Associate editor Linnea Harris spoke with Carolyn Kuebler about her process as a multi-genre writer, the influence of community involvement on her writing, and her essay “Self-Storage,” published in the Summer 2022 issue of Colorado Review.
Carolyn Kuebler is a Vermont-based writer of fiction and nonfiction.
Originally from Allentown, Pennsylvania, Kuebler earned a BA from Middlebury College and an MFA from Bard College, and went on to work in bookselling in Minneapolis and St. Paul. She has been the editor of New England Review since 2014, before which she was an associate editor at Library Journal and Publishers Weekly, and a founding editor of Rain Taxi Review of Books.
Her work has appeared in Massachusetts Review, The Common, Copper Nickel, Sleepingfish, the Literary Review, and The Little Magazine in Contemporary America, among others. She has also published dozens of book reviews, small-press profiles, and author interviews in Publishers Weekly, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Rain Taxi, City Pages, and others. Her debut novel, Liquid, Fragile, Perishable, is forthcoming from Melville House in May, 2024.
Kuebler is currently a justice of the peace in central Vermont, and a volunteer for 350 Vermont.
LH: I see “Self Storage” circling around the central question of how objects inform our sense of self. Could you speak to that a bit more, and how it became a question you wanted to explore in this project? Perhaps how growing up in “the peak, perhaps, of American materialist capitalism” informed your interest in memory and identity?
CK: When my parents moved out of the house I grew up in, it dawned on me that possessions could be more of a liability than an asset. What to do with all that stuff? It would take time, serious grunt work, and valuable square feet of real estate to accommodate all these things. But we couldn’t just throw them out, because it was as if our past selves and our memories were embodied by these old prom dresses and stuffed animals and baseball hat collections.
A surge of feeling arose when I’d pick up, say, a little beaded purse—oh, how I loved that thing! I got it on a trip to Vermont when I was about seven and took it everywhere, and when the beads started falling off, I saved it in a box with other beloved objects. When my parents gave me these boxes of precious things that I’d been storing in their attic, I finally had to contend with all that I’d saved. Did I need the purse to have the memory, the feeling, of being a seven-year-old walking to the corner store? Did I need the bridesmaid dress to remember the wedding?
Some of it turned out to be pretty easy to let go of, but I’m still hanging on to the written record—the cards and letters, the journals, and even the papers I wrote in middle school, which I put out with the recycling once but then fetched them back, because they had my teacher’s handwriting on them, his encouraging notes, and they meant so much to me.
My husband and I are both obsessive cataloguers of our lives, and when we made a will we didn’t have many valuables to leave for our child but took care to clarify that our personal papers would be given to her “for the sake of her curiosity” only, and that she would be “under no obligation to make sense of the papers or to even be interested in them.” And if she didn’t want them, we specified that they should be destroyed. We didn’t want anyone to feel obligated to hang onto them or treat them as precious. We don’t have much storage space in our house, so we have to regularly offload things, and even once had a yard sale, which also figures into the essay.
And yet the luxury of concerning ourselves over these papers, these things, is something most people in the world do not have, for so many reasons. This materialist way of preserving a sense of self is dependent on political and physical stability, and it’s so analog! Our daughter, a twenty-first-century person, is far less sentimental about her coin purses and dolls. She just takes pictures of them and puts them on the cloud. Nabokov, whose Speak, Memory brings such clarity and perspective around the topic, lost all his stuff when his family went into exile. And most people never have a chance to store their physical possessions, or they lose them at some point to floods, fire, wars. They’re a very precarious thing to base a self on, and to keep them contributes to the illusion of permanence.
LH: I’m so drawn to your analysis in “Self Storage” of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and how she works with memory, and this particular section: “For me, revisiting the written record has occasionally had the unsettling effect of contradicting what I’d long believed to be true… Had I gotten myself all wrong? Was my identity just a matter of misinterpretation?” I think this is a question that a lot of nonfiction writers have: how do we trust our own memories? I wonder how you approach uncertainty in your nonfiction writing at large. Does speculation ever play a role in your work? Do you ever conduct interviews with family, or do other archival work to inform your nonfiction?
CK: Bechdel does a stunning job looking over her own shoulder, remembering what was really going on in her head even when she recorded something else at the time. I used to think that my old diaries must contain the pure, unvarnished truth about my life. Why wouldn’t they? They were absolutely private, so there was no need for performance, no embarrassment. But the writing there is neither completely true nor unvarnished, because we lie to ourselves all the time, even when we’re children, even when we’re writing in our own diaries.
Both writing and remembering, by their nature, will include some details—and even significant events—and leave others out. When those things left out are exactly what another person chose to remember, it can really destabilize your sense of what happened, even in your own life.
I used to think the use of “I” in nonfiction was egotistical—look how important and interesting I am. But now I see it as a necessary admission of subjectivity, fallibility, and the particular viewpoint of the writer. It can be an acknowledgment of limitation, rather than just a way to insert one’s ego. I’m still wary of the solipsistic tendencies of memoir, but I don’t think there’s any point in pretending that any one person’s memory is certain or correct. I have two sisters very close in age, and they usually have a completely different memory of any given event from childhood. I can count on them for two more angles on the truth, for remembering things I had completely forgotten—even events in which I was the main character. For more recent memories I can turn to my husband, who writes things down and is organized enough to find them later. He has, for instance, an amazing record of specific things our child said, which otherwise would’ve become vague over the years, lost to a more general sense of who she once was. None of us has the whole truth in our memories, but we can each contribute some part of it for each other.
