This interview was conducted by wK blair between the 3rd and 9th of March, 2024 via email.
The questions and answers appear here in their (mostly) unedited form.

From the very beginning– the note even, though here we’ll start with ‘What I Remember’--this collection needles the real of our memories. As someone with her own coalition of self shaping incidents, I wrestle with the validity of memory a lot. This intangible, what happened versus how did I keep it can be frustrating, frightening, and lonely. Even moreso in a world where we’re told to make each person’s telling a truth. It can be hard to say X happened and seek and receive care for it when you’re wondering if X happened and how. How did the negotiation of memory play into your process of writing? Have I unsettled your being or did you already think about the insolid nature of memory too much?

I do think about this kind of thing all the time, especially because I am not really a journal writing person. At best I will write down a line to two, a feeling, here and there, but I am by no means someone who chronicles their life as it’s happening. Because of this it’s difficult to go back and  find anything definitive with proof. I am even more aware of it when I write, because studies show that when we talk about a memory, it actually can remake the memory in our heads. So what is the truth? I had to come to terms with the fact that memory may be faulty but it is not a lie. These are the things that happened, through my own perception of what happened. I have to extend my own mind the grace of having a space for secure reflection.

Throughout the collection it was the weight you gave these teenaged forays into love that really pulled me. We tend as a society to dismiss the young as trivial or unhinged and naive. In ‘An Incredibly Brief and Unfinished History of Sound’ you let us have the long slow consumption of silence, the ache that persists both with and without. Were you conscious of this in the writing? How important was it to you to represent authenticity? What did you need your reader to know?

I agree that it’s easy to wave off young love but at the time, every part of that teenage relationship was very important, very serious, and I wanted to honor how I felt then, not just how I feel in looking back. I wanted to get across that being a teenager often felt like being in limbo, where I felt like everyone was paying the utmost attention to me and every moment was of great possible importance for an unknown future. It is still important, even in it’s trivialness, and perhaps because of it, now.

The nothing of first sex in ‘Did Dolphins Cry?’ was so welcome. That tape analogy is perfect teacher gymnastics.  Yes? But also?? I promise we can take it, just use the words. Let’s talk sex education, beyond the mechanics, if you got them, what do you wish you’d heard?

I was fed this idea that sex was always about love and doing it with someone you love and that idea became dangerous, because I wanted to have sex, and therefore I needed to be in love with everyone I wanted to have sex with. It weaved in my emotions in a way that was more painful than powerful. I wish I had gotten more of the straight facts about hormones and desire so that I would have had the tools to sort out my feelings for myself.

We didn’t talk about how I was always sleeping with strangers, how much I wanted to die every winter, how I imagined burying myself under the snow to forget all the strangers’ hands that had made what was supposed to be mine theirs. 

      In A Parallel Universe, Perhaps We Never Meet and Are Worse Off Because of It

There is so much almost and someday haunting our fledge years. Even with love in hand we’re unsettled and desperate to believe ourselves enough. Toward the end of the book you write to a daughter and tell her, “I have never been needed like that before, the way a baby needs so completely.” I think we could write a treatise on what it is to be ‘girl’ in this world on the back of that line. Need me, fill me, use me, make me, complete me. Will we ever find a way to be whole?

If we cannot find a way to become whole, then we can only hope to accept the parts of ourselves that are missing and learn how to feed them properly. 

I’ll admit to laughing aloud to your salt ring of pretzels in ‘Incantations of Leaving’. This speaks so perfectly to the melodrama of it all. Play a game with me if you’re willing. Paint me a picture of a life without all the seeking. Let’s not make it too painful. What would a twelve Kirsten’s life look like if she’d believed herself whole?

I still don’t know, though I have been trying to imagine it since I read this question. I hope I will, one day.

I really believed it, that I was going to be safe with you. 

      In A Parallel Universe, Perhaps We Never Meet and Are Worse Off Because of It

No question, I’m just not done with this line.

Thank you - that is really kind to say.

3. Men lean out of their trucks and catcall you as you walk down the street, across from your high school. This has happened many times before and will happen again in other places that are meant to be safe. This intrusion, the unasked-for comments on your body, will possibly occur for the rest of your life. Do you…

1. Scream “Fuck you!” at the taillights?

2. Nothing because it is dark and you are nervous?

3. Secretly feel a little good about it, but then feel incredibly guilty about feeling good?

4. All of the above

Quiz: Do You Have A Healthy Relationship to Sex

We’ve got a piece coming out in en*gendered next month from Robin Percyz called "Is It Consent If You Didn't Say Yes?" that speaks to the uneasy space between not having said yes and having said No. Like ‘Quiz: Do You Have A Healthy Relationship to Sex?’, it’s a story that could be told by far too many girls. We are, by design, primed for this predation. It’s impossible to avoid the way we are shaped; passed from boy to man in a game of broken telephone in which the message is our sense of safety and self. How did you imagine yourself then? When you look back on the you in these essays, is it with grace?

