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Core Memories: Carol Lahines

We believe the origin of our work as creators is important to consider and hold. In CORE MEMORIES, we ask artists and writers about their own creative beginnings. What led them to operate in their genre of choice? Was it a specific moment, an errant thought, a movement? Was it an insight, a person, a place? Years into their work, does it continue to resonate?

In this edition, we interview Carol Lahines.

Carol LaHines’ fiction has appeared in Fence, Denver Quarterly, Hayden's Ferry Review, Cimarron Review, The Literary Review, The Laurel Review, South Dakota Review, and elsewhere. Her short story, “Papijack,” was selected by judge Patrick Ryan as the recipient of the Lamar York Prize for Fiction. Her short stories and novellas have also been finalists for the David Meyerson Fiction Prize, the Mary McCarthy Prize, the New Letters short story award, and the Disquiet Literary Prize, among others. Ms. LaHines’ nonfiction includes “New York est une ville a part,” appearing in chantier d’ecriture (Mémoire d’encrier, A. Heminway, ed.). Ms. LaHines’ debut novel, Someday Everything Will All Make Sense, was a finalist for the Nilsen Prize for a First Novel and an American Fiction Award (Adelaide Books 2019). Her second novel, The Vixen Amber Halloway, is forthcoming in 2024 (Regal House). She is a graduate of New York University, Gallatin Division, and of St. John's University School of Law. Ms. LaHines is a founding member of Telltale Authors and a long-time participant in the New York State Summer Writers’ Institute. Her teachers include Rick Moody, Phil Schultz, and Sheila Kohler.


What is your CORE MEMORY?

As a child, I was interested in drawing, music, dreams, memory, imagination, mystical experience. I would write song lyrics and poetry. As I drifted off to sleep every night, I would continue various storylines of my invention in my head, picking up from where they had left off. I had four or five threads going at a time; each a developed story. I would call this amusement of mine “projection theater.” It was something I did quite unconsciously, but I believe it to be the basis for my narrative impulse. I also kept journals quite religiously throughout childhood and into my twenties, furnishing an archive of life material. I would recount the events of the day, but I would also attempt to analyze and contextualize my experience, working as a kind of documentarian. At some point, I married these tendencies—the tendency toward documenting and memorializing life and the narrative/story-shaping impulse.  

How has that moment impacted your current work or current artistic practice?

Over the years, I’ve learned to trust my subconscious impulses and to mine freely from life without feeling a concomitant obligation to render experience or people with fidelity—doing so, in some sense, shackles fiction writers to a version of events that might not serve the overarching story they are attempting to write. Life material is like the day residue that forms the substrate of dreams. It is fodder; it is material we are grappling with or trying to exorcize. But it is material, ultimately, for our mind to put to narrative use, imposing structure and meaning on it that might differ from or amplify or abrogate the memory itself. As writers, I think we need this freedom to mine life material without feeling obliged to portray events as they actually transpired—doing so can be shackling and an impediment to our artistic license.

Are there any new projects you’re working on?

My second novel, The Vixen Amber Halloway, is forthcoming in early summer 2024 from Regal House. The novel, a jailhouse confessional, is a suspenseful revenge fantasy, a trauma narrative, the account of a woman’s unraveling after her husband leaves her for a winsome colleague.