of my fantasy, science fiction, and horror stories—but “The Sugilanon of Epefania’s Hearbreak” is a fantastical reworking of a story she once told me about her older sister Fannie, otherwise known as Epefania, from their childhood in Bayawan. In a way, although it is about my aunt, this story was still inspired by my mother. That story, which also brings to life their mother Bebang and their grandmother Intan, has since been adapted into a Virgin Labfest play, written by May Cardoso. When it was staged at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 2017, it gave me goosebumps to see my grandmother and my great grandmother—both of whom I’ve never met—somehow resurrected.

There is none of my mother at all in my third collection, Don’t Tell Anyone, since it is a collection of my erotica—a book peopled by my minor muses consisting of past loves and past hurts. But my fourth collection, Bamboo Girls, published by Ateneo de Naga University Press in 2018, is truly inspired by her. She is in fact the “bamboo girl” in that collection’s first story and title, based on her recollection of her grandmother once telling her that she had no mother and that was born from the cracks of a bamboo, in the thicket behind their old house in Bayawan—a story she believed in very thoroughly. The book ends with “Mother’s High Heels,” which is of course about her, and her high heels, and her resolute faith in her Protestant God.

The collection I am working on now, Where You Are is Not Here, contains one story that really excavates my mother’s life very thoroughly. It is titled “Ceferina in Apartment 2C,” and if one notices, I did not shy away at all from using her actual name. In that piece, I regurgitated her experience of her brief immigration to Los Angeles, where she lived briefly with my brother Rey in 2010. That story won me my second first prize in the Palanca, in 2022. If you have noticed, every time I write about my mother, I win a literary prize. If that is not the definition of a muse, I don’t know what is.

Why do I write about my mother? I truly consider her life dramatic. I have elaborated as much on her childhood in Bayawan, the loss of her mother and the disappearance of her father, and then later on, especially in “Ceferina in Apartment 2C,” her wish to escape her hometown by selling tira-tira, which funded her passage to Cebu City in the 1950s, where she was promised by a distant relative a chance to study nursing. That never happened. That promise broken, she found a job as a hairdresser in a beauty parlor along Jakosalem, eventually finding that she was quite good at that vocation, which she took to for the rest of her life.

I have already written, in a Martial Law essay I wrote that became viral when it was published by Rappler in 2022, about her life as a sugar haciendera back in her hometown in the 1960s and early 1970s, and then how she lost everything in the late 1970s, and how she dealt with the poverty that engulfed her and six boys in the 1980s and 1990s.

Someday I will write more fully about the part of her life between being a penniless hairdresser in Cebu in the early 1950s and back home in Bayawan as a sugar planter in the late 1960s.

Someday I will write about how a studio photograph of her which captured her in a very beautiful, pang-artista pose, made many Cebu men beeline to ask her out.



Someday I will write about her falling in love with the handsome scion of a rich Cebu family, and how she became pregnant … and how she was rebuffed by the boy’s mother who thought her totally beneath her social class.


Someday I will write about how she fled that drama by exiling herself to what she thought was a far off place—a little town called Nasipit in Agusan del Norte, where she opened her own beauty shop in a house owned by someone who would turn out to be my father and her future husband.


Someday I will write about how he pursued her, how she pushed back but then also fell in love. [He was suave, and had his ways with women.] I have actually already written something about their rocky marriage in an unpublished story, which I fictionalized by setting it in Bukidnon—but the bare details of that plot, including my father’s disappearance and his involvement in a cult and his eventual reappearance in our lives, is taken from their somewhat tumultuous life together, which climaxed with my father’s passing in 1997.

Someday I will write about how she is now in her golden years—and how, a few years ago, she got reunited with that old boyfriend from Cebu, to which she has, alas, said “no” to the possibilities of a romantic reunion. “Tigulang na ko,” is what she tells me. [Truthfully I don’t mind: the guy in his prime was very handsome, and I do not wonder at all why my mother fell in love with him all those years ago and bore him a son, my eldest brother.]

Some would say I am revealing too much of family secrets in my “fiction.” Truth to tell, my mother doesn’t mind. [The rest of my family as well.] She is a diva that way, enamored by the fact that she has somehow been transformed into literature. Who doesn’t want to be memorialized that way? Especially when it is accomplished via the lens of somebody who loves them.

I think this will always be my “forever gift” to my mother—returning to the intricacies and dramas of her life and using them over and over again as fodder for my fiction.

Someday I will turn my mother into a novel.

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