Being in the Work: A Conversation with Cindy House

Cindy House, author, nonfiction mentor and Lesley Alum, talks about the challenges of writing a follow up to her memoir Mother Noise, what she has learned from opening for David Sedaris, the “truth” in memoir and the joy she finds in teaching what she loves.

CINDY HOUSE – FICTION, JUNE 2017

LG: I would like to start by asking you about your time at Lesley, and what led you to getting an MFA in Creative Writing. 

CH: I had wanted to get an MFA for a long time. When my son was still little I would do research late at night when he was asleep, looking at programs, and I was drawn to the low residency model. I had the unusual situation, though, of not having an undergrad degree. I was a class short of graduating at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. But then one night I discovered that some places will let you in on the basis of your work, and Lesley issued me a BA waiver so I was able to go to grad school. To this day, I am delighted with that choice. I feel like Lesley gave me everything I wanted, and a few things I didn’t even know I wanted. 

LG: I know you’re really happy you did it, but do you feel like someone needs to have an MFA in order to become a working writer? 

CH: I don’t feel like someone needs to have an MFA to be a writer. However, I think the act of getting an MFA just forces you to take yourself more seriously, and what I learned about myself as a writer at Lesley was invaluable. The connections I made with my mentors really altered the course of my career and changed how I thought about writing. I’d always had a mentor in David Sedaris, but working for two years with new writers and listening to their wisdom, and then reading their books, there’s really nothing like it.  It also gave me discipline. I was struggling to write again after my son got a little older. I had been a single parent, and I just didn’t know how to go about getting things done, how to work it into my life.  But grad school forced me to prioritize my own creative work in a way that I don’t think I would have found on my own. I don’t think everybody needs the same thing out of an MFA, and I don’t think everyone needs an MFA, but if you can do it, I think it’s a great gift to your creative life and to your future as a writer.

LG: That makes a lot of sense to me. Do you stay in touch with any of your mentors?

CH:  I do. And now that I’m teaching at Lesley, I cannot tell you the joy of showing up for residency and having my colleagues be these people that I have such respect for and learned so much from. It’s been fairly comfortable to transition into that, and I love being around them. I love hearing about their work and taking in their wisdom. I’m just not their student now.  But I was in touch with them before I started teaching at Lesley. In fact, my mentors were some of the first people I told when I sold Mother Noise, even before my family.  I left Lesley feeling so much gratitude for these people who had invested in my work, and I just loved the whole program. 

LG: I know. I feel the same way. So, did you start out as a nonfiction writer? Is that how you entered the program? 

CH: No, I was in fiction and I was writing short stories and I thought I would be a short story writer and maybe I’d write a novel at some point after school.  But then for one of my interdisciplinary projects, I decided I wanted to write an essay about my friendship with David Sedaris. I worked with Michael Lowenthal to do that, and it altered everything. As soon as I wrote that essay, it cracked something open, and I started writing tons of nonfiction. Then I started studying on my own, once I left Lesley, memoir, nonfiction, and reading as much as I could. 

_{^{Cindy with David Sedaris}}

LG: You started opening for David Sedaris not long after you graduated. What have you gotten from that experience? And how has that changed over time, because you’ve been doing it now for a few years. 

CH: David asked me, and I thought I would do it once and bomb because I was not a funny writer. I’ve known him for 30 years, and I’ve been going to his shows for so long, but I didn’t realize until he asked me to open for him and I tried to write funny, how much I had actually absorbed just from watching him. I had kind of an instinct that I didn’t really know was there. When I first started opening for him, I was just trying to get a laugh. If I could get a couple of laughs, it was fine. Now, though, I think I’m learning to write in that format, to write funny but also to go a little deeper. So I think the whole experience has really taught me something new about how you want to deliver your writing to your reader or your audience. It’s been really valuable in that way.

LG:  Now that you’ve got a second book in the works, how has that experience been? Would you say it’s been different from the first time around? 

