Monica Macansantos discusses her new book, Returning to My Father’s Kitchen, featuring “A Shared Stillness,” first published in the Spring 2021 issue of Colorado Review, with associate editor Alaina Villoria.
Monica Macansantos is the author of the essay collection, Returning to My Father’s Kitchen (Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press, 2025), and a story collection, Love and Other Rituals (2022). She is a 2024-25 Shearing Fellow with the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas and a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers. Her work has appeared in Colorado Review, Bennington Review, River Styx, The Hopkins Review, Lit Hub, and Electric Lit, among others.
AV: It is my understanding that “A Shared Stillness,” which we published in our 2021 Spring issue, is what led to the birth of your new collection of essays, Returning to My Father’s Kitchen, which is coming out on May 15th…
MM: I’m not sure I would call it the essay that started it all. It probably provided an impetus for me to complete the rest of the book, but it wasn’t the first essay in the collection.
AV: Oh, I see! So you had already been working on Returning to My Father’s Kitchen, then?
MM: Yeah, I had written a couple of essays by the time I started working on “A Shared Stillness.” I believe about half of the manuscript was already written down. The earliest essay in the collection is “James.” It’s a very short piece, and it started out as a poem that was written in response to a prompt that was given to us at our first year seminar at the Michener Center, which is where I did my MFA. That was way back in 2010, and when I wrote that piece it didn’t really come to mind that this would become the first seed of my essay collection.
A few years later, in 2015, I was beginning a doctoral program in creative writing in New Zealand. I wrote “Becoming a Writer, the Silences We Write Against,” the third essay in the collection. My father was still alive when I wrote that piece. He was quite proud of it because he felt that I was defending him and doing the right things by standing up to abusive personalities in the Filipino literary community. So, after I finished that essay, I felt that maybe eventually this could be part of a longer book of essays.
My father passed away very suddenly a few months before I was due to turn in my doctoral dissertation. After I concluded my doctorate, I felt that I wanted to keep writing despite the creative paralysis that my father’s death caused for me. But, I still felt incapable. Or, not necessarily incapable, but I wasn’t as drawn to fiction because, in my opinion, when you write fiction, you’re writing about other people’s lives. And at that time, I just wanted to turn inwards. I wanted to withdraw into a protective shell and process this grief that I held, and, for me, non-fiction was an effective way to do that. So, I ended up writing a couple essays in the fog of my grief.
I didn’t see myself writing a whole collection of essays. Or, I did, but maybe I didn’t know where it was going. But common themes emerged from these essays, like grief, returning home, memory, and the ability of memory to retrieve what has been lost. Eventually, in 2020, the pandemic happened. I was in the Philippines with my mom. I was supposed to travel to Japan and the States, but that wasn’t happening, so I was locked down with my mom at home, and again, quarantine forced me to turn further inwards. That’s when I started working on “A Shared Stillness,” which was actually written in response to a prompt from another literary journal called A Public Space. They had this writing contest about family history, and I wanted to work on an essay about my grandparents being the tango champions of Zamboanga City for the longest time, so it gave me an opportunity for that. A Public Space didn’t take the essay, but Colorado Review did, and it was probably one of my first major journal publications. It basically encouraged me to collect my essays in manuscript form and submit it to publishers.
AV: You kind of already touched on the emotional weight and experience of talking and writing about these different forms of grief and loss. Could you talk a little bit about what it was like handling these different types of emotional intensities while you were writing? Where there any things that you did to help you go into these emotionally charged memories that maybe made the writing process easier on yourself when you had to go back into those memories?
MM: I think the essay form enabled me to take breaks between one project and another project. I think that if I were writing a memoir that had a definitive beginning, middle, and end, it would have been harder for me. But with the essay form, I could linger on a specific moment and isolate those emotions that I had. There were tears shed in front of the computer, and it wasn’t an easy process. For almost every essay in this book I cried. But, I think that taking breaks between essays and projects was important. Despite my grief, I was also working on edits for the novel that I turned in for my PhD and some short stories, but essays were my main focus during the pandemic, in 2020.
AV: Yes, 2020, as you said, was such an isolating time. Earlier you mentioned your grandparents and how they were tango dancers, and your father wrote poetry. What was it like writing about these different artistic forms within your family, and then bringing them into your own writing?
MM: I think that learning to tango myself and learning this art form that my grandparents had mastered, enabled me to write about it. I don’t think there was any other way. I had to experience what they experienced, learning the dance and then dancing it. I think that going through the experience of heartbreak, and learning a dance that an ex taught me was also an opening into the lives of my grandparents. Both of my grandparents had long been dead by the time I wrote this essay, so they weren’t around to tell me about their tango dancing. But I think that since I’m their granddaughter, I carry within me a legacy that they passed on to me by learning to tango myself. I wasn’t learning to tango for purposes of research, that was just for me, it was a fun thing to do. But nonetheless, it enabled me to perhaps understand my grandparents a little better and why their relationship endured despite the violence that was also there. This essay came together as I lived my life.
AV: I love the way that you talk about carrying on your grandparents’ memory when you tango dance. Are there other things that inspire you, or perhaps never cease to inspire you? Maybe when you write fiction as well?
MM: When I write fiction, I write about other people, and I’m inspired by the stories that are told to me. Sometimes these are second hand, passed on to me from another person, sometimes it will be gossip, and sometimes, because I travel a lot, a person will tell me about their lives because they know I’m just passing through. I guess it’s like bartender effect. They feel their stories are safe with me when they’re really not! But also, writing fiction is a process of transformation, because you’re not just using somebody’s life or gossiping about them, you’re also attempting to find meaning in an experience that honors them. So, a lot of things inspire me. Things I overhear, my own personal experiences. There’s an essay in the collection about going to the wake of my high school classmate’s mother, and this didn’t take place in my family, that was their story, not my story. But still, this was my story of briefly witnessing the strangeness of this family and what this said about my own place in the history of my hometown. So, just living life and keeping my eyes very open and being very curious about other people is what inspires me.
AV: Right! I find Uber drivers are a wonderful way to learn about somebody’s life.
MM: Yes! In Las Vegas I’ve gotten quiet Uber drivers, I’ve had some scary Uber experiences, and some Uber drivers who kept going on and on about conspiracy theories. I’ve also had wonderful Uber drivers, so it’s a mixed bag, like the rest of humanity.
AV: Yes, exactly. I want to ask one more question before closing: Do you have anything that you would like people to know about either “A Shared Stillness,” or the overall collection that is coming out May 15th?
MM: I’m trying to figure out how to answer that question, because the question is answered by the book. I consider myself to be mainly a Filipino from the Philippines. There are a lot of Filipino writers being published in the U.S. at the moment, but a lot of them are Filipino Americans or Filipino immigrants. I’ve spent much of my time as an immigrant too, but much of my formative years were spent in the Philippines. So when I write about the Filipino experience, it’s not really about me searching for a sense of identity, although there is that too, but it’s more about finding a sense of self that probably transcends ethnicity or nationality, if that makes sense. So I feel like this book offers something different from what is being published right now in America by Filipino writers.
Alaina Villoria is a first-year MFA student in fiction, where she is an associate editor at the Colorado Review. Her writing is place-based and often set in Florida, where the setting is a central character in her short stories.