Cinelle Barnes is a memoirist, essayist, and educator from Manila, Philippines, and is the author of Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir (Little A, 2018) and Malaya: Essays on Freedom (Little A, 2019), and the editor of a forthcoming anthology of essays about the American South (Hub City Press, 2020). She earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Converse College. Her writing has appeared in Buzzfeed Reader, Catapult, Literary Hub, Hyphen, Panorama: A Journal of Intelligent Travel, and South 85, among others. Her work has received fellowships and grants from VONA, Kundiman, the John and Susan Bennett Memorial Arts Fund, and the Lowcountry Quarterly Arts Grant. Her debut memoir was listed as a Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 by Bustle and nominated for the 2018 Reading Women Nonfiction Award. Barnes was a WILLA: Women Writing the American West Awards screener and a 2018-19 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards juror, and is the 2018-19 writer-in-residence at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, SC, where she and her family live.
EB: What first drew you to writing memoir and essays? How did your nonfiction journey begin?
CB: The very first stories I wrote were fiction. My first story, that I wrote when I was seven, was about a family of three dogs—
EB: Love it already.
CB: But one of them kept disappearing. They took turns disappearing, and, in the end, it turns out they took turns disappearing because their mother was gone. But when you look back on my life, my mom started disappearing around then—physically and mentally—so it was actually a kind of nonfiction?
EB: Oh, wow.
CB: There was another story called “The World of Z” and I tried to write a story with as many words that started with the letter Z as I could. Zach was the main character.
EB: [laughter]
CB: But I feel like in school I was never taught to write nonfiction. The only nonfiction you write are formal essays and they are so dry. You have to read it in front of the class, here is the formula… and I did enjoy those because I felt like my brain was really working when writing those. I was responding to something and felt like I was pulling something outside of me. In Monsoon Mansion I mention that my mother would put me in these essay-writing contests for prize money. So that was my introduction to it.
But then, in college, I started out in fashion school, and I hated it—I love clothes, I don’t like to make them—but at FIT like all SUNY and CUNY schools, you are required to take prerequisites. I took a short fiction class which I loved, and I realized that none of what I was writing was fiction… I just changed the names. They were all essays. That was when my then-boyfriend-now-husband asked me, “Why are you in fashion school? Why don’t you switch into a writing program?” So, I did. I transferred to Hunter College, which was a sanctuary for me—I could still get an education even though I was undocumented and unprotected in every way.
When it came time to declare my major, there were booths set up at the sky bridge at Hunter College. At one end was the journalism booth and at the other end was the English and creative writing booth, and, this is going to make sense with Non-Fiction by Non-Men, but when I walked up to the English department’s booth they had all these books and quotes from writers and every single one was by a dead white man.
EB: [rolling eyes]
CB: At this point I wasn’t as politically-minded, or, at least, I didn’t have the vocabulary yet to express what I was thinking and feeling, but I saw all that and thought, “I don’t want to be here. I don’t belong here.” And the only people at the booth were that guy in your MFA, trying to outsmart everyone who came up asking questions.
EB: Ugh!
CB: So, I walked to the journalism booth. The head of the department, Kelly Anderson, who eventually took me in as her intern, who is a journalist and a documentary filmmaker, was at the booth, and she immediately asked about who I was and what kinds of stories I wanted to tell. She asked me, “What would be your beat?” Then she showed me a copy of the student publication that they were working on, and they had been reporting on different Brooklyn neighborhoods. This was in the early 2000s and Manhattan was still the thing. She wasn’t trying to sell Brooklyn. This was before Instagram.
EB: [laughter]
CB: She said, “Most of our students are from Brooklyn. Why aren’t we telling their stories?” As soon as she gave me a copy of the publication, I thought, that is what I want to do. I began taking literary nonfiction classes as part of my journalism major, and I fell in love. I read Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson for the first time. Our predecessors.
