An Interview with Kristin Keane Regarding An Encyclopedia of Bending Time

Interview by Whitney (Walters) Jacobson

Whitney (Walters) Jacobson: As I noted in my review of your book, I love that your book is a hermit crab memoir. How did you come to the encyclopedia form for the memoir? Did you know the form before you started building the text, or did your writing evolve into this form? With that, did you consider and / or try any other forms for the memoir?

Kristin Keane: When my mother became sick, I began jotting terms on notes I planned to use as topics for love letters to her. They collected over time, and then she became very sick before I could put them together. After moving, I arranged them on my wall in alphabetical order and zoomed in on one— ‘encyclopedias,’ I had planned to write to her about the The World Books we kept growing up and how important it had been to me that she stored those everywhere we lived. Soon, I realized I could use that structure by to contain and explore my grief after losing her. Once I made that decision, I brought those little notes into entry-shaped forms.

My students often ask a similar chicken-and-the-egg question to the one above when I introduce them to hermit crab essays (Does one start with the form or the topic?). What advice would you give to emerging writers about writing hermit crab essays / memoirs?

I think intuitively writers know why they bring two or more desperate concepts together, but the real puzzle can be in determining how to invite the reader into those juxtapositions, and the amount of explicit or implicit lifting the writer will do. So I’d say, instead of form or even topic, it can be helpful to start with preoccupations that nest or sit together in consciousness. Exploring those images—and their connections—can bear the broader focus, reveal accompaniments, and sometimes even unveil a form they can live in through that process. Of course, inversion of this process is possible, but for me, this order of operations often feels most true.

The way you’ve woven ideas and people beyond yourself into the memoir is impressive and helps prevent the memoir from being insular. I thoroughly enjoyed following your inquiry and engaging with the concepts you presented. What did your research process look like for An Encyclopedia of Bending Time? How did you decide what research to incorporate, and what effect did you hope the research would have on readers?

I let the initial sticky notes with terms guide the research process. In most all cases, I validated things I knew, added additional complexity to my understandings, and investigated etymology for those I was already committed to topically. Occasionally, that layered learning would unveil something which connected to another entry somehow, or helped me solve the puzzle of finding a way to reorder or realphabetize an entry based on new material. In other cases, in order to understand some sort of phenomena, I pursued other lines of research—reading, watching, searching—to deepen my understanding or find areas to further expand. I wanted to invite the reader into an alternative form of encyclopedia reading that was particularly curated and had nested inside of it, a narrative form. 

As someone whose mother has also died, I am fascinated by grief memoirs for their endeavor to put the singular experience of grief into engaging words for an audience beyond the self. Did you read other grief memoirs before or while composing yours? If so, which ones? What effect did they have on your writing?

I’ve benefitted greatly from works like Joan Wickersham’s Suicide Index, a genre-defying masterpiece. A work very much aware of itself, Wickersham investigates the events leading up to her father’s death and the aftermath. Rachel Eliza’s Seeing the Body, a hybrid work of poetry and self-portraiture explores grief multimodally. Her work is about her mother’s death, but also about her identity and racism and violence in America. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is a graphic memoir exploring her father’s death, and also, gender, sexuality, artistry. It’s brilliant. All of these words had the aggregated effect of pushing me to think outside of linear form and to take risks in genre bending.

It’s challenging to choose a particular passage as my favorite as I have so many marked, but for today, I will pick a portion of the SOUL entry as I think it encapsulates so much of the desire in your memoir. You write, “I’m trying to tell a story about time: it is unknowable; it is beyond our grasp; it is a thing we have invented. ‘Time’ is an idea and yet, and yet—it is all we have. It is everything we know and don’t know at once” (106, author’s italics). That second “and yet”—oof. It stopped me in my tracks in the best way. I imagine there were many challenges to writing about your grief and threading all the ideas together in this unique form. Please share a bit about those challenges and your process for overcoming them but also the rewards of doing so.

Someone said to me recently it must have been very healing to write this book. When I think about healing, I think of a wound sealing shut. What writing this book did was not to close something that can’t be, but to help me understand myself better in this process, and to build a record of a very specific time within that experience. In that way, it’s hard then to separate the challenges and rewards of the writing from the grieving itself. Reductively: it was difficult/it helped me understand better.

Did you have a particular physical writing set-up that fostered your writing? If so, what did it look like? If not, what creates a productive writing space for you?

I write at my desk where I keep ephemera, images, and notes related to projects, taped to the wall above my monitor. For An Encyclopedia, I kept a postcard image of Tim Hawkinson’s “Octopus,” a photograph of my mother, sister and myself, and some of my mother’s stones nearby. In a small box a friend built for me, just adjacent to where I write, are some of her seashells and a note she left on my desk once, which I reference in the book.

As your memoir is published, who do you hope will read it? What effect do you hope it will have on readers, fellow writers, or the larger world?

I want An Encyclopedia to find readers curious or interested in genre-bending work, and to join the corpus of other books taking on non-linear shapes. I hope too it finds those swimming in loss who need it. The collective impression that grief is a linear experience composed of stages one works through, can feel very isolating if one’s heart runs counter—as mine did. I want it to be possible for readers to find their own selves reflected in a stranger, more upside-down version of loss, and to perhaps feel less alone in sorrow. For those curious about loss, maybe it can be an invitation to complicate some of those models. This work is motored by the idea that so remains we don’t yet know, and for readers who find an edge of hope in that, I hope this book supports them in continuing to reach.

What’s the best piece of writerly advice you’ve been given? Or, what writerly advice would you give someone writing their first memoir?

Spend time exploring art very different from the mode you’re working in. Interdisciplinary perspectives can enrich, enliven and jumpstart new projects, especially through exposure to unfamiliar mediums.

As a publication focused on place, environment, and the relationship between humans and the natural world, we’re curious: if you were venturing into the wilderness (alone) for a month, what three books would you take with you and why?

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer; Alison Bechdel’s The Secret to Superhuman Strength; and, Eileen Myles’s The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art. I deeply admire these three writers who offer variation in mode and structure in works concerning place, time, and being in the world. I think these books would make good thinking companions in outdoor solace.

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An Encyclopedia of Bending Time by Kristin Keane was published by Barrelhouse Books in April 2022. The book is available for purchase on Barrelhouse’s website and Amazon.

Kristin Keane is the author of An Encyclopedia of Bending Time (Barrelhouse Books, 2022), and the novella Luminaries (Omnidawn, 2021). Her writing and research have appeared or are forthcoming in/at The Washington Post, New England Review, TriQuarterly, Electric Literature, Catapult, Reading Research Quarterly, American Educator, and elsewhere.

Whitney (Walters) Jacobson holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Minnesota State University Moorhead. Her poetry and creative nonfiction have been published in Punctuate, Feminine Collective, Up North Lit, After the Pause, and In the Words of Womyn International, among other publications. She is currently working on a collection of essays exploring skills, objects, and traits passed on (or not) from generation to generation. She maintains a curiosity in memoir and the themes of feminism, water, inheritance, blue-collar work, and grief.