Belief Logic, Desire Logic: An Interview with Kristine Langley Mahler
Ten questions for the author, plus a bonus outtake from A CALENDAR IS A SNAKESKIN.
Mila Jaroniec: Your books deal heavily in found objects—artifacts. What is your relationship to stuff in your daily life (minimalist, maximalist, prefer not to think about it?)
Kristine Langley Mahler: Wholly maximalist. I write about artifacts and found objects because they surround me in a very literal sense! I keep thinking that, at some point, someone’s going to ask me if I’m a hoarder because I write so often about all the stuff that I keep, so I’d like to preemptively say NO, I am not a hoarder, yes my house is full of objects but they are very artfully arranged, lol.
MJ: I saw a lot of my young self in Curing Season. Being the extrasensitive child, always needing more than people seemed willing to give. How did it feel to go back there and turn over the leaves?
KLM: I feel like I’ve been revisiting and reconsidering the events of Curing Season ever since they happened, and I suppose I would just say that it was actually more enlightening and less painful to understand them better—to take those situations and turn them over and over in my hands rather than leaving them, like artifacts, to sit on a shelf in my heart, unconsidered. I came away from the construction of those essays with more forgiveness for everyone, including myself. And I give a lot of space to the truths that I might never fully understand, which I think might be why I return over and over to try to get as close as I can.
MJ: Sounds like an ever-bleeding wound situation. Where’s your Chiron?
KLM: My Chiron is in one of the darkest corners of my chart (8th house). I view it as both a fear of loss and an exposure of my vulnerability!
MJ: How does being a publisher influence your writing, if at all? And vice versa?
KLM: Being a publisher means I’m always getting to read new books, which is its own form of inspiration! But being a writer means I bring a lot of the writer-fears, those other-side-of-the-desk concerns, to my role as a publisher and that definitely informs my interactions—hands down, I am always trying to work with my authors the way I want to be worked with as a writer myself.
MJ: Give me your most unpopular/controversial belief about literature.
KLM: LOL I’m a publisher, Mila, you know I have to watch my p’s and q’s on this one! As an experimental essayist, and also as someone who truly enjoys reading boundary-breaking work (there’s a reason I wove that phrase into Split/Lip Press’s mission!), let me just say this: experimental work should always be considering WHY it is breaking formal norms rather than breaking them just to be different. The best experimental work I’ve read has a premise behind its form that deepens the experience and the piece itself. We can hermit-crab all day, but if it’s just the nearest shell—rather than one chosen to best fit the animal—it feels like a thought experiment rather than something considered. I feel similarly about erasure work—don’t just grab the nearest book, instead pick a book you want to comment on!!!
MJ: What do you want to be remembered for?
KLM: I think I’ll be remembered for my boundaries, but I want to be remembered for my flexibility.
MJ: What’s one skill you would monetize, and one you wouldn’t?
KLM: Ah, here’s the rub: I’m a very fast and thorough reader (always have been, expect to always be) but I’d also never monetize my reading—I don’t want to answer questions about why I read a certain book, I don’t want to think critically about how to carefully describe and characterize a book. I read to excess and I delight in it and I would never want to compromise my joy by subjecting it to quotes or quotas.
MJ: My son asked us this question at dinner, and I think it’s an important one: if you could have any superpower, which would you choose and why?
KLM: Immediate empathy. Mine comes after a lot of contemplation, which often means it’s too late for me to share it when it was really needed.
MJ: How do you see the future of Split/Lip?
KLM: We’re crossing the ten-year line in 2024, and I couldn’t be prouder of our team, our authors, our readers, and the ways we’ve developed since the press began in 2014. I hope to manifest steady, continuous growth—in directions I hope surprise me!
MJ: Three words to describe your current project?
KLM: (the) privilege of home
Belief Logic, Desire Logic
The saints are household gods. Gemstones are magnets pulling my absent desires back to me. When I light specifically-colored candles, the evaporating wax forms into my needs: communication or ancestors or ambition or success. Tarot cards tell me what I already know but don’t want to see.
Patterned behavior is enacting safety.
My kids need ritual as much as I do. I needed ritual when I was a kid. I am grateful for a life that is in order. My father needed order, and so he must have needed ritual as well. My parents loved me and they did not have to tell me but I am glad they did. I love my husband and I do not tell him nearly enough but I think he is always glad when I do.
I do not have to ask for anything because God already knows what I want. My prayer pyramid is effective but mostly because it soothes me. When I ask a saint to intercede, I am really just asking for bonuses.
Heaven will be whatever I want it to be, which is why I want it. Heaven will be constantly mutable and always reshaping itself according to my personal desires. Heaven is not “no needs;” it is the pleasure of watching a need get fulfilled over and over.
If I can will others’ behavior into being, I am more satisfied than if I ask for what I want. To ask is to be weak; to receive what I want through wordless communication means my desires are known. I prefer saying nothing. I prefer to get what I don’t know I need.
That is not true; I prefer to get only what I want. What I want is what I need. Protect me from what I want.
Gravestones are safety stones holding the past in the ground. Gravestones are safety stones proving the past to anyone in the skeptical future. An eroded marble gravestone has more strength than a granite one because it is older and more venerable.
To be venerable is to be ancient. To be ancient is to be beyond vulnerability. To be scattered into the wind is to be lost.
I do not want to be lost.
I will not be lost. I will demand ritual for my death so that there is a process and order which cannot be forgotten. In that way, I cannot be forgotten.
Process and order are not the worst ways to be remembered.
The intention is the remembering, but mostly the remembering is the future. The best way to develop a future is to remember the past, to ground myself in the past, to carry the past with me so no one can tell me I did not learn from it; no one can tell me I did not grow from it.
In my future, I will not live in my past so much.
That is not what I want but what must be.
That is the problem of being a memoirist, all the work of remembering the past while not getting lost within it.
That is not true; there is no problem with being a memoirist. I love being a memoirist and I love using the fact that I am a memoirist as an excuse to stay in the past. I write the past to rewrite the past. Sometimes I try to write it correctly, but sometimes I write it just to remember.
When I am in my grave, no one will whisper the things I got wrong. Or maybe they will; I did that once to people I had never met. In my essays, I often whisper to my grandparents about the things I’ve misunderstood. Maybe I am whispering to my future self you will get things wrong. Or you did get things wrong even though you tried to iron them out correctly.
I believe there is a right and a wrong, but whatever is right is only what I believe is right at the time. If I am wrong, I can only know that in hindsight once I have new information—but never so much new information that I would have to take back what I did. I always do what I think is right at the time.
What if what I think is right at the time is not right later?
The saints are there to clean me up, scrub me up, rinse the dead skin down the drain.
The saints are there to prep me for the future.
The candles are here to light my way, to make my intentions pure.
The gemstones are here to give me something to fixate upon, a place to store energy.
The cards are here to remind me of what I do not want to see but must acknowledge.
I already know what I want heaven to look like: here, over and over again, the samsara of being right while being wrong, making the same decisions and providing the same outcomes, the comfort of knowing how it will all turn out.