Hybrid Interview: Karen Babine
Essay by Abby Manzella •
In Karen Babine’s latest memoir, The Allure of Elsewhere: A Memoir of Going Solo (Milkweed 2025), the author preps her Scamp camper and drives from her home in Minnesota to the Acadian coast of Canada in search of her family’s past. She goes seeking the details of her ancestors’ experiences as they are written into the geography she traverses. It is a fascinating quest tied specifically to the murder of her great grandmother and great uncle and the suicide of her great grandfather, but it is also a story about the author’s own choice to go solo, without a spouse or children, in her life and on this trip. It is a tale about living as she sees fit instead of simply following “the expectations of marriage and children and the life [she] was supposed to lead, because that was just how it was done.” Her companions are her two cats Maeve and Galway, and although Babine travels without human road buddies, she embraces her strong connections to family that include her sisters, her parents, her niblings (the collective word for nieces and nephews), as well as the generations of ancestors and the spaces they’ve inhabited. As she states, “I’m alone, I’m solitary—but I’m not disconnected.” The Allure of Elsewhere is a tale of self-reliance and research normally thought of in the vein of Thoreau and his cabin, but with a gendered awareness that is wholly recognizable to women readers who themselves have received cat calls and endured the presence of men offering their inexpert advice while their own skills are discounted.
This work feels in kinship with Babine’s early memoir All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer (Milkweed 2019), where she also wrote about her connection to family, specifically through food and illness, with a focus on her mother. This new narrative extends those conversations about family, now imbued with the memory of her mother, to include earlier ancestors, as well as the thought that we are tied across time to the spaces we and our predecessors have inhabited. This focus moves her work and her into new locations through travel.
I was specifically drawn to how Babine uses the road story to structure her experiences. In her introduction, Babine states, “There are stories of women traveling, but few of them are road trips.” Jack Kerouac’s and John Steinbeck’s books on the subject are still probably the most canonical versions of a road story, but I am glad now to include Babine’s work of a woman on the road. And, unlike the Thelma and Louise movie model, this road story allows not only for solo journeying but also for the possibility of a satisfying, non-tragic return. Specifically, her sense of familial attachments means that she may head out on the road, but home won’t always remain in the rearview mirror. In this tale, Babine’s connections to loved ones are a means to call her home.
Women have long been forced on the road to be part of migrant labor, slavery, and to go in search of safety, but it is also important to tell stories of women’s travel adventures. Certainly, Babine confronts difficulties often caused by the sexism of men who question her self-sufficiency, but overall, this book is not one of struggle, nor is it in the vein of Cheryl Strayed’s and Elizabeth Gilbert’s travel narratives of “finding oneself.” As Babine states, “I certainly didn’t travel to go find myself because I’d never lost myself.” Instead, her memoir is more in line with the travel narratives of historical women from Isabella Bird, Nellie Bly, Mary Seacole, Salama bint Said, and Zora Neale Hurston to contemporary women such as Jessica Bruder and Lauret Savoy, who are the explorers and the researchers.
Beyond its generic position, such a story about an individual woman on the road reminds us that, even in the twenty-first century, such placement is bucking the expectations of gender just by a woman daring to be alone in public spaces. I appreciate that Babine doesn’t need a group of women to feel whole either, and she makes sure to include scenes that demonstrate this freedom, for although she enjoys her experiences with other women campers, she also notes that she is unlikely to follow up with them in the future. Similarly, she revels in the moments when she gets to engage with librarians and archivists but then does most of her contemplation on her own; Babine is happy to converse but also satisfied when solitary, both personally and professionally.
