#208 Layering Memory, Meaning, and Motifs in Memoir with Cinelle Barnes

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Cinelle Barnes

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I’ve been a fan of Cinelle Barnes’s work since I read Monsoon Mansion, her beautifully written memoir about her childhood in the Philippines. I loved the book, so I was especially interested in talking with her about her newest memoir, A Way Home, which began as a travel memoir and changed dramatically after she survived a ruptured brain aneurysm.

We discuss how she braided different threads and timelines together, found connections between seemingly disparate parts of her story, and shaped a memoir that became more expansive than the book she first planned to write, plus:

• Shaping a hybrid travel and medical memoir
• Using emotion and sensory details to deepen scenes
• Working with motifs, refrains, and circling back
• A writing exercise anyone can use to find connections among seemingly disparate elements in memoir
• Moving from “I have to” to “I get to”

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About Cinelle Barnes

Cinelle Barnes is the Philippine-born author of Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir, Malaya: Essays on Freedom, and A Way Home: A Memoir of Losing Yourself and the Beauty of Returning. She is also the editor of the New York Times “New and Noteworthy” A Measure of Belonging: Twenty-One Writers of Color on the New American South. 
Cinelle is a survivor of a brain aneurysm rupture and sits on the Brain Injury Leadership Council of South Carolina and the Hub City Press National Council, and is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Fund, the Authors League Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, South Arts, the SC State Arts Commission, and the North American Travel Journalists Association, among others. She has served on the jury panels for several literary awards, including the inaugural Pulitzer Prize for Memoir. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Coastal Living, Travel + Leisure, Oprah Daily, Newsweek, Southern Living, and Memoir Land, among others. Cinelle lives in Charleston, SC, with her husband, daughter, and cat.

Links

 For information, visit www.cinellebarnes.com

Get More From Estelle Erasmus

Latest Substack post: Detail with a Pulse to Make Your Writing Sing. A great detail doesn’t just describe a scene. It carries emotion, tension, character, or meaning. Here’s how to find the one detail that makes a scene come alive. Plus, paid subscribers can send me up to three paragraphs for feedback.

I’m also teaching an upcoming NYU course, Write to Publish: How to Get Your Work in Print and Beyond, live online starting October 13 as part of the Storytelling Certificate. We’ll work on how to get attention for your writing, develop and strengthen essays, memoir pieces, and micro memoir, and learn how to pitch publications, and get your writing published. The course meets synchronously online, so you can join from anywhere. Learn more and register here.

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Writing That Gets Noticed — named a Poets & Writers “Best Book for Writers.”

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About Estelle
Estelle Erasmus is an award-winning journalist, TEDx speaker, and author of Writing That Gets Noticed. She is the host, founder, and executive producer of Freelance Writing Direct, an adjunct professor at NYU, and the former editor-in-chief of five national magazines with a combined reach of 10 million readers.

Her work has appeared in more than 150 publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, WIRED, PBS/Next Avenue, The Independent, and AARP The Magazine.

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