Author

As press director, author, and mother Kristine Langley Mahler promotes her sophomore memoir-in-essays, A CALENDAR IS A SNAKESKIN, she is asking again: when will I let my daughters read what I’ve written? How can I let them into my experience without coloring their own?

Her first book, CURING SEASON, was an attempt to understand her failed grasp at belonging, set across four years of her adolescence in suburban North Carolina. A year post-publication, her eldest daughter has read the collection, but only after graduating from the eighth grade. Kristine says, “I didn’t want them to read about those years of my life until they had lived them for themselves; didn’t want them referencing my missteps or judging me until they had emerged on the other side.”

That fear of judgment has a sharper edge reading A CALENDAR IS A SNAKESKIN, which finds Kristine hushing “the sound of my daughters begging for my acknowledgement as I closed the door, choosing to be more interested in the girl I once was than the girls I had created” as she prioritizes writer over mother. How can she share the book with her daughters before they have emerged into parenthood themselves?

Kristine would love to speak with you about how we separate our creativity from our maternal roles, and how we choose what to share with our children, when.

Kristine Langley Mahler is the author of the essay collection Curing Season: Artifacts (West Virginia University Press, 2022). Her work has been supported by the Nebraska Arts Council, named Notable in Best American Essays 2019 and 2021, and published in DIAGRAM, Ninth Letter, Brevity, and Fourth Genre, among other journals. A memoirist experimenting with the truth on the suburban prairie outside Omaha, Nebraska, Kristine is also the director of Split/Lip Press. Find more about her projects at kristinelangleymahler.com or @suburbanprairie.