CH: Getting the new material together and getting it all figured out has been really hard for a lot of different reasons this time. I was writing fiction for a while after Mother Noise came out, and I was attempting to write novels, and it just wasn’t coming together. But I was still opening for David, so I had to write new material, and eventually I had this second group of essays. I’m still shaping it and figuring out the through line. But the second book has been a struggle. Late one night on a bad day, I googled something like is it hard to publish your second book? And BAM, tons of pieces and essays on Substack, all these writers writing about how difficult it is. I think it’s just that every book feels like a miracle. It feels like a miracle to even have a book published, to even be a working writer. But the best lesson in all of it has been that I just really love to write. The rest is great, and I feel so lucky. But when it comes down to it, the thrill is the discoveries that I make on the page, or figuring out the next project, or coming up with ideas and just being in the work. I’m not running a business where I’m just trying to sell books. At the end of the day, I just want to be in my office writing.

LG: That’s great, I completely get that.  

CH: Right, and it would be great to sell a second book, and I hope I do it, but it’s still the work that matters. 

LG: Yes, that’s really it, isn’t it? Okay so tell me about these writing workshops that you run. 

CH:  I started teaching after Mother Noise came out, while I was trying to write a second book, and I thought I would just do it for a while. I taught teenagers years ago, and ran writing workshops to homeschoolers in this lovely community. But I forgot how much I love teaching because in the last couple of years, as I’ve taught a lot and run these private classes, it has added so much to my life. It sounds hokey, but I get really invested in people’s projects. I get really excited when someone publishes something.

LG: I know you do.

CH: I just live for that. It makes me so happy, and I am always in awe of the people who come and write about the hardest things in their lives. I think it’s especially rewarding to teach nonfiction and to have people bring their pain to class like that. It’s just so humbling. The other piece is that the teaching feeds into my own writing. It’s all a circle. If I’m struggling with a craft issue in my own work I end up talking about it in class.  And then students will come with things they want to learn, so I’ll teach that, and then those craft issues are prominent in my head and in my toolbox when I start a new essay. I’m also reading all the time to find new things to share with my students. So I’m just living, sleeping, breathing, eating, writing all the time, it’s all one thing. And I feel so grateful to have such great students show up. So yes, it’s been really fantastic teaching.

LG: Since the 2024 election you organized a new workshop specifically targeting what people are going through, what writers are experiencing. Can you tell us a little bit about what inspired that? 

CH: I woke up the day after the election, and I thought, I just need to be with people. I need to be with people who make things. I need to help support as many other writers as I possibly can to write. Part of it came from when the pandemic hit. The first thing I thought of, and the thing that got me through the pandemic, was thinking about all of the great art that would come from it.

And artists did not let me down. Patricia Lockwood and Jesmyn Ward for example wrote beautiful essays, and there have been some amazing books. I wrote an essay for photographer friends of mine who published a gorgeous book of photos of their personal, family bubble during COVID. So the idea of when things are horrible let’s make some art, was the only thing I could think of. I am lucky enough to have a whole email list of working writers, and writers trying to publish, so I decided I would ask them to help me build a community where we can be together, not to talk about the latest news coming out that’s upsetting, but just be together. Make things, write things, and lift each other up. That is what I’m holding onto for the next four years. I think it’s important. I think it’s positive, it makes me feel better about the world, being around artists. 

LG: I think that’s great, it’s like a survival tactic. And writing together, sharing the experience with other people makes it so much more, not just comfortable, but inspiring. I think that’s a great gift that you’re giving people, that you’ve created this safe space where they can come and do that kind of work together. 

CH: Thank you. I mean, it’s good for me too. But the other piece of it is that writers and artists have, I feel, almost a responsibility. It’s our history, and I think that’s another aspect of this. We have this ability and yes, we should be commenting. We should be telling our truth about it. 

LG: Yes, absolutely. 

CH: I just think it’s a good thing to do all the way around, and we’ll be leaving something behind. It’s like the body of COVID work that has been so great to see. It’s also the only thing I know to do.

LG: I totally get that. Looking ahead, you published Mother Noise, and now you’re working on a second memoir. What do you see coming in the future? 

CH: I do want to finally publish a novel at some point, and I have some notes, some ideas, some beginnings, so we’ll see. But I just feel like I want to work until I physically can’t type, one foot in the grave. I want to work because it makes me happy, so who knows what else? As long as I’m making things. 

