Kristin Keane is the author of the memoir An Encyclopedia of Bending Time and the novella Luminaries. Her writing and research have or will appear in/at the Washington Post, New England Review, TriQuarterly, Electric Literature, and elsewhere.
EB: Let’s begin by talking about your new book, An Encyclopedia of Bending Time. How did the book come about?
KK: My mother was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, and, about a year into her treatment, I became very frightened the interventions we were trying weren’t going to work. Flooded with memories—and worry—I began meditating deeply about time and our life together, and had the idea to send her love letters from those evocations. At that time, she also encouraged me to write about what was happening to me and her and us, so I began collecting these ideas on Post-it notes I stuck to my kitchen wall. Time passed, and I never developed them into the letters I dreamed up, and she was suddenly very sick. I put the project aside when things really went sideways, and then she was gone. After moving shortly thereafter, I unpacked the kitchen box and that stack of Post-its and I lined them up on a new wall alphabetically. I started working on some again with the purpose of still addressing her directly and was met with the very real, practical truth that my life—my orientation to what I had hoped to write to her when she was alive—had completely changed. An epistolary felt sad to me then—like a kind of dead-end, one-way conversation, but it still felt important to speak directly to her. During that same time, I began thinking a lot about one of the Post-its— “encyclopedias”—which referenced the set of her World Books, I read as a child. I needed a literal and figurative container to put everything inside of, and I began seeing connections between my disjointed grief and my need for order and categorization in the wake of being unmoored, and saw opportunity in the form of those books. Those Post-its, all lined up in order as potential entries, became a sort of draft of their own.
EB: I really loved how you organized An Encyclopedia by words/topics in alphabetical order, like an actual encyclopedia—it almost read like a book-length hermit crab essay to me. How did you finally end up with this structure? I am imagining lots of rearranging the Post-it notes over and over.
KK: There were puzzles to solve almost immediately: when I started expanding my ideas into short entries, it became clear there were going to be some real head-scratching organizational challenges—the constraint of alphabetizing things meant that some aspects I felt were better ordered, couldn’t be, necessarily. At first I wasn’t sure how to marry the idea of teaching a gone-person the facts of their material life, with my personal reflections in singular entries. So I set those demands aside for a bit and just sort of wrote into the strongest images, memories, and ideas. Connections between entries emerged organically, and I saw how the ‘See also’ structure at the end of encyclopedia entries could assist me in forming links at more and less explicit levels. Once the draft started taking shape, I spotted organizational and thematic holes, and saw also how it was—much like an encyclopedia—becoming about, sort of, everything. So I reversed my approach and leaned into the rules I had developed by interrogating my own thinking in real-time as I tried solving those puzzles, and compressing and settling how my work was going to be curated. That’s to say, though I was deeply constrained by the principle of alphabetization, I soon saw how that limitation could help me make choices. I did have to abandon some ideas, but those rules ushered in some other opportunities, too.
EB: Fair. Such a strict structure can be both challenging and also weirdly freeing. Were you channeling any particular books or authors while putting together this encyclopedia? Was here anything particularly influential or inspiring to you while you were writing An Encyclopedia?
KK: I reference many kinds of texts in my book—books, films, television, empirical studies—and treated several of those as very central to my own, particularly Roland Barthes’s Mourning Diary. This work means so much to me for the obvious reason of the intensely beautiful, raw and tender ways he explores his mother-loss grief in real time, but this work also helped me see the promise of deep, recursive meditation on particular ideas. Quantum Leap too was very important to me—again, for its sentimental residue and clear connection to my mother, but also because in reviewing so many of these episodes, all these years later, I really saw for the first time how much that show is about grief and longing. I knew already I would circle that as a text as it was one of my first Post-its, but seeing the show in an entirely new light also helped me explore my own grief and longing on the page, and figure out how to put it into discourse with the other texts I had drawn from.
Part of the conceit of the work is my yearning for sense-making, so I was certainly living that out in real time, and wanted to incorporate that reactive experience to the research process itself, as I learned more about topics I wanted to explore. I read so much while I was writing, and most texts led me to other sources, which led me to others. At a certain point, I had to sort of stop pursuing threads and instead wrap my arms around what I had; to synthesize and put them into a conversation. I did spend a lot of time with life-ephemera too, like photographs, which also became central texts in the work. That work was hard and I write about how difficult it is for me to physically look and examine certain artifacts of my mother’s. It seemed important to interrogate and incorporate those reactions into the work as well.
EB: So, going back a bit to before An Encyclopedia, how did you begin writing nonfiction? What drew you to the genre? I know your first book, Luminaries, was a novella—how is writing nonfiction similar or different for you compared to writing fiction?
KK: When I first started writing creatively, I stuck exclusively with literary fiction, leaning often towards the speculative. At some point, I found works that opened my eyes to the ways that form and rule-breaking can mediate a different experience, very powerful experience for the nonfiction reader—I’m thinking of works by writers like Valeria Luiselli and Maggie Nelson, for example. I sought out opportunities for experimentation and self-reflexivity, and began feeling excited about treading into my own nonfiction waters by examining what drives a lot of my fiction: the biological world, things seen and unseen. The reciprocity between fiction and nonfiction writing wasn’t obvious to me at first, until it was. I saw how I could marry and reify my practice of one to the other, and tried my own hand at personal essay. Then I tried another, then another, kind of thing. During this time, I was also training as a researcher and began to see further opportunities to marry all these creative enterprises together in ways that make sense of, and complicate my own feelings about the conceptions of genre.
EB: Feel free to speak about writing An Encyclopedia in particular or writing nonfiction in general—but what do you think is the most challenging part of writing nonfiction? And what do you think is the most rewarding?
KK: The challenge for me with nonfiction writing often comes down to pacing and compression. The paths forward are sometimes very hard to see. What to reduce? What to expand?—and how to identify and then solve those puzzles. The rewards in nonfiction come for me in the moments I find edges for experimentation and form-play. I’m deeply interested in interrogating my own approaches and processes of writing, and love when I find ways to bring that thinking onto the page with clarity I might not have until I actually do so.
EB: Finally, what is a favorite passage of nonfiction by a fellow “non-man”?
KK: From Doireann Ní Ghroífa’s A Ghost in the Throat:
When I think of the signs we are taught to fear—the single magpie, the broken mirror—I wonder at the scaffold that has fallen from each, the absent repercussion that first followed it. All our omens hold the mystery of some grave human consequence, now forgotten, leaving only the gleaming symbol in its aftermath. In attempting to comprehend a turn of ill-fortune, we may search for an omen as prelude, for to find such a sign imposes meaning on the chaotic. In seeking an omen, we frequently seek a bird.