By Kristine Langley Mahler •

Some of the most fascinating creative nonfiction lives on the fringes of genre-play, borrowing from both fact and fiction, both poetry and prose. Essayists, memoirists, and nonfiction hybridists frequently use tools from fiction to create unique and distinctive work which is, regardless of its origin, still clearly nonfiction. One of the wonderful things about nonfiction is how expansive and flexible its genre designation is; a nonfiction piece is able to hold multiple truths and approaches at once. Which is precisely why I’m here to remind nonfiction writers to borrow literary methods not only from the novelists and short story writers, but also from the poets: I’d like to introduce you to the erasure essay.

I am a nonfiction writer by calling—I consider it a higher calling, but maybe that’s just my stubborn Aquarius moon wanting to reinvent tropes. I’ve always believed that, given boundaries, a writer can practice maneuvering within the enclosed open space, constantly pushing those “fences” further and further back as she works with the form. Nonfiction presents a marvelous field to play within: facts plus experiences plus impressions, all held to the soft-sided definition of “truth,” an arguably empirical concept which aims to capture all sides of a story (those of us who write nonfiction know this to be impossible). 

And so, when I first encountered erasure—a highly boundaried form—I was instantly captivated.

Erasure poems are popular because they are approachable and seemingly easy to create: the writer takes a source text and erases, or otherwise visually alters, that text into a new creation. I’ve seen many beautiful erasures created out of seemingly random source texts, but what makes erasures really succeed—regardless of their genre distinction—is the authors’ familiarity and connection to their source texts, as well as a willingness (or compulsion) to reinterpret and directly rewrite their experience into the erasure. 

For me, that source text was an old copy of The Seventeen Book of Etiquette and Entertaining from 1963.

I’d been a thrift store junkie since I was a teenager, and I’d also always loved the pomp and circumstance of social behavior from the decades before my casual youth in the ‘90s. When I found The Seventeen Book of Etiquette and Entertaining while thrifting as a mom of three young daughters (then in my early thirties), I knew the book was coming home with me.

Flipping through the book, I got caught up on a chapter titled “Boys, Boys, Boys.” So many lines mildly offended my sensibilities—it opened with the promise that “any girl can get a date,” which was a flat-out lie in my experience—but then I hit upon the line: “Learn to type rapidly and accurately; boys need theses typed.”

Theses. Boys needed them typed. I was a graduate student at the time, working on my own thesis. As the chapter wore on, I kept calling out more sentences that made me mad, though my spouse and daughters grew increasingly bored by my outrage. I didn’t want to ruin the book—a document of a foregone era—but I had to do something to manage my emotions.

I ran off a copy and started blacking out lines so the chapter would read like what I believed the authors had been really instructing teenage girls to do. As my blacking out continued, I found myself creating a narrative in which the sentences that were left behind on the page began to push back against the original text to illuminate my actual experiences—which was not that “any girl can get a date” bullshit. The “essay” (?) I left on the page reflected how I had internalized the “lessons” of teen girl magazines, and spoke toward how frustrated I still was that those lessons never paid off.

As I continued to go through The Seventeen Book of Etiquette and Entertaining over the next two years, writing the erasure essays that now comprise my forthcoming collection, Teen Queen Training, I wasn’t sure I could call them “essays.” I wasn’t sure I could call them erasures either, seeing as how the only erasures I’d encountered were called “poems.” But I also never found any erasures in the form of paragraphs, which surprised me. Why were erasure poems limited to lineation? Even poems themselves weren’t limited to verses and stanzas!

I was performing erasures on entire chapters, reducing them to single essays, and I did to those erasures what I often did—I wrote my essays into paragraphs. I removed the blank spaces between words because, for me, what was important was not the emptiness remaining on the page—it was not important to me to ensure the reader had that experience of visual absence while reading the essays. More important to me was the re-creation of rules. The rewriting of instructions. It was important to me that I present these paragraphed erasures of chapters—after I’d modified them—in the form in which the original text had been presented.

I deconstructed the source text into erasures, but I had to create my own rules for these “erasure essays,” as I was calling them, since there were none.

First, I borrowed from erasure poetry to develop the primary no. 1 rule for my essays, which is that all of them had to retain the text in the order in which it was originally found. There is almost no way around this rule if you want to call your work an erasure. The text must remain in order. I love experimentation and bending the rules, but if I didn’t keep the text in order, the essay would become a collage essay—which shares similar attributes to the erasure essay because both forms use found material and then manipulate it to make one’s own.

But erasure essays require the text in its original order.

I got around this stringent requirement by developing rule no. 2, which was that I was allowed to make words from other words, so long as the original words remained in the same order.

It may be easiest to explain this by sharing an image:

As you can see, this erasure essay would have been difficult to read if I had chosen to only black out, or otherwise alter, the original page. The “words” don’t always appear as words—they also appear as scattered letters forming new words. Choosing to push letters together into words—from found words—was an artistic decision I was comfortable making. Creating words, rather than relying solely upon whole words that preexisted on the page, gave me much more latitude in my work. In particular, for my purposes with Teen Queen Training—a project centered around modifying the lessons I learned from the Seventeen guide—choosing to create words fit my intended creative model of “reading into the text to see what I was really being told.” 