LG: Do you think you’ll keep teaching at Lesley? How does that fit in? 

CH: I think so. I really like the low residency model. It’s so much fun to leave your regular life for a week and be submerged in the work. I’m always so moved. I’m moved in the same way I was as a student because I’m sitting through faculty readings and student readings, graduating student readings. I’m just so excited every residency. I’m always really happy to be there. 

LG: That’s great, it sounds like it’s doing as much for you as it’s doing for your students. I wanted to ask how you talk to the people you work with about including things from their past that might not be so nice about family members or friends? How do you advise people about how to proceed with telling their truth in memoir? 

CH: I mostly say that everybody has to be on that journey on their own, everybody’s got to figure out what they can put out there. Then I talk about what it was like for me to do that. I never thought I’d write a book like Mother Noise, where I tell the world I was a heroin addict. I didn’t see that coming. I was nervous to do it, but I have never regretted it. I think it’s fairly common for people to start writing a memoir with a list of things they could never write about. So I often start by telling people to just write for themselves, to not even think about publishing. You can’t write memoir if you have this long list of things or experiences you’re never going to touch, because then you’re censoring yourself. You can’t tie your hands like that. You need to be able to discover what it all means as you go, that is a huge part of the process. People come to it slowly, and I get it because that’s how it happened for me. I used to think, as long as I write fiction, I’m safe. But then I started writing nonfiction, and all the things I thought I could never write about are in a book, or in a show, and it’s okay. We all have the things that we’re ashamed of, or that we’re afraid will upset other people. But generally, if you’re telling the truth, I think it’s okay. I think that it works out.

LG:  Has anyone ever been upset about being included in your work? 

CH: No. There were a few people in Mother Noise I was worried about, but I showed it to them first, so it wasn’t a surprise. And my son reads everything he’s in, and sometimes he’ll say, can you just change this line? Usually he’s okay, and he’ll give his permission. 

LG: Okay so then there’s this other thing, about what “the truth” actually is in memoir writing. Maggie Smith says in her memoir, You Can Make This Place Beautiful, that the book wasn’t a “tell-all,” it was a “tell some.” How would you describe the difference between the truth in a memoir versus the truth in a historical document, for example? 

CH: I think that emotional truth is the most important part of memoir. We can’t always remember the exact date when something happened. We write dialogue, and maybe the conversation happened thirty years ago, but you’re writing to the truth of that conversation, to the truth of what happened emotionally. You write lines that fit how it made you feel, it’s your story. This is understood, and a lot of memoirs address that, the fact that someone else would write a given book very differently. People are reading for the narrator’s point of view, with the understanding that it’s through the eyes of that one person. You’re building from blocks of truth things that really happened, but you’re curating, right? What you choose to pull out to make your story is the artful part. You’re pulling out the memories that speak to the spine of the book. So if you’re writing a book about addiction, you may pick differently than if you’re writing about a slice of your life that’s about your divorce. That’s why memoirists often write more than one memoir, because it’s not supposed to cover your whole life. It’s a slice or an angle or one aspect of your life. 

LG: Yes, that makes so much sense to me. Okay here is my last question and I’ve been saving it. What do you tell someone who comes to you and says, “I want to be a writer, how do I get started?”

CH: I have an email in my inbox from someone asking that right now, and I have not responded yet. 

LG I know. It’s a terrible question to ask you. 

CH: There’s something Ira Glass said that I absolutely love, and I think is so true. I said it to my son when he started playing music. Ira Glass said that when you come to your art form, you’re doing it because you have great taste, because you’ve loved other writers or artists or musicians. But you have to be willing to ride out the period when your work is just awful, and your taste knows it’s awful. You can’t live up to how great your taste is yet. But you have to be willing to persevere, because it takes a while to get good at something. So if you can live with yourself when you’re writing garbage, that’s the best thing you can do. And I think that’s really true.

LG: I think that is really true. That’s perfect. I thank you.

CH: You’re welcome.

^{Cindy with fellow alum and interviewer Leah Glennon}