The lessons she learns on the road often extend beyond the personal into the geographic, and she uses her attention to spaces as a narrative way to pause the forward progression of a road story to acknowledge the more reflective possibilities that also allow her to include her research as she moves back in time. In this way, she traverses the locations of the Great Hinckley Fire (1894), an ecological disaster that decimated thousands of acres as well as ended hundreds of lives, to the Halifax Explosion (1917), the largest human-caused explosion prior to the atomic bomb, and all the way back to the Arcadian deportation and imprisonment of thousands (1755). Babine notes that the spaces tell us about what those who came before us have endured, while also acknowledging that the land itself has long endured. For instance, when thinking about the land of the Canadian Shield, she states that some of “the oldest exposed land on the planet, some of which is as old as 4.2 billion years…. This isn’t land that moves. This is land that other things move across.” There is an important human history here, but there is an environmentally driven awareness that some things are even more lasting than the Anthropocene. Babine reminds us that we should learn from the land because we are affected by these spaces.
This interconnection between self and space is also parallel to her thinking about how an event only becomes history “when we don’t feel it in our bodies anymore.” This consideration influences her own engagement with the ethics of storytelling. In particular, she considers that some stories should remain untold or perhaps unprinted; the difference here between her explanation of “secret” and “private” is a worthwhile one that recognizes that some stories are meant to remain within families themselves. All of these events are things that have the potential to make us whole or to break us and our relationships, and so each approach to retelling must be done with care.
This is the story about an individual, a family, the land, history, research, and how there is always a weaving between the personal and the familial, the present and the past, the individual and the collective. Because even as this is a story about making it on her own, Babine sees the connections that formed her like the steady rocks beneath her. She is trying to reach for that foundation beyond the mythic stories she’s been told about her family’s own complicated history of wholeness and fracture shown through imprisonment, forced migration, murder, suicide, and ultimately generational survival.
It was a pleasure to travel on the page with Babine’s words and then to have a conversation with her about her writing and research for this grand journey of a memoir.
Abby Manzella: Karen, I’m pleased to get to talk to you about your delightful new book. I enjoy writing that uses the personal to think about larger issues like you do. I’m also glad to have this opportunity because I’ve been following your work online as well as in print. One of the first pieces I read by you was “A Taxonomy of Nonfiction; Or the Pleasure of Precision” published in LitHub, and now I teach it each semester to give students a clear overview of creative nonfiction’s categorical possibilities without limiting them. I appreciate that you pay attention to these building blocks of CNF. Did you think about any kind of taxonomies as you wrote The Allure of Elsewhere?
Karen Babine: I didn’t necessarily think about that one when I was writing this book, but I did spend more time with “Wisdom and Wisdom Teeth: Against Relatability,” because as a nonfiction writer, I’m kind of obsessed with this idea of “if you don’t know me or have any connection to the subject matter, what’s here for a reader to hang onto?” I thought about this a lot when I was writing All the Wild Hungers, because I’m not the first person whose mom has had cancer and I’m not the first person who’s lost their mom to cancer—and because of that, I had to figure out what I, as the writer, was going to construct on the page to open that door for the reader, and it turned out to be food. And my weird cast iron obsession that started with an orange skillet named Agnes.
When I was considering that relatability question with The Allure of Elsewhere, it became a matter of “I can’t expect that anybody’s going to be interested in my family, the forgotten history of the Acadians and the absolute horrors of Le Grand Derangement, or even the quirky set up of me as an intentionally solo woman doing this camping trip with cats who were absolutely not a fan of the idea”—so I started looking for the layers, which often start in the form of fundamental questions: What did I know? What did I want to find? and perhaps the most important: Why does it matter? Why does it matter to me? Why should it matter to a reader who has no connection to me? At the heart of anything I write is a sort of bone-deep buzz of curiosity—why does the world work the way it does? This led to wondering about the relation among history, and stories, and landscape and at what point the California Babines just stopped telling stories of who they were—which is how I found out, when I was a teenager, about the murder of my grandpa’s twin and their mother, and the suicide of my great grandfather in 1943 after my grandfather and his twin left for bootcamp, and that answered a lot of those questions: because it was too painful.