After I finished erasing the book and had time to ruminate on what I’d done (and particularly as I tried to think about how to present the manuscript of Teen Queen Training to potential publishers—was it poetry? Was it essays?), I recognized I had actually developed a few more rules for erasure essays, which I imparted during the subsequent courses I taught.

Rule no. 3 was that the text chosen for erasure needs to be a text you are positioned to appropriate. I came to this guideline after reading interviews with Chase Berggrun, who completed a full-length erasure of Bram Stoker’s Dracula into their 2018 poetry book R E D, and with Angela Pelster, who erased “all the major rulings and court decisions that pertained to civil rights in this country” into a collage essay called “A Map to Now,” published in Black Warrior Review—two seminal texts for me while I was in the process of writing Teen Queen Training. 

In a 2017 interview with Barrelhouse, Berggrun explains “I tried to engage with Dracula in many other ways before I started to erase it: erasure was my last resort. Erasure is undeniably connected to the tools of white supremacy. It’s very, very easy to fuck up. I don’t believe, and never have believed, that every artist has a right to alter, appropriate, or work with any text they want: we’ve seen the racist result of this kind of mindset again and again.”

I agree that, as Berggrun suggested, erasure essayists need to check their privilege. As a white author, I would not erase, for instance, the words of a minority author—that form of erasure is dangerous since an erasurist runs the risk of figuratively-by-literally removing the work of an already under-voiced population. I felt that the Seventeen guide had been written and directed specifically at my demographic (middle-class white girls), so I felt comfortable with what I was doing to the original text. 

When addressing the question of privilege in her Black Warrior Review erasure, in a 2018 interview Pelster wrote, “As a white Canadian with little knowledge of the history of the United States, I knew that if I wanted to exist here in a way that lined up with my beliefs about justice and equality, and that if I wanted to make art in this country, about it, because of it, that more than anything else, I needed a better education on its history of violence against African Americans. To function from any other space would be a continuation of that oppression.”

“A Map to Now,” Pelster’s erasure/collage essay, draws from a diverse set of documents including the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth constitutional amendments, Maryland slave laws, and U.S. court cases related to civil rights. Pelster made the decision to bold, rather than erase, the excerpts she selected for her essay. As a result, the reader can see the sources the essay originally was drawn from. Rather than actively erasing or obscuring text, keeping those original sources muted (but still visible) strengthened the goals of Pelster’s essay to highlight the ways racism is and has been inherently part of the history of the United States.

Pelster’s essay “A Map to Now” helped me recognize two additional questions erasure essayists must ask themselves when beginning a piece, which I then added to my three erasure essay rules. First, erasurists must decide whether to black out, highlight, or white out the source text. Those are not the only options—I’ve seen color, thread, overlaid art; many innovative and exciting ways to block or otherwise underscore text—but the question remains the same: should the words, or their absences, be noticed on the page?

Finally, do you want the reader to experience the visual evidence that you, the author, are rewriting a narrative? Or do you want to reveal that the work you have created is an erasure only at the end of the piece? 

When publishing some of the work from Teen Queen Training as standalone essays, I experimented with giving the essays subtitles like “an erasure of Chapter XX in The Seventeen Book of Etiquette and Entertaining (1963),” as well as using an asterisk on the title and then footnoting the source. I originally thought I wanted readers to simply experience the piece as what I had created, and to be punched with the knowledge that I had gleaned the sentences from a source text only after I’d hooked them in. But I changed my opinion as I progressed through the creation of Teen Queen Training because the erasure essays I wrote were often so different from their original source chapters that, frankly, I was under no obligation to even call them erasures, particularly with all of the word-creation I had done. The erasure essays barely resembled the source texts. But I believed in the critique that was being done by erasing, specifically, The Seventeen Book of Etiquette and Entertaining—I felt that my essays gained power when the reader knew the source from which the work had originated, and more so, that the erasure essays had been developed from that specific source.

I have spent most of my writing life drawn to the fringes of the nonfiction genre, experimenting with form and presentation. It amuses me to see how insistently my process while creating Teen Queen Training seemed to demand I ensured its content appeared like traditional essays, even as those essays were created through such a nontraditional approach.

Perhaps it was my subconscious intent for Teen Queen Training, to restructure the lessons offered on how to be a teenage girl into the lessons I actually learned as a teenage girl, which led me to reconsider the so-called “rules” of nonfiction. Erasure found me at a time when I needed to learn a new form for my field, when the fences didn’t need to be mended but to be excavated and reset. uprooted and replanted.

 

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KRISTINE LANGLEY MAHLER is the author of three nonfiction books, Teen Queen Training, A Calendar is a Snakeskin, and Curing Season: Artifacts. Her work has been supported by the Nebraska Arts Council and Art at Cedar Point and thrice named Notable in Best American Essays. A memoirist experimenting with the truth on the suburban prairie, Kristine makes her home outside Omaha, Nebraska. She is the director of Split/Lip Press. Find her on Instagram @kristinelangleymahler.

 

Featured image by Kim Leary, courtesy of Unsplash.