#before these scenes I did not know how singularly fixated I could be on a rare pair | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

ndrmag · 7 years ago

Text

Contributor Interview with Kristine Langley Mahler

Kristine Langley Mahler lives and writes on the suburban prairie of Nebraska, where she is completing an erasure book on Seventeen‘s advice to teenage girls, a grant-funded project about immigration/inhabitation on native land through the lens of her French-Canadian ancestors, and a graduate degree in creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared/is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Quarter After Eight, Sweet, Split Lip, Storm Cellar, the Bitter Southerner, and received the 2016 Rafael Torch Award for Literary Nonfiction from Crab Orchard Review. Visit her at kristinelangleymahler.com.

How did the initial idea for “Club Pines” come together for you? How does the finished work differ from that original conception?

It started as a very ambitious multimedia EXPERIENCE: I had hand-drawn the neighborhood and I was going to have the houses hyperlinked so the reader could click on them to read the segments, but I realized that wow, I might have some coding skills but not enough to pull that project into place. So I scaled it back. Earlier versions of “Club Pines” had the neighborhood map reproduced before each “house,” with the house in question colored in and any previously encountered houses as empty boxes to indicate how they had become "vacant" for me, but again—it was too much. I loved the visualness of that neighborhood because it was such a maze, so winding and so metaphoric, but (and this is where I had to tone back my writer ego), that doesn't matter to the reader. In the essay, the map just looked like a visual distraction, an unnecessary bit of detail—the reader could ascertain from the narrative that Club Pines was a maze to me. They didn't need to see it shoveled in front of their face like LOOK SEE I WAS REALLY CONFUSED SEE HOW CONFUSED?

There were a lot of houses/girls who were in the original essay, but I tried to pare it down to only those girls who tied me to certain aspects of my adolescence. I thought about including boys’ houses, but that’s a whole ‘nother ball of wax. Nearly every house in that neighborhood had meant something to me at one point: I had babysitters who lived there, or I had babysat there myself, or I went trick-or-treating there once and a woman handed out personalized toothbrushes she’d bought at the dollar store so I got RICKY or whatever. Stuff like that. But those are the sort of completionist tendencies that could have snowballed into a whole neighborhood ethnography, and the emphasis, here, was really on those girls. That’s where I felt out of place and in place, even temporarily.

What craft struggles did you encounter while writing this essay? How did you overcome them? What did you learn from the process?

Oh, you know, as a memoirist, it’s always a challenge to be comfortable with my portrayals of other people. I’ve always been very watchful, obsessive about retaining memories and situations so I can analyze them later, but I know it’s presumptuous to ascribe motives to others. These girls were so much more than the summations I present to y’all as paragraphs. So I tried to remain true to the way I knew the girls, at that time, and to make it clear through the way I sketch them that I’m laying my own biases out for judgment. There’s a moral code I don’t think I’ve broken, but I’m also protected from any real-world retribution since I’m only “officially” social-media-connected to one of the girls in “Club Pines.” I’m one of those tracking dogs who finds digital loopholes and can pick up a cold trail: they’re married, they’re mothers, they’re single and childless, they’re living their best Southern life and they’ve left for other regions, other countries. They’re unprotected and they’re on social media lockdown; they’re oversharing and they’re silent as the grave. Just like me, we’re all telling the narrative of our girlhoods the way we need to believe they happened; we’re all revising when we see a perspective we didn’t realize. If they ever came across this piece, I hope they’d know that.

"Club Pines" presents a neighborhood that simultaneously feels ubiquitous and incredibly specific in its details, particularly those concerning toys and media of the time, as well as the denizens and their spaces. In capturing a place that is both unique and typical at once, how were you able to decide what to keep and what to let go?

The essay progresses from age ten through age fourteen, crucial years when we’re all figuring out who we are, trying on friendships, trying out cruelties, jostling for place. I doubled-down on my feelings of displacement as I wasn’t a native North Carolinian, but honestly, the anomie and aloneness in adolescence are pretty universal.

I think I included so many details because they set the reader in the era of the early-to-mid 90s—an important era because it predated the Internet, predated the ability to form an escapism that might have allowed me to retain virtual connections with my old friends from my old town. Instead, I had to grind through adolescence in that neighborhood, which I name, in that city, which I don't (though it's not hard to figure out), where I was a regional newcomer bombarded with all this “knowledge” everyone else seemed to have and I’d never encountered: sweet tea, cotillion, tobacco, smoked and grown everywhere. When writing “Club Pines,” I fixated on the details in the girls’ houses that were NOT regional because those were the details that made me feel like I had an entry way into these Othered spaces: troll dolls, The Beatles, fortune tellers.

Part of what makes "Club Pines" such a phenomenally textured essay is the broad range of feelings it depicts. For instance, there's the bitter levity of "I sneer at her because I may be a pleb but she is a snob" and, later on, more somber notes such as "when we still called it “playing,” when I still anticipated her calls, when she was still my best friend, when she was still." What advice would you give a writer attempting to establish such a tonal dynamism without things feeling unfocused?

I suppose it's important to remember, particularly in a segmented essay, that each section needs to be treated as its own narrative and needs to be able to stand on its own. To hover above a single moment as if it had to represent all the moments you’ve ever had with that person or space can force you to recognize the range of your emotions. The trick is forcing that range to harden into the meringued truth for one scene: fragile, beaten, but momentarily solid.

The houses are distinct spaces, yet are especially vivid because of the specific atmospheres you conjure. How did you go about capturing these atmospheres so lucidly and in such short spaces?

I had layered, multi-year friendships with some of those girls in “Club Pines,” and with others, complex and painful situations I didn’t even address here. I word-spattered all over early drafts, writing the first things I thought about when I thought about those girls, and as I cleaned up the mess, I kept the scenes that emblematized those girls singularly, for one blurt. More often than not, they were the first things I’d written.

There are a number of details I muted throughout the piece, little signals to myself which hint at outgrowths of moments I don’t describe here, and I think their hinted presence must have allowed me to restrain over-telling and over-showing. For instance, I used the word “nook” in describing the location of my house and Betsy’s final bedroom in her house because they were both places where I was hidden and ignored, and yet they were places of comfort. You don’t get descriptions of the girls’ appearances. They don’t matter, because these girls are Everygirls. These houses are Everyhouses. No matter where you live, adolescence is packing season, leaving season, replacing season, curing season.

1 note · View note