Then the feet-on-the-ground research-experience of it became important to create that next set of layers to give a reader something to stand on: It felt important to stand on the Bay of Fundy where my ancestors had once created dikes so they could farm the land, to watch those magnificent tides that are so strong that they move the peninsula of Nova Scotia twice a day. It felt important to place an experience I had on Grosse Ile in Quebec, which had been the quarantine station for the port of Quebec, which was the first place I learned how to read the landshape of a cemetery, something that I didn’t know I would need two years later in Nova Scotia, where the wooden crosses that the Acadians used to mark their graves would be long gone. All of that became the layers I used to construct the story I wanted to tell of this journey, the ancestral history of the Acadians, the contemporary history, and the history I was creating myself in real time.
AM: One of the things you directly mention in your book is your role as “family historian.” Was that a role thrust upon you because you’re a writer, or did you take it on yourself? How does this role relate to your sense of this book as a memoir?
KB: I think the two are intertwined because they both have their roots in storytelling. My maternal grandmother would launch into stories at the least provocation, probably because she was not only a great storyteller but also because she taught English and social studies, both of which are grounded in the importance of stories. As I tell my students, history is only boring when you forget it’s about real people. So I learned all about my Swedish ancestry through her, whether we were baking pies or cleaning windows or in the car on the way to someplace else. My sisters will ask, “You’ve written this down, right?” at fairly regular intervals and I feel a certain level of responsibility to the stories I’ve been given, because there’s something really poignant when stories pass out of living memory. I was thinking recently about the letter I have in my archives from my grandmother’s sister Harriet, who was teaching in Washington, DC in 1945 when FDR died, and she wrote about standing on the street watching his caisson pass by. Those who can tell such stories are almost gone.
But I’m not convinced that stories disappear entirely when there are no words to them: the story of the ice age Missoula Floods still exists in the watermarks on the mountains, in the Channeled Scablands in Washington, down the Columbia River. Then I think about what I call embodied history, this idea that something becomes history when we no longer feel it in our bodies and that’s another layer of stories that don’t have words. My high school history teacher once told us that there’s a color of pink he viscerally cannot stand, because it was the color pink Jackie was wearing when JFK was shot—that event will never be history for him, because he still feels it in his gut. September 11th still gives me a heat flash and goosebumps. The murder of his mother and brother was never history for my grandfather because that grief was still active in his bones; my father found it easier to tell me those stories because he had a little more distance; and for me, those stories are fully history. Stories live, whether they have words or not, and they have function and purpose.
My California grandmother’s sister Katherine was the historian for that side, the keeper of all the Ponsford family documents up the British side of the family, and she was one of the few who would tell me family stories when I asked. I don’t remember the first time I saw the giant tree she had that went back to the 1500s created by a distant British cousin, but now that I have it, I should really frame it. My memory works spatially, so once I have the map in my head, I can follow the memory as if it’s tangible in front of me. When I was in the archives in Tusket, Nova Scotia, I couldn’t scan or take pictures of any of the archival material, so I had to transcribe it by hand—and something about that work of drawing one generation to the next, arrows from one place to another, created a path so strong I could run you straight up my family tree to the earliest Babins in Acadie without thinking about it. There’s something interesting there in the retrieval of memory and the construction of it for the future—memory happens in a lot of different ways and they’re all necessary.
I absolutely took the title for myself, without asking if anybody else in the family had similar aspirations. For now, I’ll just be the caretaker of the archives and the stories until someone else wants the job.
AM: How did you approach research as you wrote this book? I appreciated the commentary within the book about such things as your philosophy that you needed to track down any archival documents to prove family connections and not just take the word of other researchers. But I’m curious about what you thought you needed to know before you started your literal journey and what you did after drafting began in relationship not just to the genealogical investigations but to the other research as well?
