5 Questions with Monica Macansantos
Monica Macansantos holds an MFA in Fiction from the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, TX, and a PhD in Creative Writing from the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.
Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, the Hopkins Review, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, and the Pantograph Punch, among other places. Her work has been recognized with residencies at Hedgebrook, the KHN Center for the Arts, Storyknife Writers Retreat, the I-Park Foundation, and Moriumius.
(Credit: Lydia Blaisdell)
No.1
You’ve had a long career writing fiction throughout the years, with an MFA in Writing and a PhD in English and Creative Writing as well as short stories in various places, some of which have been translated to languages such as Czech and Spanish. What first brought you to writing?
Thank you for that, Cher—you’re inflating my credentials but I’m honoured, haha. Love and Other Rituals is my first published book and it took some time for it to find a home—I’ve been sending it out since 2016, when I still had an agent. While waiting for book publication to happen, I kept submitting to literary journals while finishing a novel manuscript (which I’m shopping around at the moment) and a collection of essays. My second novel is currently a work in progress. Along the way, many editors, jurors, fellow writers, and translators held doors open for me. I thank them for their faith in my work.
I grew up in a household of avid readers, and my father was a poet who was active in the literary scene in the Philippines, while my mother wrote essays and poetry while working full-time as a mathematician and university administrator. There was no pressure from them to pursue a career in writing, but it was something I naturally gravitated towards, as a child surrounded by books whose father loved reciting poetry to her. Some of the writers he loved were W.B. Yeats and Thomas Mann. He would often bring me to writers’ workshops where he served as a panellist, and I was fortunate to witness at an early age how people apart from my father made this a life for themselves.
No.2
The stories in Love and Other Rituals come across as novellas in short stories (which immediately reminds me of writers such as Italo Calvino and Alice Munro), with each one very firmly set within a Filipino consciousness, diasporic or otherwise. What was the process behind putting together the collection and how did you arrange them such that they spoke to each other?
Thank you for mentioning Munro—she’s a guiding light and an inspiration for my work. I’m also an admirer of Calvino’s stories. I wrote most of the stories in Love and Other Rituals early on in my career, when I was still learning to write, and most of them were written when I was an MFA fellow at the Michener Center. So I had no conscious plan as to how I’d put together a collection of stories but they came together naturally as I wrote them down. Most of these stories are either set in my hometown of Baguio in the Philippines, or have characters who trace their origins to Baguio—that’s not something I planned originally, but when seeking material for my fiction, my mind would naturally return to my hometown and the stories that emanated from it. As for arranging these stories in the collection, I think that the concepts of childhood, family, and loneliness/alienation when living overseas helped me give these stories a meaningful ordering.
No.3
How have your experiences as a transnational person—someone who’s lived across places such as the Philippines, the U.S., and New Zealand—influenced your writing practice?
I’m answering your question from my cabin in Alaska, where I’m one of the current writers-in-residence at the Storyknife Writers Retreat—it’s a setting that makes me keenly aware of being a ‘transnational person’ and writer, especially as I await the Australian publication of my book. While the themes and settings of my work are firmly grounded in the Filipino situation, living across places has helped me acquire a more expansive view of my identity—as a writer, a woman, a human being, and Filipino. I don’t think it’s necessary to travel vast distances to expand one’s world view—my father remained in the Philippines for much of his life and left the country for the first time in his forties, but was also very well-read and curious about the world. But in my case, traveling and living overseas for prolonged periods has changed me in ways that I often become aware of when I sit down and write.
Living in the U.S. for three years as an adult forced me to re-examine certain views that were ingrained in my Filipino upbringing, and then returning home after that experience helped me question my own Americanisation. And then living in New Zealand for three years made me further rethink the assumptions I had acquired about the world while living in America. My early training in the Philippines made me develop a rather rigid view on writing and craft, and studying at an MFA program in the U.S. allowed me to be much more adventurous in my language and storytelling (even as I also developed a necessary discipline). My time in New Zealand helped me grow further as a writer while giving me opportunities to travel and meet people (and I did this a lot more in New Zealand than in the U.S., since I felt so safe traveling alone as a single woman). Such experiences teach you that there isn’t one way to be a writer or member of your community or ethnicity. These labels shouldn’t be seen as boxes that limit our identities, but as springboards for thought and play.
