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For years, I’ve read Kristine Langley Mahler’s essays and have come to expect inventive structures, sentences that are taut and on-target, and a meticulous attention to detail. These signatures are no doubt present in her debut essay collection, Curing Season: Artifacts, which explores and catalogs four years of the author’s adolescence spent in suburban North Carolina. It’s an elegant time capsule, a kind of literature wholeheartedly dedicated to going beyond the vestiges of memory.
I spoke with Kristine about various technical and ethical considerations when writing creative nonfiction.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Aram Mrjoian
One of my favorite parts about this memoir is the idea of essays/chapters as “artifacts,” which is suggested in the title. It’s evident from the get-go how much research and curation went into this book, so I’m curious about your thoughts on creative nonfiction as a point of historical, cultural, and personal interest. What does it mean to you to create an artifact, literary or otherwise?
Kristine Langley Mahler
I didn’t take it lightly when I applied the term “artifacts” to these essays. Artifacts help us understand history because they are what’s left behind when the context has otherwise vanished—artifacts are the remnants of a specific era, and a specific people, and a specific place. As a memoirist, I approach the construction of an essay knowing that I am creating an artifact out of a memory. I am taking something arguably non-tangible (a memory) and turning it into a lasting representation (if we’re going to call a book “lasting,” lol).
But a basic principle of anthropology is that artifacts have to be studied in their cultural context to understand their significance. What need created the artifact? Was the artifact used differently through multiple eras? Did everyone in the culture have access to this artifact? I think you see where I’m going.
These essays in Curing Season are built from the memory-artifacts of my time in Pitt County but they are, of course, only telling part of a story. I’ve sought corroboration from documents and histories from the era—both from my personal archives and from those I’ve been able to locate in the public history—but I’m aware that they are, still, constructions. It’s funny: I grew up intending to be an archaeologist because I was obsessed with the idea of uncovering the past, and here I am, as a writer, working as an archaeologist at the dig site of my own life!
I suppose calling these essays “artifacts” is my way of acknowledging that they are both creations and also relics of a time that vanished before I could understand it. There is context that I am still uncovering. The more I’ve returned to these narratives, the more I’ve been able to reconsider what I see. The artifacts remain the same, but I am always trying to understand them better.
Aram Mrjoian
Curing Season focuses on a particular era of your adolescence, as well as on a specific region of North Carolina. Having read both Curing Season and much of your other writing, I’ve always admired and been in awe of your abilities to sketch specific places and times. You masterfully develop setting details and precise context. How does place influence your writing? What considerations do you make in trying to capture such vivid moments in your memory?
Kristine Langley Mahler
Place is crucial to everywhere—look, there I am, telling on myself because I’d meant to say “everything”—I write. I write mostly to reconstruct a place to which I cannot return—sometimes that’s literal—like the tobacco fields behind my neighborhood park which are now suburban houses—but often it’s figurative, because I am always trying to bring myself back into a place the way I knew it. I was on the Outer Banks this summer with my family and we took a day trip to Greenville—first time I’d been there in over fifteen years—and it was disorienting, to say the least. I’m glad I’d written this whole dang book before I went back, because now I can’t shake the sight of those houses constructed on top of the old fields out of my periphery!
I find that the older I get, the more I write about current places and experiences to capture them NOW, while I still can. When I was younger, my family would have told you I had a steel trap memory—I could tell anyone, anywhere, what details were present in a situation, the order in which events had occurred, precisely what the conversation was, etc. It has been disquieting and jarring to recognize that, as I get older, my brain apparently only has room for so many memories—and it has been kicking out older memories to save newer ones. I suppose I would say that now I am definitely trying to save the memories I have of a place before they evaporate.
Aram Mrjoian
Perhaps related, but thinking about your research process, can you talk a little bit about how this project came together? My sense is you spent a lot of time scouring both personal and community documents, as well as texts like ledgers, almanacs, and newspapers, to get the details right.