EB: I love that, how the journalism booth was all about telling unheard stories. That’s what I love about nonfiction—hearing other people’s stories. Nonfiction gives me an excuse to ask people about their lives and their histories. I feel like when I write nonfiction, I connect with people more deeply. You can do that with fiction, too, but it’s not the same.
CB: There is something always at stake in nonfiction.
EB: Yes!
CB: I love that. It’s so risky. But I love that.
EB: I actually wanted to ask you about the risks in nonfiction. I recently interviewed Cameron Dezen Hammon and she mentioned how women are often tasked with being the keepers of family secrets. But when a woman writes personal nonfiction, she is subverting that—putting it all out in the open. Many of your essays in Malaya are about secrets you were forced to keep. How does it feel now to have that information out in the open? What was it like to write about these things you were supposed to keep quiet for so long?
CB: My friend Fiona Sze-Lorrain, who is a poet and a harpist, who actually can make a living doing both of those things in Paris.
EB: Of course, in Paris.
CB: Right, in Paris you can do anything, I feel. But Fiona and I were doing a reading together, and someone asked Fiona, “Why is all of your poetry at the vantage point of looking through a peephole?” She had just read a poem about Picasso’s lover through a part in the door and you just see a little bit of the lover’s leg coming out of the bathtub and onto the rug. Fiona said, “Because poetry is about the secret about the secret.” So, I followed up with, “I think nonfiction is about the secret about the secret about the secret.”
EB: I like that.
CB: There is still that core secret.If someone tells me something in confidence, there is a high responsibility to that person’s core and their heart. I have to figure out if my responsibility to that person is higher than my responsibility to history in that moment. But even if the secret needs to stay secret, I like to tell what is around it. And that’s almost always enough.
But then there are times where I really don’t hold back. That essay with the surfer girl, and a couple essays about me and my dad—they can be loving and harsh at the same time. But, when writing about my dad, I had to think about what do I have to offer my dad, versus what do I have to offer the rest of my family, versus what do I have to offer the world? And the latter two weighed more heavily on me when I was writing those essays.
EB: This is something that comes up a lot when I teach memoir-writing classes. I’ve spoken to other writers about how it’s so hard to know where to draw the line around their own story, and you have to figure out why you are revealing every detail: am I revealing this because it is crucial to the story, or just because it is exciting? You have to figure out the purpose of why you are sharing each thing.
CB: Yes. Last night at my reading, before I read my essay, I read a message I got on Instagram yesterday morning at 9:16am from someone who had read Malaya and asked about the essay I write about my husband’s family. In it, I reveal a lot about myself, but I also reveal a lot about my husband’s family—secrets dating all the way back to 1776. The woman who wrote to me said that she felt like I had walked into her world in that essay, that she loved reading about another outsider who had married a fellow outsider. I love being able to do that—to use the tools that I have, that maybe someone else doesn’t have—to say and write what someone else might not be able to on their own.
I’m also okay with backfire.
EB: [laughter] I know, it’s weird. You have to both have a very thin skin to connect to the world and have empathy for others as a writer, but you also have a very thick skin to stand by what you said.
CB: Yeah!
EB: Now that you have written both a memoir and an essay collection, what was the experience of writing each like? How was writing a memoir different or similar to writing a collection of essays for you?
CB: Monsoon Mansion I wrote over the course of six years. Malaya I wrote over the course of eight months—
EB: Oh my god.
CB: Actually, I was only given six months. I asked for an extension. And I was writing it while touring.
EB: Wow.
CB: I did a lot of writing on planes and trains.
EB: That’s where I always do my best writing!
CB: It’s like a one-person writing residency.
