RICCO SIASOCO
Photo by Margarita Corporan
Ricco Villanueva Siasoco is a writer, educator, and activist. Ricco has received fellowships from The Center for Fiction, Lambda Literary, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is a board member of Kundiman, a national literary organization dedicated to Asian American literature. Ricco lives in Los Angeles and The Foley Artist is his first book.
Interview by Tyler Nesler
You were born and raised in Iowa. What was the diversity like in the area you grew up in? Was there a significant Filipino community?
Yes, I was born and raised in Des Moines and Council Bluffs — with all my awkward teen years in the middle of the Midwest. There wasn’t really any racial diversity in Iowa: I think there’s maybe 2% Asian Americans, but this percentage is from the most recent census. In the seventies when I was growing up it was less than 2%. I always think of my family knowing all the Filipinos in the state! My mother was an activist in addition to being a force of nature: she founded the Filipino American Association of Iowa in 1969, and she knew the dozen or so families who had immigrated from the Philippines.
Though we were a small community, we were tight-knit and loving. My parents made friends with all the Filipino nurses and doctors who had immigrated to Des Moines. Now that I’m older, with a more critical perspective on immigration patterns and capitalism’s needs, I have begun to understand the link between U.S. imperialism in the Philippines, the installation of Western medicine and education in my parents’ homeland, and the ways that immigration laws ensured migration of an elite class to feed neoliberalist tendencies in the U.S.
How do you think a Midwestern upbringing as a Filipino-American has informed both your approach to work and the content of the work itself?
When I think of my many identifiers — including, but not limited to, being gay and Asian — I also think of the Midwesterner in me. Being from Iowa, and the ways in which that “Midwestern nice” gets into your DNA, is something that has certainly affected my work. For a long time I resisted writing about Iowa. I hated it. I ran away to college and never really looked back. But that strong sense of place — Iowa’s gray skies, open fields and weird subdivisions, the white folks everywhere — is really what made me understand my positionality as an Other. If I’d grown up on the East Coast or in California (where I now live), and the ethnic diversity that comes with the coasts, I know that I would have taken this diversity for granted. The first time I went to San Francisco as an adult, I couldn’t stop talking about how many Asians and Filipinos there were everywhere, from the staff at the airport to the teenagers on the BART. It’s hard to describe the visceral feeling of moving in space where you’re not the “only.” My mind was blown.
Did you have dreams of being a writer from an early age? Were books and reading important in your family? Any early mentors?
I come from a family of immigrants — my mother was an educator in the Philippines and valued education and learning, period. Any and all books were encouraged and valued. So from an early age, I remember reading Dr. Seuss (as an adult, I’m more critical of Seuss’ problematic geopolitical views) and Shel Silverstein and Encyclopedia Brown. There were never faces that looked like mine in the seventies and I see now, as an adult, the importance of representation. I think kids are lucky to have panethnic representation in everything from Randy Ribay and Erin Estrada Kelly’s YA novels to the Asian kids on Fresh Off the Boat.
The Asian men I remember from my childhood — Data from The Goonies and Long Duck Dong from Sixteen Candles and the child emperor from The Last Emperor — they were, in essence, stereotypes of the Asian geek or the perpetual foreigner or the Eastern wise man. I love that in 2020 we have teenage and young adult representation who happen to be Asian. I’m thinking now of Aziz Ansari (again, problematic as his personal life may be) and his inclusion of Asian Americanness in Master of None. If I had seen this when I was a teenager, I’m sure that my racial identity development may have looked very different.
There was a divide between my worlds of school and worlds of home — today, I relate to Homi Bhabha’s sense of hybridity and third space in which one inhabits a space that bridges these two worlds. So, from an early age, my mother was one of my greatest supporters — encouraging me to read, listening to my storytelling, never allowing me to apologize for my ethnicity or identity.