Kristine Langley Mahler
I originally thought the essays in Curing Season were part of a different book project—the one I am currently working on, which focuses on the broader concept of home, and ancestry, and what it means to belong, or not belong, to a place. But as I looked at the set of essays that now comprise Curing Season, I recognized that they were telling a very important narrative—my villain origin story, if you will—about where and when I had my first epiphanies about belonging to a home, and where I had actively tried to do so and failed.
When drafting some of the more heavily source-based essays in Curing Season, I had a bad habit of searching for research to bolster the narratives I already believed. Fortunately, more often than not, I would come across a piece of research that made me reinvent what I thought I knew, like in the essay “A Fixed Plot,” where I realize a specific cemetery in Greenville isn’t actually the Catholic cemetery after all. I have so much backlogged, weirdo stuff in my draft folders, like environmental site assessments and jpegs of NCDOT project study areas. I wanted the details in my essays to be correct, of course, but I also wanted evidence that I wasn’t drawing my own lines between plot points. But I do wish I’d saved more screenshots from the online Celebrations page in The Daily Reflector.
Aram Mrjoian
There are a lot of moments of nostalgia in this memoir, some positive and some negative. Do you consider nostalgia to be a particular theme in your work? In these essays, how does nostalgia contribute to your writing process and vision?
Kristine Langley Mahler
I love the opportunity to talk about nostalgia, because I have never viewed nostalgia with the rose-colored glasses with which nostalgia is most often maligned. My nostalgia has never been soft; my nostalgia has often been violently felt. I have wanted to return to places and periods with a passion that’s made me sick with frustration. My nostalgia has been managed by approaching that past—the one I cannot have again, and those places I cannot return to—with a deep desire to consider and reconsider those places and moments.
It’s been incredibly important for me to spend a lot of time in my past, undoing the knots I had tied around memories I’d packaged up because I wanted them to remain inviolate. I suppose that, for me, nostalgia is the only way to move forward. When I hear people say that they don’t look back, I think about how damaged I would be if I didn’t review the ways I was shaped by my experiences—for good and for bad—because I require my past to inform the decisions I make in my present and toward my future. Nostalgia is not simply in the toolbox of memoirists; nostalgia should be in the toolbox of every person.
Aram Mrjoian
I imagine a big part of writing this book was also talking to family, friends, old acquaintances, and, in some cases, people who have fallen out of your life. What role did others have in how you wrote, revised, and proofread Curing Season?
Kristine Langley Mahler
Well…I actually didn’t talk to anyone involved in these essays! For one thing, I have long since fallen out of touch with most of the girls I wrote about, but also my family had no idea—at the time, by design—what was going on during most of the events in the book, so they couldn’t have corroborated much even if I had asked them. My parents might have had some inclinations, but I desperately didn’t want them to find out certain details because I didn’t want to admit them to myself. That being said, I have a tendency to approach multi-layered narratives with the self-dictate that “no one in these essays should sound worse than what I am willing to admit to being as well.”
I feel like I have a responsibility, as the one writing these narratives down (and publishing them!), to remember that I am portraying a specific angle, from a specific side, no matter how hard I may try to gesture toward other perspectives. If I am casting myself in the position of being the ugliest—but not for the purposes of being a martyr, because that’s just corny—then I can be more generous with the other people I include. I don’t ever want to look like the hero in a piece because I know I’m writing from the speaker’s podium.
And yet. I thought a lot about how I portrayed my friend’s mom’s house in the essay “In the Burn Pile Behind the Old Nobles House” because it isn’t particularly flattering. My friend and her mom were good to me, good people, and I wouldn’t want readers’ takeaway to be “Yeah, but they sure lived in a messy house.” But I remember it as messy? And I remember still wanting to live there desperately, even through the mess? And perhaps that’s what I hope comes through, in that piece in particular but in all the essays in Curing Season where I may be less-than-complimentary in my descriptions of others or their actions. The longing that pervaded, nevertheless.
And, I mean, I think about how much I wish I’d talked to the friend I call “Annie” in Curing Season all the time. I dreamt of her off and on for years as I wrote these essays. I know skeptical readers might think memoirists invent dream sequences to fit convenient narrative needs, but I really did dream Annie alive, over and over. She cannot speak to me from the grave, but I also think she will speak to me from the grave. I am hoping she does again.