EB: [laughter]
CB: So, Monsoon Mansion is about looking back. I mean, Monsoon Mansion wasn’t the plan—I was thinking literary nonfiction, something more journalistic but told in a literary way, that has some cultural significance. In my head, that was what I was going to do. And then one of my writing mentors, Jim Minick, played a game in a memoir workshop, where each of us had to tell something we hadn’t already told the class. And I felt like I had already told them everything, but he said, “I don’t believe you.” At the time I was writing about yoga and my relationship with bodies of water and muscle memory, and because of that game, I finally spoke about what would be Monsoon Mansion. Jim said that he didn’t think I would be able to write other stories, until I had gotten out what was behind me. So, I ended up spending six years on that book. It was emotionally hard to write, as you can imagine, but there was also so much technical research—looking at Google Earth and calling churches and hospitals back in the Philippines, scouring the web and databases for records on my family, traveling to Chicago to interview relatives to confirm details.
EB: Wow, yes, I remember when I saw you on a panel at AWP how you said you used Google Earth to look for your family’s old house. The amount of research you did is incredible. No wonder it took so long!
CB: Malaya came together in eight months. The essays in the collection came about because they were responses to questions I would get at readings, or on the street, or on Instagram or Facebook or GoodReads. Some people figured out how to send me snail mail! But someone would always ask, “How did you get here?” And I wasn’t sure what “here” meant. Did they mean here in America? Here in marriage? In motherhood? In what they perceive as the American dream? Here in success? In sanity? In stability? I started asking myself that same question in the form of the essay, and every time I sat down the answer was different. Each one of those essays is one answer.
I finished writing this book January 24, 2019. By the way, it is still 2019.
EB: And it’s already out! And you’re on tour!
CB: Yes! So on January 24, my husband had the stomach bug, he had been throwing up all night, and my deadline was at 8pm. At 8am, I took my daughter to the mall, put her in the mall play area, and she played there for hours while I wrote, and I was living the end of the story. Talk about stakes! But the essay form allowed me to write the stories I was still living.
The essay has a very dialogic form. I wasn’t exactly sure who I was in dialogue with at the time, but now that the book is out, I realized, oh, these are all the people I have been in conversation with.
EB: I had never thought about an essay as a story you are still living. My students and I often talk about the difference between aesthetic closure versus actual closure. Because so rarely in real life do you get actual closure unless someone dies, or you move from a place and that place no longer exists… I like the idea though of an essay being a vehicle to tell a story that is still unfolding. Had you had any of the essays written before?
CB: Only four had been previously published. Two with Catapult, one with Buzzfeed, and one with South 85. The majority—two-thirds of the book—is fresh. I remember doing the math thinking I need twelve essays, I have six months, that is two essays a month, so every two weeks I was writing a new essay.
EB: That’s a lot.
CB: I read so much to fill up myself, and then I had to discipline myself and stick to this schedule. I think that’s another reason why I am drawn to nonfiction—I am a very structured person. Most of my friends who are writers are fiction-writers or poets, and I was always amazed by how they could just be comfortable with whatever. I was always the antsy one. I always wanted to know, okay, what’s the nut graph? I also always start thinking right away whether or not I think something is going to be a print piece or an online piece. Maybe that’s wrong, but it’s how I work.
EB: No, I actually feel like there is something really different about writing when you know it is going to be published online or in print. When I interviewed Scaachi Koul and Grace Talusan, both of them mentioned how in print there is more of a buy-in, that things aren’t so easily Googleable, that if someone wants to read your work, they’ve already committed to purchasing or checking out that print item.
CB: Right.
EB: All that being said, do you think you’d ever want to try fiction again?
CB: I’ve actually been working on a novel. But I wonder if it is just another decoy… The working title is Magnolia Land, and it is about Charleston, South Carolina, where I currently live! And the protagonist is a Filipino writer who is an artist slash performance artist. The book is all about what a performance is and what the word performance means in the South and the roles we play in different contexts. And as my agent keeps asking me, why don’t I just write this as a nonfiction book? I think because I still live there.
