The Cost
After I disclosed the abuse, I learned the cost of telling. It hurt, but I didn’t regret it. I still don’t. In fact, as the years passed and the abuse’s shadow darkened, I felt increasing urgency to write about it. Ultimately, though, despite writing and publishing prolifically through my twenties and thirties, it took until my forties to learn the skills—third-level emotion being just one—to make this ugly story into something more. To make it “simply beautiful … precisely imagined, poetically structured, compelling, and vivid,” as Joyce Carol Oates wrote when she selected the very first piece I wrote about my childhood for a literary prize in 2015.
That Little Voice: The Outsized Power of a Child Narrator
I love words, I love children, and I love the way children stumble toward words then into them, the way they grasp for words and stow them greedily away in the pockets of their minds. I love watching babies wrestle their unwieldy tongues against the still-foreign objects of their teeth to form vaguely recognizable sounds, and I love watching toddlers learn to recall words, control and arrange them, recognize their meaning and willfully draw it from them.
Under My bed and Other Essays [review]
Keisner interrogates fear—personal and collective—from one sharp angle after the next, with a special acuity for the fears known best by women and mothers. As Keisner’s essays build through the book’s three parts—Origins, Under the Skin, and Risings—their themes reflect and refract elements of one another, creating a prismatic experience of how it feels and what it truly means to be afraid, as well as the impossible yet necessary quest for resolution.
The Burning Light of Two Stars [review]
This undergirding of cosmic truth lends depth and complexity to the title and substance of Davis’s memoir, which recounts the author’s complicated and fiery relationship with her mother, Temme. The memoir details periods of molten conflict and an eventual long, excruciating estrangement after Davis recovers memories of early childhood sexual abuse at the hands of her maternal grandfather.
Why Are You Telling This Story?
What we’re really talking about is the profound and indelible link between the workings of individual human imagination and the collective human experience. The least we can do is consider our work in this context. I often start by asking myself why I am writing a particular story at a particular time.
The Other Mothers [review]
Like Berney, I, too, am endlessly fascinated by the human states of longing and desire and the ways in which those states intermingle with nostalgia, loss, and aloneness, all of which Berney examines and captures with tremendous acuity. Her narrative and the voice in which she so intimately delivers it reminds me of a word in the Portuguese language—saudade—which is untranslatable in English. It refers to a longing so deep it can consume you, eat you up. You can die of saudade.
Bent
Calyx 2019 Margarita Donnelly Prize for Prose
Mama tells me stories. Some, I make her tell me again and again. Like the one where she was three years old and rolled her neighbor’s pool balls, slick and shiny, down the buckled sidewalk of 24th Street. I like to imagine those balls, wild and free, careening down the steep hill to the rocky shores of Lake Superior below. Some of Mama’s stories are so real they grow inside me, like a baby.
The Climb
North American Review, 2020
I only started building the stairs on some kind of whim after Mom took Charlie away. If she took him, that is—I can’t say that for a fact. I can only say he was there before school, and gone after, our little Pekingese with his sorry squished face all sticky and hard from the cream of mushroom soup he had to eat after our neighbor, Mrs. Crimshaw, knocked on our door and Charlie limped through it with his lower jaw dangling like a shingle.
Overview Effect
This is not about the novel coronavirus, or the quarantine, or the strange new anguish we’re masking behind 10 X 6 rectangles of cotton fabric. It’s not about that, not directly, because it started long before the first fever in Wuhan. It started with stars. Did you know that the word corona means something suggesting a crown, such as the outermost part of the atmosphere of a star? My granddaughter comes from the stars. That’s what she tells me, because that’s what I tell her.
Family, Family
The Masters Review | New Voices selected by Kelly Link
Leo’s baby was made of the longest unbroken strands of discarded wool yarn he had collected from his many false starts on his scarf, those discards he’d stuffed into the bottom of his calico knitting bag. In that sense, Leo had fashioned this baby from his own failures.
The Part That Burns
I don’t believe in jackalopes. But people have to make up their own minds about these things. Douglas, Wyoming, is the jackalope capital of the world. A jackalope is a cross between a male jackrabbit and a female antelope. Jackrabbits and antelopes are both real. You don’t believe in them or not.
They just are.
Four Dogs, Maybe Five
Mom and her sausagy little dog are hunkered down in Duluth now. When I visited last, she was giddy about a fancy new leash she’d gotten—this soft ropy thing meant for a giant breed. Mom has a cairn terrier. “Feel it,” she said, holding out the leash. “Isn’t it something?” She crooked her arm and laughed into her sleeve, like she does.
other published works
stories & essays
Writer’s Chronicle, Cleaver Magazine, Narrative Magazine, Penn Review, Proximity, Masters Review, december magazine, Cleaver Magazine, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Nowhere, Dr. T. J. Eckleburg Review, Past Ten, Rake Magazine, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Annals of Internal Medicine, Geriatrics, Pediatrics, Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Utne Reader, Parents Magazine, Ladies' Home Journal, On the Issues, Minnesota Parent, AARP Magazine, University of Minnesota Alumni, Macalester Today, Carleton Voice, Daughters Magazine, Island Parent, Maryland Parent. Renew Magazine, others
books & anthologies
The Part That Burns (2021, Split/Lip Press), Ms. Aligned: Women Writing About Men (El Leon Literary Arts), Nowhere Print Annual (Nowhere), Mama Moon (Orchard Books), Women's Lives: Multicultural Perspectives (McGraw Hill), Feminist Parenting (Crossing Press), A Day Without Immigrants (Compass Point Books), Hurricane Katrina (Abdo and Daughters), The Good Caregiver with Dr. Robert Kane (Avery Putnam), others