KB: On the practical level, a lot of this research I started decades ago for my own curiosity, my own documentation, my own data collection because I was that kind of nerd. There were years I could afford to subscribe to Ancestry.com and more and more historical documentation is digitized and available online, which makes research over the distance much easier. The research was necessary because my California grandparents were very much Children Should Be Seen and Not Heard grandparents and trying to get them to tell me anything, even innocuous stories, was impossible. So I had to go elsewhere if I wanted to know anything about this side of the family, which had such an interesting ancestral history. I knew a little about the Cajuns in Louisiana, but I didn’t know that Cajun was a deterioration of the word Acadian and they came to Louisiana because of the deportation in 1755. I learned that my family was split at the time—my six-greats grandfather and three of his children were deported to Louisiana; my five-greats grandfather and his brother were not because they were in prison. On the 1767 census in Louisiana, all the names are in the Spanish forms of their names, not French, and it was one of those moments where my brain had to restart itself: of course, the Louisiana Purchase hadn’t happened yet—it was still Spanish Louisiana!
But as you say, I started to develop an unexpected kind of ethics to my research: it wasn’t enough just to copy somebody else’s work into my tree and call it good. I could use somebody else’s information as a springboard to find original documents, or to refine an avenue of inquiry, but I couldn’t copy it. I think I came to that conclusion about the time in college I encountered Celese Peters’s tree that traced the Surette line straight up through the Dukes of Savoy to Charlemagne (who is thirty-two generations away from me). Of course, all that hinges on one person who may or may not be the link to royalty, but she did so much work that it didn’t feel right to just copy it. So while I find it really interesting, her tree just sent me in the right direction to do further research for myself. Then you can start to put real people back into the documents, like matching occupations with the linen mills in operation in the northeast employing recently immigrated Canadians, or realizing that when Selective Service passed Congress in 1917, it was for all men in the United States, regardless of citizenship status, which is how my great-grandfather was drafted. Then you get into the weeds, which are a really fun place to be, like the city directories that tell you not only where they lived, but their occupation and their political affiliation, which is how I learned that when my great-grandparents lived in Bakersfield in 1922, Catherine was a registered Democrat and Bill was a registered Republican; after the twins were born, they were both registered Democrats—which I found fascinating because along the way, he changed his views to hers, rather than the other way around. That offered a view into my great-grandmother’s character I might not have gotten any other way. The best thing about research is the pursuit of a complex curiosity and when that curiosity is buzzing, it’s the best feeling in the world.
One of the interesting bits about this book is that I pretty much knew everything I needed to know, data-wise, before I left, so I wasn’t on a voyage of discovery to find new information, though I really wanted to find primary documents if I could. I could trace everything back to my nine-greats grandparents, Antoine Babin and his wife, Marie Mercier. I had their dates, I knew where they were born, died, and were buried. But what I really wanted to know was what it would be like to stand in a place where no Babine had for three hundred years, or in the case of my great-grandfather, in a hundred years. I would learn that the Acadians liked wooden crosses for their graves, so while I might find where they were buried, I’d never be able to stand over their stones and have that moment of connection. What I was really curious about, though, was what would this place tell me about what it meant to be a Babine, to belong to a collective history, and what it would mean to me, as an individual person creating my own legacy as a woman who had made the choice a long time ago to be solo without kids.
AM: Several times you mention the sexism on the road. Have you found that to change over the years? In what ways? Did it affect your sense or approach to your writing?
KB: Not much has changed, but it’s interesting to see when it happens. I call it The Benevolent Sexism of the Road, because the way it happens is very rarely the nasty kind of sexism, but the kind that is meant to be kind or complimentary. I see it in men asking me if I want them to back in my camper for me or being impressed that I’ve been camping alone since 2008. It doesn’t actively bother me, but it’s something I pay attention for. One of the reasons I keep going back to my repair guy here in Chattanooga is that he treats me like a person with a brain and doesn’t assume I don’t know what a fuse is because I’m a woman. That’s refreshing.
But the sexism of the road is larger than that—seatbelts were tested on male-sized crash test dummies and even those that simulate women are simply smaller sized male dummies, which do not take into account the ways that bone density and pelvis location are different. Women are 73% more likely to be seriously injured in a car crash, and according to a 2021 article in the Washington Post, “a five-star safety rating for a car or truck means it was highly rated for a 5-foot-9-inch, 170-pound man. We have much less information on how safe a car might be for a 5-foot-2-inch, 110-pound woman.” I’m five-eight and my seat belt still hits me across the throat. Short women are even more at risk, not just from not being able to reach pedals or being able to see over the dashboard—another thing that has become standard humor around women drivers—but weight sensors that would deploy air bags in a crash sometimes don’t register small women.