EB: Having that plausible deniability is nice. I read an interview with Zinzi Clemmons about her novel What We Lose, which draws from experiences in her own life. She said she chose to write the work as a novel, though, because she wanted to be the author, not the protagonist, and that fiction allowed her more flexibility.
CB: I’ve also become more cognizant about how I write about my daughter as she gets older. I try to change her name and obscure her identity the best that I can. I asked for her permission to dedicate the book to her. When I write something about her, I read it out loud to her. So she is aware of what I have written about her, but I feel like I need to start protecting her more and more, and I feel like writing this in novel form allows me that. Also, she is so precocious that writing her as she is might be hard to believe. She is almost eight, but the protagonist’s daughter in the novel is around ten-eleven. The conversations the protagonist and the daughter have are very much our real conversations, but I feel I need to start protecting those, too.
And she told me that she also wants to write nonfiction.
EB: Oh, no!
CB: I talk about it in the last essay in Malaya, how she wants to become a writer, and how I think, “Oh, crap.”
EB: [laughter] That’s so funny. But, yes, I love that you talk to her and ask her for permission. I feel like there are some parents who are writers who feel entitled to their kids’ stories, because being a parent is part of their identity, but I think you also need to respect that your kids are their own autonomous people and maybe you should talk with them about this stuff.
CB: Yes, I feel like we can have conversations about it, so why not? Or at least, even if not asking her permission, ask her, “Is this how you would have described the situation?” Or, “Hey, I’m writing about your school, how do you feel about that?” She is so precocious she can talk like an adult. She understands, and so I am trying to model best behavior and best practices to her.
EB: Yeah, if she wants to write nonfiction, teach her the most ethical way to do it!
CB: Definitely.
EB: Do you ask other people for permission to write about them, or just your daughter? Do you give other people, like your husband, veto power on what you write about them?
CB: My husband is my first reader. I just trust him a lot at the line level and at the developmental level. He’s prophetic. He knows what my editors or my agent will say. He helps me write out a plan. But he never speaks into my work with a “you can’t do this.” He may just tell me how he’d approach it differently. I did tell him I was working on the essay about his family and asked what he was comfortable with me sharing, and he said, “Yes, it’s about my family, but this is your story.” There were some sections of dialogue where he remembered it differently and we went back and forth and negotiated. I do that with him and with my daughter.
For my mother-in-law, I just told her, “Hey, I’m writing about my relationship with the family, specifically with Grandmama, and I just want you to know.” I told her it wouldn’t be online—again, thinking of how when you pick up a print copy you’re entering into a covenant. You know what you’re getting into, and you know that part of the essay is that nothing is going to be the same after, and we’re both going to be okay with that. And my mother-in-law very openly agreed to just let it be.
But with anyone else? No, not really. I don’t ask for permission. I’ve never asked for my dad’s permission. I do write that one essay about interviewing my dad for Monsoon Mansion, and how, after my dad had a stroke and I was taking care of him in the ICU, I read the manuscript to him, not knowing if he was hearing me at all or retaining any information he was hearing post-stroke. When I finished reading and he came to, the only thing he said was, “You’re too nice.” I had been waiting to hear those words since I was eight, and I wouldn’t have heard those words if he hadn’t had the opportunity to say those words, which he wouldn’t have had, if I hadn’t written that story.
It amazes me how much people actually want to be written about. How much they are waiting to be spoken to or spoken about. We are always waiting for someone to veto our work, but often they will not.
EB: I understand. Maybe it’s just a very writerly worst-case-scenario mindset? I always fear what people will push back against, and it’s always the thing I don’t expect—someone has an issue with the brand of jeans you say they wore, not that you revealed decades of family trauma.
CB: Yeah. We are always so concerned with who has given us permission. I hear that question get asked a lot at readings and in workshops. But no one ever asks who are you giving permission to. Everything I write gives someone else permission to do something or say something or hear something or see something. That’s such a gift.