In grad school, of course, when I began to take myself seriously as a writer, I learned the craft and tools of literature from my teachers: Rick Moody, Alice Mattison, Askold Melnyczuk. What I quickly learned was that these writers I admired were also teacher-practitioners: they wrote, taught, showed others how to live professional lives as writers. I was guided both by their incredible range and talent, but also how they helped an Asian American man from a non-literary family imagine a writers’ life.
The Foley Artist, Gaudy Boy, 2019
Who are some writers who have inspired and influenced you, particularly in terms of writing fiction which explores cultural and sexual identity?
What an awesome question! So much of my work and personal identity is intersectional, so the aspects of my identity that bridge the personal and the literary are of particular interest to me. I’m thinking of writers like R. Zamora Linmark, a friend and writer whose sexuality and Filipino identity are essential to his novels.
In terms of my sexual identity: Genet. Burroughs. Jeanette Winterson and Kathy Acker. Harold Brodkey. As a young writer I’ve been influenced by queer writers who were also experimentalists. When I was introduced to Genet I was blown away in ways that I couldn’t articulate — the in-betweenness of Our Lady of the Flowers, the meta-fictional framework Genet employed as both narrator and author, the profanity and the way that he cared little for the propriety and concerns of polite society. What I loved most about Genet was that he seemed to write first and foremost for himself. It was almost as if his readership was an afterthought, if at all.
When I think of my cultural identity, I owe a debt of gratitude to Filipino American writers like Jessica Hagedorn, Jose Garcia Villa, and Carlos Bulosan. The epigraph to The Foley Artist is me honoring the great Jose Garcia Villa, who fancied himself the Doveglion (a combination of dove, eagle, and lion) and, who along with Carlos Bulosan, were our Filipino American literary forefathers. Garcia Villa has never received his due, even though he was contemporaries with Auden and Bishop, and published his poetry in the New Yorker in the fifties. Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters broke open worlds for me: her cinematic capture of Manila and a distinctly Filipino deference to Americanism was the first time I had seen myself reflected in fiction. It humbles me that I now consider Jessica a mentor, friend, and, most of all, dear heart.
The stories in The Foley Artist are thematically connected and they also share characters. They fit together in the collection almost like loosely interconnected chapters of a novel. How did this connectedness develop? Were these stories all written relatively close together, or was it an extended process over time?
Thanks for highlighting the importance of this! Yes, the interconnectedness of the themes and characters developed over time. It took me ten years to finish this book (an ungodly amount of time). My preoccupations with race, class, and sexuality were somewhat unconscious and as I was writing them, I wrote about what mattered most to me (I took my cues from Genet and Hagedorn). The actual reappearance of characters in my stories — I’m thinking of Noel and Maribel, for example — were probably the result of my own dissatisfaction with where a story had ended up. After finishing my story “Wrestlers,” for example, I felt I hadn’t done justice to Maribel. I also felt that I was lacking empathy for women and was a bit misogynistic, if I’m being honest, and I set a challenge for myself to write from a woman’s point of view. Then I gave myself a second challenge: write differing women’s perspectives. Then, a third challenge: the chasm between American-born Filipinas and Philippine-born Filipinas. That was the origin of the story “Nicolette and Maribel.”
How conscious was your decision to feature a few of the same characters across stories? Did this come together organically or was it more directly planned out?
It was interesting because as I put these stories together, I was reading interconnected stories by one of my teachers, the amazing Alice Mattison, as well as Dale Peck’s Martin and John. I loved the way that their characters appeared and reappeared, sometimes as the same people but also, in Peck’s work as doppelgangers. What really interested me was how the same character appearing in a different story at a different point in time could provide a natural arc and show character development. For example, when Noel appears in early stories he is still coming out to himself and to family; by the time of the latter stories, he is partnered and more secure in his sexuality. The character of Chad Kline was a bit of a chameleon in my mind: he sometimes played trickster, other times seducer, and other times a pure catalyst to inject a story with adrenaline. In “The Rice Bowl,” this character does all of the above, fucking around with the relative calm of the story and setting.
Issues of sound and speech are present in many of the stories (especially in the titular story, “Nicolette and Maribel,” and “Deaf Mute”). What attracted you to the challenges of sounds, speech, and silence for use as metaphors in these stories?