Aram Mrjoian
Amalgamations of forms and genres also feel integral to this memoir. You include unconventional structures, images and photographs, and lists. How do these hybrids allow you to complicate or make sense of the way you tell these stories?
Kristine Langley Mahler
Honestly, I was fascinated when I looked at all the Greenville and Pitt County essays and realized it was almost as if I’d had to approach that time and those memories by putting them in neat structures and boxes and closed forms. Formal experimentation certainly wasn’t a specific intention when writing about Pitt County, but the proof is in the product: I can see now how much I both wanted to create structure out of that time and how much I felt constrained by the cultural structures I didn’t build!
Aram Mrjoian
What other artifacts did you use to tap into this time period? Music? Movies? Were there specific pieces of pop culture that helped you capture the mood of this memoir?
Kristine Langley Mahler
For someone who does look back as much as I do, it might be surprising to reveal that I really didn’t revisit the albums (Janet Jackson’s janet.! The Beatles’ White Album! Let’s all say it together—Nirvana’s Nevermind!) or old TV shows (Unsolved Mysteries! X Files! Disney’s Avonlea!) of my adolescence when writing Curing Season. I feel like that would have resulted in an entirely different book—recasting how I remembered certain pop culture artifacts with how I see them now—if I’d actively returned to reconsider them.
What I did do, however, was to frame the painting I made of my old house in North Carolina, which I had painted during my arts elective during my senior year of high school, and then hang it above my desk. As a painting, it’s a mess—the perspective is terrible, there’s no dimensionality—but I keep the painting near me because it reveals how I saw my time in Pitt County. The light glaring off the window panes, the surreal tree trunks looking like slingshots, the massing green of foliage blocking out everything nearby. My house with the glassed-in screen door closed, but one pane darker, like someone was looking out.
Aram Mrjoian
Throughout the memoir, there are moments where you’re aware of your privilege, but my sense in reading is that part of that comes from having time and space to process the four years you spent in North Carolina. How does this memoir reflect on your past with new awareness, and in what ways are you connecting your past and present self?
Kristine Langley Mahler
Oh gosh, it is the work of my adulthood to undo the things I learned in my adolescence, particularly with regard to privilege. I had to write this book to realize how much privilege I had carried when I lived in North Carolina because I was so certain I’d had none—and the process of writing Curing Season has shown me how much privilege I carry with me still. I can see what a naïf I was when I lived in Pitt County, but I can also see how I was complicit in failing to dismantle situations that I knew were wrong but which I didn’t think I had the strength or the power to address. I know better now.
Aram Mrjoian
Additionally, there are moments in the memoir where you kind of break down the wall of the past, and acknowledge the process of writing a particular essay or chapter. Another way of saying this is you consider gaps in memory, embellishments, and liberties you take as a storyteller by directly acknowledging them. How did you navigate that process and how do you know when to lean into the more engaging but less truthful version of a story or event?
Kristine Langley Mahler
This is my favorite thing, the question that brings me back to the page when I drift, the question I want to work on the rest of my writing life: I know when I am leaning into telling the construction of a story, so how do I address that in the work itself? When drafting an essay, I often start telling the version of a narrative which I’ve told most often. The familiar, repeated version is the most comfortable, but it’s also the one I can get out in drafts because I don’t have to think as hard! But then I look at the narrative, glaring there on the page, looking like the most dug-out-of-a-plastic-bag-and-dunked-in-fry-oil-real-quick Applebee’s appetizer, and I think “Girl, you are just taking that out of the deep freeze. Do the work.” I have to get out the original ingredients and think about what I’m trying to make. I’m the literal worst cook (though an excellent baker) so this metaphor is a real wild one, but I guess the point I’m getting at is that when a narrative comes out of my memory pat and controlled, I want to show the process as I take it apart and try to make it again. Leaving that process on the page is my little writer-trick to my future-editor self because I know I’ll come back for that narrative again when I have more context and after more reflection—and I can see what I did to it last time.
MEMOIR
Curing Season: Artifacts
by Kristine Langley Mahler
West Virginia University Press
Published October 1st, 2022
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