So, it’s not all a cultural kind of sexism, but it is a kind of sexism that refuses to account for the ways that women move about in the world.
AM: Throughout your book you mention the importance of being self-aware about our bodies, and how we might embody connections to ancestors and even to the spaces they inhabited. Is this something you’ve felt throughout your life, or was this something you began to understand on your trip? Could you talk more about the importance of this awareness?
KB: One of my foundational beliefs about the way the world works is that we cannot know who we are unless we know what’s underneath our feet. We live differently when we know a place floods, or is susceptible to earthquakes or tornadoes. In some ways, not knowing the place where we are can have consequences, and right now I’m thinking that we just passed the five-year anniversary of the Easter tornadoes in Chattanooga (and Facebook memories tells me the power came back on today)—and I’d only been in Chattanooga about six months at that point and had not yet learned how Tennessee tornadoes are different from Minnesota tornadoes. For one thing, I don’t have a basement in my house. But in the course of the first few springs in Tennessee, I learned about Dixie Alley and how Tennessee has the largest number of nocturnal tornadoes and we don’t have tornado sirens here because the sirens belong to the nuclear plant.
Because I believe this, one of the questions I had in the book was how the landscape played a role in who the Babines were—and who they became and how that affected their willingness to tell the stories of the family. In the last four generations, we’ve had a lot of pain, from WW1 to WW2, murder and suicide, mental illness. I wondered about epigenetic memory and if the family passed down the instability of the Nova Scotia peninsula and the Bay of Fundy’s tides so strong they move the land twice a day, to southern California and its earthquakes and Santa Ana winds. I’m not sure that’s an argument I can make in the end, but I do wonder if it played a role.
That said, there was something about the Bay of Fundy side of Nova Scotia that got into my bones—or maybe it had always been there. It felt good to be there, to watch those tides come and go, to soak up the glow of lupins in the early spring sun. Nietzsche had this idea about the “true climate,” that there are places on this planet where the temperature of the place matches the temperature of the thinker and Nova Scotia certainly became one of those places for me.
AM: I know that you are Editor in Chief at Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. In what ways does that position inform your own creative writing?
KB: I see the three facets of my writing life—writing, teaching, editing—as integral elements of each other. Each one feeds the other. My writing informs my teaching, my editing informs my writing, the teaching gives me things to write about. Each one exercises a different part of my brain that’s focused on a different incarnation of the page and I’m truly grateful for it.
AM: As we wrap things up, I’m wondering what you’re reading right now?
KB: Speaking of the intertwining, I’m planning my fall creative nonfiction workshop themed around travel writing and walking, so I’ve got an ARC of Nicholas Triolo’s The Way Around here on the coffee table.
AM: Oh, that sounds great! Thank you for your time and your book!
ABBY MANZELLA is the author of Migrating Fictions: Gender, Race, and Citizenship in U.S. Internal Displacements (Ohio State University Press), which won the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Book Award, and Ripples into the Wild, her short story collection forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. A 2025 Pushcart Prize winner, her work has been published by places such as The Threepenny Review, Literary Hub, The Massachusetts Review, and Pleiades. She is Assistant Professor of English and creative writing at Truman State University. Find her on Instagram @abby.manzella.
KAREN BABINE is the two-time Minnesota Book Award-winning author of All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer (Milkweed Editions, 2019) and Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life (University of Minnesota, 2015). Her third book, The Allure of Elsewhere: A Memoir of Going Solo, is out now from Milkweed Editions. She also edits Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, and is the editor of the Assay anthology Beyond Truth and Fact: Innovations in the Craft of Creative Nonfiction, forthcoming in 2027 from Texas Review Press. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, where she is a UC Foundation Associate Professor of English. Find her on Instagram @karenbabine.