Thanks for noticing how sound and silence matter. The building blocks of craft really impressed me as a young writer. When I learned those staples like “show don’t tell” and the notion that imaginative writing is all about the senses, I found myself challenged by sound as the most difficult of the senses to capture. How do writers create music from a sequence of words and chicken scratches on a page?
Silence is certainly key to “Nicolette and Maribel” and “Deaf Mute,” as you noted. I tend to rely on exposition in my writing, which privileges silence, and wanted to also push myself as a writer to incorporate silence in functional ways to move a story forward. So the moment in the story “The Foley Artist” when Vicente stops in his tracks and sits down on the floor of the video store without speaking surprised me. Vicente’s life work was sound, so his inability to express himself through language hopefully adds another layer of complexity to the story. The deaf uncle in “Deaf Mute” and the sulky narrator of Nicolette manage silence, of course, as a matter of daily experience. It’s funny, but I was recently in conversation with some high school students who had read these stories and they didn’t refer to these moments in terms of silence, but in terms of loneliness. I definitely think solitude and loneliness are recurrent themes in my work.
Most of the stories are fairly straightforward realist narratives, but there are two stories that deviate from that and explore more subconscious/psychological territory. The story “Dandy” flirts with the horror genre when the narrator confronts a type of shadow self with the character Oliver, who is at equal points charismatic and menacing. Are there any particular works of fiction or characters who inspired the creation of this story?
I can’t point to a specific work of fiction or character who inspired Oliver. I do know that I was interested in something so completely out of my realm of experience — S&M and bondage — but did not have access to this in my own life. Maybe I was writing this story at the same time as Fifty Shades of Gray and this was my inspiration!
But seriously, in “Dandy” I was interested in both the forbidden and the closeted. I like to task myself with challenges when I’m writing. So a character who has a deep sense of internalized homophobia, as well as a curiosity about forbidden sexual behavior, interested me. I was also interested in voice: the main character is one completely unlike myself, an elderly white man who has always been closeted yet whom I relate to because of his teacherly life. Oliver, his antagonist, was an exploration of someone who is the epitome of charm but also manipulative and provocative. I appreciate that you read him in a slightly villainous, unrealistic way — this was my intent.
The other story in the collection which really stands out tonally is “Babies,” which heads into full tilt magical realism. I saw this story as a culmination of many of the themes explored in all the others, in the sense of a powerful wish fulfillment for another identity or role being played out Hugo's male pregnancy. What inspired you to take so much of a risky shift in style with this particular story?
It’s funny: so many of my readers hated this story, though I loved it. Maybe a recurring theme for me as a writer is my restlessness; I get antsy writing traditional realistic fiction and I’m easily bored with my own work. So I loved reading and digging deeply into Borges and George Saunders and even Alice Munro, who sometimes eschews realism for the fantastic in her work.
I had never thought of this story under the rubric of “wish fulfillment,” as you’ve noticed. Though Hugo explicitly says he wants babies in the first scene, the fact that he gets pregnant always seemed a matter of writerly style and interest, rather than the fulfillment of a character’s natural desires. I just get bored with realism and loved how Saunders and Munro were playing with this in literary fiction. Could I use fabulism as a model for literary work? What would the form of magical realism do in terms of discussing gayness and family? These were questions I sought to answer in “Babies.” It’s one of the last stories I wrote and felt natural in providing closure to my interests.
Do you see your focus with fiction writing staying more oriented to short stories, or do you have any plans for longer pieces such as novel in the future?
Like the rest of the literary world, I’m working on a novel! It’s slow-going, though, and focuses on an interracial couple abroad. As a restless writer, I’m eager to engage in unmapped territory for me: straight peoples’ lives.
Buy The Foley Artist and check for updates on Ricco’s site
You might also like our interviews with these writers:
Tyler Nesler is a New York City-based freelance writer and the Founder and Managing Editor of INTERLOCUTOR Magazine.
