Solid Objects: Kristine Langley Mahler
Tayari Jones keeps a baby food jar of dirt on her desk from Toni Morrison’s hometown. CJ Hauser gifts her students a tiny plastic chicken to pull out whenever and wherever it’s time to write. Writing totems, talismans, amulets—we ascribe many names to the objects we keep close while we write. These objects inspire us, comfort us; they can prompt our productivity, make their way into our writing, or at the very least, serve as a dangling carrot to the world beyond our daily pages.
In Virginia Woolf’s short story, “Solid Objects” her main character grows enamored with a smooth piece of green glass he finds at the beach. “It pleased him; it puzzled him; it was so hard, so concentrated, so definite an object compared with the vague sea and the hazy shore.” The right object can be our own green glass; a raft when we’re treading the slippery shapes thoughts take.
In SOLID OBJECTS, we ask writers about the objects most essential to their creative practice, and what exactly these objects do for their brains.
This edition is written by Kristine Langley Mahler, whose debut essay collection, Curing Season, is forthcoming from WVU Press this October. You can preorder it here.
I am a memoirist, so writing often feels like a kind of kneeling excavation into the hidden pits of my memory, troweling carefully around the artifacts I find, intent on keeping them intact before rocking back and collapsing against the crumbling dirt walls, exhausted and overwhelmed by my discoveries.
Is it obvious I always wanted to be an archaeologist?
As a child, I owned a basic archaeology book—the book was orange, about 14 inches tall, the cover etched with black letters and images. I lost the book years ago and frankly, don’t know why or how: that book was the seminal work of my childhood, an archival object to which nearly my entire writing life can be traced.
I may have inherited the archaeology book from my great-uncle’s collection after he passed away. My great-uncle had built a massive personal library, pasting a photo of his parents (my stern great-grandmother with her arms crossed; my great-grandfather, smiling) on each book’s interior flap. My great-uncle intended, upon his death, for the books to be given in one large library donation to honor his parents, but in the end the archaeology books were shipped via Media Mail to me, a quiet nine-year-old and the only heir-apparent to his love of history.
I owned a calligraphy pen—felt-tipped, hunter green, you know the type—and had saved it, unwittingly, for the right job: my Historical Notes. I would settle myself at the desk my father had built for me and page through the archaeology book, making useful annotations like “ATLANTIC Ocean, obviously!” beside the old theories on the location of Atlantis and “Druids,” underlined three times, next to an image of Stonehenge. The intermittent months I spent “studying” and annotating created my masterwork: the notes inside that book were my earliest attempts to take history apart so I could impress my desires upon it.
I just spent five minutes looking for the archaeology book on the internet. While “orange + hardback + archaeology + book” yields a lot of options, it didn’t yield my book. I’d swear I would know the correct book on sight, but maybe I am fooling myself.
I suppose that loss may be why the space around my adult desk is filled with talismans. I lost so many portal-objects—the ones revealing the histories I had forgotten I once told myself—over the years and over the moves. I am writing, now, about that absent archaeology book because it is a solid object I lack. And look what I just discovered: my desk space has become the archaeology book!
A postcard of my father’s hometown (absent: the ships, just like my grandfather). A Currier & Ives print of Maple Sugaring (is this what the sugar camps looked like on my ancestors’ farms in Québec?). The painting of my house in North Carolina that I made four years after we moved (so much green; but then why do I remember it yellow?). My desk space is my archaeology book and the artifacts around it are the memories I have excavated, mnemonics I keep.
There’s a scene in one of my favorite armchair archaeology books (House of Rain by Craig Childs) describing an archaeologist in the beehive-shaped pit she’d dug, pick-pick-picking around an artifact only to discover she had unearthed a skull. The archaeologist relied on her training to try to stay calm—she’d found herself in a dark hole holding not the curve of a water jar nor a disarticulated shell necklace but, instead, the old bones of an old ghost now exposed and seeping energy. Eventually she yelled for someone to lower down a ladder; she could not stay there alone any longer.
My wall and my desk and my shelves are lined with my discoveries. They are bathed in the eastern sunlight which nocks itself on the hinge of my neighbor’s house every morning before shooting into my office, cleansing them all. But every morning I climb back into that pit, hollowing new space, hoping I can write up my discoveries as an annotation that might be useful to someone.
Kristine Langley Mahler is the author of Curing Season: Artifacts (WVU 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 Speculative Nonfiction, among others. 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.