I do try to tred an appropriate understanding of my past self and the sense of agency I did retain. Bad choices were not only made for me; I chose to make them too. That being said: a lot of bad shit happened that was outside of my control, and is often outside of women’s control, and it was fucking awful! With both those things in mind, I feel like I must handle my past self tenderly, because it is what she deserves, even if she may not have agreed at the time.

through her skin I can outline the delicate bones that hold her together. Her breathing is shallow, and I realize how much I love her, this small creature who knows nothing of me except that I am all she has now.

Forgotten Synonyms for Grief

Sorry in advance for this one but there’s very much a way to read this line about both the puppy and you. You talk at various points throughout the book about needing someone to love you because you can’t. I saw a tweet the other day that said “(to me) it’s just you and me” (@tendollardanny) and, undeniably, yeah. What do you do to soothe the Kirsten puppy? I run too long and lift pretty heavy and play ridiculous games with my body to prove that I can, but I also throw little fits where I turn off my phone, and move out on my family, and try to put myself first. Give me your best you-first act of rebellion. Let’s celebrate the indulgence of caring for us.

I walk; I walk everywhere. It wasn’t until I moved to a city that I realized how empowering it was to be able to walk wherever you want, to have more control of where you physically are anytime because of walking. I feel powerful in it. In a car, a bike, you may move faster but you have to stop, park, chain it up, etc. With walking, I can stop and go wherever and whenever I want. When I can, I walk alone. To take a 30 minute walk instead of a 5 minute drive is an indulgence I crave all the time now. 

About the graffiti you find on February 28th you say “Taking a picture feels like my way of telling god that I’m listening, I’m preserving.” (Bar Bathroom Graffiti in New Orleans: A One-Year Catalog). What are you preserving here in this book?

I feel as if I’m preserving two selves; the me this happened to, and then the me that wrote them down. This book was an enormous part of processing what happened to me and how to move forard in the world in a way that was kind to myself. The me this happened to and the me that wrote them down feel like sisters, not past selves, now.

Sensitive Crearures reads like it’s moving toward a reclamation that hasn’t yet come. Do you feel still in progress? What are your thoughts on memoir in the moment? To be told must our stories always be done?

When I was in workshop, I often got the same note: that I overwrote endings by trying to pull them back together neatly. I think about this often. Our lives are simply never as clean as we want our stories to be. It’s something I talk about in my own workshops now, about how what can be very clearly tied in to us is not actually interesting to a reader, or where we want the ending to be may not be right for the arc of the story. 

I find myself searching for emotionally endings, like finding a stopping point in a book - where can I pause here? How long can the pause be? I am always in progress but I think I am closer now to what this book was searching for - but I couldn’t have kept writing this book for the additional years. Life takes a long time. We can only be done when we get to the end of it all.

I apologized over and over and over again. Once I screamed back. I was so loud that the dogs nearby began howling, too. Then we were all just making noise, a symphony of animals trying to be heard, trying to bait the universe into giving answers to a question I didn’t know how to ask.

How the Cicada Screams

I’m not going to take up too much of your time with this but I can’t pass it up. I’ve been writing against your cicadas for months–in my head, in snippets I hide places I will never find them, and in one essay that went so off the rails I had to nope my way back out. I am too much cicada. My sisters cicadas. The desperate, the thrashing; each birth a final stand for survival; how easily the best of them can be crushed. Talk me through the inclusion of animals. Were the pairings sought out or are these parallels organically alive in your brain?

For many essays, the pairings were born from the animals. I read about nature a lot. Sometimes I would be reading the research and the pieces of it lined up so naturally that it felt like a universal alignment. It’s something I love about nonfiction, when those lines to life feel so natural. Of course, not every piece was that easy. But many pieces - especially the research heavy ones - began with an animal, and what I knew about animals, first, and then moved organically from there.

Last question, most of the people reading this are likely writers so I like to take a moment to dish. What was the process of your writing? Are these pieces gathered then filled in or did you know your goal from the start?

This started as my thesis, which was an enormous convenience because it forced me to have a deadline and page count requirement. I had a vague idea to write about animals, but I didn’t really know what the overarching themes would be. 

Once I started placing what I had side by side and I had the big tentpole pieces that felt like the collection anchors, I just worked my way around. I knew it had to be split into two sections because that’s how my brain works. I’m very organized in creating order; I wrote out the name of each piece I had on a index card, color coded them by length, marked them by format and identified them by one the major themes I felt the collection was moving towards. This allowed me to see the gaps and feel them in from there.

To fill those out, I had to mine out my own brain and life to figure out why I kept focusing around this time and these themes. The animals started as a way to keep the difficult subject matter at an arms length, but they became a really natural vehicle as I pushed myself to write through what I was uncomfortable with. I don’t believe nonfiction should have to re-traumatize you, but I do try to write and publish truths that scare me a little to share with the world at large. I keep myself vulnerable this way. 

In terms of an overall goal, I am always a reader before I am a writer, and as a reader, I want to read books that are intimate and personal and make me understand myself in ways I didn’t before. That was always my end goal here.