EB: I love that about nonfiction. Seeing someone else put their story out there gives you courage to share your own. In my interview with Grace Talusan, she talked about how important it was for her to see other Asian American writers, like Amy Tan, tell their stories, and how that encouraged her to tell hers.
CB: Yes.
EB: In general, what do you find most challenging about writing nonfiction?
CB: The challenging part changes. Sometimes it is in the pre-production stage, sometimes in the production, sometimes it’s in the post.
EB: Sometimes it’s when you have eight months to write twelve essays?
CB: [laughing] Yeah!
EB: And what do you find most rewarding about writing nonfiction?
CB: Almost always it is the feeling of having written.
EB: Yes, that is the best feeling.
CB: But the bonus part is when you get these messages—like that one I got at 9:16am on Instagram yesterday—from readers. I love not knowing who you are going to connect with, and getting those messages at the most random times. 9:16am! Not 9:15, not 9:20. This person was on their way to work or getting ready for work or already at work, and they had to begin their day by telling me this. That is really what makes it worth it—knowing that someone is breathing a little easier because I gave breath to something on the page.
And, also, that I don’t carry these burdens anymore.
EB: Yes! I know that writing can be good therapy but therapy doesn’t always make for good writing. But there is something about putting down an experience and feeling, there, you live there now, not in me. Thank you for sharing that.
CB: You’re welcome.
EB: The last thing I wanted to ask about is your writing support system. Writing can be really lonely, and so I always like to ask writers about their communities. I know you’ve written about how your dog helped you get through writing the more traumatic parts of Monsoon Mansion, and I love how you write in Malaya about how your husband was the one who encouraged you to write on index cards while breastfeeding your daughter. (Such a good idea, tucking that away for the future!) But who else do you turn to for support when writing? Who makes up your writing community, and how does that affect or help your writing process?
CB: As I said, my husband is my first reader. Then I also have my Mafia of Love—that was the name given to my cohort when we were in our MFA program.
EB: I call my MFA cohort calls the Nonfiction Mafia!
CB: [laughter] Ha, yes! The fiction and poetry people would say that us nonfiction writers traveled in groups all the time, always arriving at the cafeteria at the same time.
EB: I love that.
CB: There are three other women from my MFA who were also on the nonfiction track, and they are just really good emotional and mental resources. I bounce ideas off of them, and they do the same with me, but almost always I turn to those three.
I also have a group from VONA, Voices of the Nations Arts. It’s all writers of colors and we all met at Penn a few years ago for political content writing. I was part of a cross-genre group, but we were all writing something that we felt had political significance. That’s a good group too. We text about everything, not just writing. We send each other presents—a new journal or a rose quartz or a pack of essential oils or a candle to help you write.
There are also my writing mentors all the way from college through post-MFA. They are always so generous and always making time and always ready to listen to me cry on the phone.
EB: [laughter]
CB: And I got really lucky with my agent, Noah Ballard, who is now one of my best friends. He just really knows what my life and work are really about. Last time I was sick, he sent me a box of 52 granola bars. One for each week of the year? I don’t know.
My editor for Monsoon Mansion and Malaya, Vivian Lee, has also become such a good friend. She understands everything from the developmental level to the line level to word choice. She understands why I put in every comma, sentence fragment. I feel really spoiled. So I try to be that to other people. I recently edited an anthology for Hub City Press that is by all writers of color from the South, and I remember while editing and selecting contributors that I wanted to be all these people to these people. I wanted to give of myself the way that these people have given of themselves to me.
EB: Me too. I want to do that as a teacher and an editor, too. People have been so kind and generous to me, and I want to give that back.
CB: Yes.
EB: Finally, what is a favorite passage of nonfiction by a fellow non-man writer?
CB: I love when Joan Didion quotes W.B. Yeats in her essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”: “the centre cannot hold.”
There is also a Toni Morrison quote I love, from an interview, that speaks to the themes in Malaya and my forthcoming work:
I tell my students, “When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.”