No.4
In my time working as an editor with writers from the larger Asian diaspora, I’ve often encountered questions surrounding how best to represent culture—objects, rituals, food, etc—in fiction without pandering to a so-called universal (read: white) experience. You do this so well in Love and Other Rituals. I don’t need to know exactly what ‘aswang’ or ‘pandesal’ is and still be able to follow the story. Can you tell us a little bit more about the ethics of cultural representation in fiction and how you yourself navigate that in the fiction that you write?
I am so heartened that you noticed my efforts not to exoticise my culture! When I stepped into an MFA workshop for the first time, as an international student who had no idea if my stories would speak to a non-Filipino audience, I was afraid that I’d have to explain myself repeatedly to my mostly white classmates. So I put footnotes in the first story I turned in for workshop and my classmates and my professor, Oscar Cásares, went, ‘You really don’t need to do this, we can understand these words based on their contexts.’ That opened my eyes to the power of my own stories to communicate across cultures.
I had a lot more to learn as a writer after that experience, since our stories still have to speak to people who don’t share our cultural backgrounds, and I don’t mean that in a way that we have to pander to the dominant, colonialist culture. But I mean it in the way that Chekhov’s stories, for instance, speak deeply to me even if he’s writing about Russians and I’ve never been to Russia. I’m sure that Chekhov and other Russian writers belonging to his generation didn’t even think of their characters as ‘Russian’ but just as regular characters.
Though I’m writing about Filipinos and Filipino culture, that’s only because this is the cultural context to which I belong, and I see my characters as human beings first whose stories I want to tell. It’s when I see a character as ‘a Filipino’ that they begin to feel more like an anthropological specimen and less like a human being. Of course their cultural background is important to me, but I was born and mostly raised in the Philippines, and their Filipino-ness just comes as second nature to me. It’s when I see my characters as ‘those Filipinos’ that the othering begins in my mind, and that’s when I begin italicising words in their language that aren’t foreign words to them. I think it’s key for many writers coming from marginalised backgrounds not to see themselves through the eyes of the dominant, colonialist culture because that’s when we begin to objectify ourselves.
No.5
Which writers do you consider an influence on your work?
As I mentioned earlier in this interview, Alice Munro is one of my enduring influences. I’ve never really ‘outgrown’ her influence—I first read her as an undergraduate and here I am, post-PhD, still finding that her work resonates with me. There’s nothing in her stories that’s sentimental, and yet she’s capable of reaching into the innermost crevices of your heart and plucking a string that resonates through your very being. She taught me, early on in my writing life, that stories emerging from the simplest of situations can reveal an entire life, and that there’s beauty in these quiet, unsung lives.
Who else? Like Munro, Mia Alvar and Lysley Tenorio taught me how to mine the heartaches of quiet lives in precisely worded sentences that sing. My mentor, Elizabeth McCracken, also continues to be an enduring influence on my writing. I learned how to take more risks with my work in her MFA workshop, while rooting my stories more firmly in feeling. Her work is known for being funny but there’s also a lot of tragedy that her tongue-in-cheek humor shores up to the surface. What I love about her work is this wry awareness of how comedy and tragedy don’t politely step aside to make way for each other in real life.
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"Tony couldn’t find any term to describe the city of his youth. Fallen, yes, but not quite so: the slums growing from its cracks could be taken as a crude sign of the city’s resurgence. As for the narrowing streets, he felt it was a sign that things were returning to normal, that houses could rise as quickly as houses had crumbled down. He had grown up thinking that his home town, nestled among pine trees and rolling hills, would last forever."
Lost in and out of their homeland, Monica Macansantos’s characters contemplate love whilst navigating the naivety of childhood, the complications of young adulthood and the politics of marriage. Macansantos is a powerful and emotive new voice of the Filipino diaspora, bringing us the vivid, raw and quintessentially human collection that is Love and Other Rituals: Selected Stories. This rich collection depicts death with vitality, absence with longing, and tension with ease.
Out now with Grattan Street Press. Get it here, or at all good bookstores.