I haven’t done many formal interviews or much archival research, at least not yet, but my dad used to tell us these amazing stories about the neighborhood gang he grew up with, so at one point I did sit down and ask him questions and record it in audio, though I haven’t done anything with that yet. And once I interviewed my grandmother about the Great Depression for a school project. Otherwise, my fact-finding has been limited to the boxes of things and conversations with my family and occasional trips down the rabbit hole of Newspapers.com.
LH: Your new novel Liquid, Fragile, Perishable just came out in May! As a writer of both fiction and nonfiction, do you feel that your personal experiences inform your fiction as well as your nonfiction? If so, was that the case with this newest book project?
CK: Absolutely, it all comes from the same tank of thinking, feeling, and being in the world. I only started writing personal essays after I completed that novel, which was a long-term project and very painstaking. It hadn’t yet been published, but I was finished with it, at least for the time being, and I wanted to write something I could complete within a few months rather than several years. I also thought it would be such a relief to write something people could read in 20-30 minutes rather than several hours. I’d written many reviews and other kinds of essays, but this more personal form was completely open, no assignment, no deadline. It felt so freeing after a long book project, with its intricate plot and rhythms, its many characters, its timeline, to write something directly out of the things I was thinking about and following that wherever it would lead. In the end, I think I need both forms. When I get tired of the limitations of the “I,” I can shift over to fiction, imagining my way into other points of view. The filters of fiction create a different kind of revelation and surprise from the more direct pursuit of the essay, at least as I’ve worked it so far.
LH: You write about Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves - specifically how she writes about memory. What other writers do you see your work in conversation with?
CK: Not long after the essay came out, I went to a talk by a colleague at Middlebury, Megan Mayhew Bergman, called “Landscape and Memory: Examining the Flow between Person and Place.” I was so excited to learn that she was pursuing a lot of the same questions, but with a focus on the physical environment of memory, the land itself, which set me to imagining a whole book full of forking-path essays on memory, a book I’ll likely never get around to writing.
I also spent some time with In Search of Memory, a wonderful memoir by the Nobel Prize–winning neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel, which breaks down the science of memory, complete with diagrams of the brain and stories about the history of this field of study, right alongside his own life story, showing how the two are intertwined. Again, an admission of subjectivity even in the world of science. And who would have guessed that sea slugs could provide such insights into how our memories work? David Shenk’s book The Forgetting is much more literary and readable for people like me, and he led me to think about Emerson, who became another touchpoint for this essay. It’s truly an endless topic. But as I said, I wanted something I could finish in less than a year, so I had to cut myself off at some point and just write the essay.
Getting beyond this single essay, I see my work in conversation with all the writers I love, even if their work is nothing like my own. Lately I’ve been trying to figure out where my own novel fits in—what kind of book is it, really?—which has led me to read a lot of other work that uses multiple points of view and/or comes from a rural place, where not a lot happens. Two recent favorites are Sara Baume’s Seven Steeples and Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13. I love what they do with time and repetition.
And of course, my work is also in conversation with all the writers I’ve read and published (or not) at the New England Review—in all genres. But editing can be a liability when it comes to writing, for me at least. It’s essential to carve out a space in my mind that is safe from the editor, both as critic and as admirer, so I can just be the writer I am, rather than the one I think I ought to be.
LH: You have a long and robust history in the literary world: co-founding the literary magazine Rain Taxi, working in bookselling, and you’ve been the editor of the New England Review for ten years. But you’re also involved in climate activism in Vermont and serve as a justice of the peace. Do these many diverse experiences inform your writing? How so?
CK: It’s true, my professional life has nearly always involved some form of reading, writing, or editing—and moving boxes and chairs around, which is a part of every literary-type job I’ve ever had. Even though I get exposed to all kinds of ideas in this work and in my reading in general, I also need to get beyond all that, to be in the physical world with people who learn and perceive and understand through ways other than reading and words. I was shocked by the 2016 election, totally caught off-guard, and so I determined that I needed to get out more. Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny—an excellent short book about how societies arrive at totalitarianism and possibly how to prevent that—convinced me I needed to get to know some people outside my immediate circle of friends, people in my own neighborhood. That desire, along with my mounting climate dread, led me to volunteer work, and to climate activist groups, and to serving as justice of the peace—all ways of getting new perspectives and meeting new people. What I like about the JP role is that it doesn’t involve many meetings, but it allows me to be useful as an election official, to attend tax abatement hearings, and sometimes to officiate weddings, which is always a pleasure even when it’s just a quick five-minute ceremony. Also, I love the poetry of the title: justice of the peace. I’m still shocked by the violence of humanity and by the speed at which we’re wrecking the planet, but the best thing to have in any emergency is a good neighbor, and to have good neighbors you have to get out a little. Reading and writing have always provided my deepest sense of connection to myself and others, and I will never tire of the ways language can be used as an art form and a tool for understanding, but I also want to be of some use as a human being taking up space. That’s a bucket-list item that will never be crossed off, just like I’ll never read all the books in my house. Which brings us back to possessions and memory, identity and objects. Even though when I die my books will likely just be a burden for whoever’s left behind, for me and for now they remain firmly in the asset column.
Linnea Harris (she/her) is a second-year MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at Colorado State University, where she is the Gill-Ronda Fellow in Creative Writing and an associate editor at Colorado Review, a contributing reporter for EcoWatch, and the Center for Literary Publishing’s unofficial plant proctor.