Devotion & Womanhood: Marissa Miranda Interviews Kristen Holt-Browning Marissa Miranda

Kristen Holt-Browning is a novelist, poet, and freelance copyeditor and proofreader. Holt-Browning is the author of the debut novel Ordinary Devotion and her poetry chapbook, The Only Animal Awake in the House. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in various literary journals, including Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hunger Mountain, and Necessary Fiction. She holds a BA from Connecticut College and an MA from University College London. She lives in the Hudson Valley region of New York State with her husband, two sons, two dogs, and a cat.

Ordinary Devotion is available for purchase here.

From Marissa Miranda: Ordinary Devotion explores womanhood and devotion following the stories of Elinor, a 12-year-old handmaiden enclosed with an anchoress in the 14th century, and, centuries later, Liz, an adjunct professor searching for their story. Holt-Browning invites us into women’s spaces and challenges the notions of women’s rights and history. She touches on the detrimental effects of erasure while intertwining the idea of devotion and its multitude of layers that guide our lives. She interrogates how far faith and dedication can be taken and why people feel the need to take their loyalty to the extreme. With thought-provoking language and emotional intensity, Holt-Browning grapples with how young and adult minds struggle with their existence in this world. 

Marissa Miranda: I understand this is your first novel after writing a myriad of poems, along with your fiction piece “A Theory of Doors” for HFR. What parts of your writing style have changed and which parts stayed consistent in creating this novel?

Kristen Holt-Browning: It seems obvious, maybe, but being able to play with narrative, with story, with plot is not something I did too much in poetry. Certainly some people write very narrative poetry, but I don’t. I’m much more focused on lyric, language, and image, so it was wonderful to get the chance to dive into character development and plot development and watch something unspool over a long narrative expanse. That’s just something I never thought to do in poetry. I write short poems so it was a real challenge for me to write something more than a page long, something 250 pages long, but what I retained from writing poetry to turning to writing fiction is an awareness of the importance of compression and word choice. 

Ordinary Devotion is a relatively short novel. I tend to like novels that are on the shorter side. Not a huge fan of super long novels. Lots of people are, that’s cool, whatever your thing is, but I feel like a lot of longer novels that I’ve read could have used some editing and some tightening up and some polishing, so I was really aware of that when I wrote Ordinary Devotion. I think it comes from my poetry background. Just being really aware of having to justify the existence and placement of every word of every sentence. Is it necessary? Is it doing the job? Is it conveying what I want it to convey? That’s something I carried over from poetry, absolutely.

MM: You see that in your structure with how you go back and forth. You can see that fluidity. I’m assuming that was hard going back from such different centuries.

KH-B: Yes, it was. If I write a second novel, it will be completely contemporary. No research, I need a break from all of that.

MM: In the acknowledgments, you explain how the novel came about from a short story you wrote in one of your writing workshops. How did you decide this was the story you wanted to expand on and turn into your first novel?

KH-B: I had these two short stories, actually, from that same class. I had a story about an anchoress, really just the anchoress, and I had a story about a woman in her thirties dealing with grief when her career was not going anywhere. They were totally separate, and she wasn’t an academic—the woman in the contemporary story—but I kept writing each of them separately, and I felt like they both weren’t going anywhere. They both felt flat, very static, and very “I keep writing words, and nothing is happening. No one is going anywhere. Nothing is developing.” It was just these two parallel tracks going nowhere. So I put them both away, and that was years ago, starting about 10 years ago. 

But then, during Covid, I looked at them both again. It was like one of those days where I was stuck at home, and I wasn’t working at the moment, and I guess my kids were fine doing their remote school—like what a mess—and I pulled the stories back out because I was going through a lot of old files, and looking at them together after not looking at them at all, for like a couple years at that point, it really was one of those cliche, lightning bolt moments. Like, “Oh, wait, these actually are kind of speaking to each other, like, she could be studying anchoresses, there could be a back and forth there. Then I could see they were touching on similar themes, which I couldn’t see before when I was so deep in each one. 

It wasn’t clear to me at all, but with time passing, it seemed so obvious, and that just felt very energizing. That felt like a path forward, and it also felt doable. Especially during Covid, it felt doable to take two rough things and kind of play with interweaving them and moving things around. More than sitting down and starting some huge new project. Who had time for that? Things were too crazy, but being able to sit down for a little bit each day and think about “What if this protagonist found this? How would that affect this?” Playing with the two formats, interweaving them, and moving things around was fun for me, and that helped me see a way forward for both stories because then I could see that they were in conversation with each other. It became this almost ping-pong back-and-forth flow that I was able to continue with even after the peak of COVID-19/the pandemic. I had more time to devote to it. So yeah, that’s where it came from—kind of a random origin story.

MM:  I love how you needed to just take that break and step back before you saw the connection.

KH-B: Yeah, it just took time. It just took time, absolutely.

MM: You titled your novel based on the term ‘ordinary devotion,’ which in the book you mention is coined by D.W. Winnicott, and you summarize this term through the abbot by expressing, “We don’t need to give extraordinary care, we don’t need to contort ourselves to meet impossible demands—or to lock ourselves up and starve ourselves. Our ordinary, loving care is enough”. Do you think extreme devotion can coexist with ordinary devotion?

KH-B: I don’t think it can exist with it comfortably. I think that if you are someone who has that burning desire or need for that kind of really extreme action, I can see where it would be very hard to fit that into standard societal norms. I mean, that is why the anchoress has to do what she does. I mean, she literally cannot exist in normal, everyday society. It has to exist separately, in a separate place, completely cut off from that everyday society, because it doesn’t work; there is no place for her in the regular 9-5 world. I certainly don’t have any personal experience with that kind of intense, extreme devotion, so I’m really speaking from a place of guessing and imagining, but to me, it just seems that it would be so difficult to have that level of intense emotion boxed in by the constraints of living in the regular world. That’s what I imagine it would be.

MM: How did you balance switching from the perspective of Elinor, a 12-year-old girl in the 14th century, to Liz, a medieval studies adjunct in 2017?

KH-B: This was something where, again, I think my poetry background helped because of what I was saying about being so aware of the importance of word choice. I became very aware of the importance of word choice and syntax, what kind of language would be accessible to one of these characters, to what wouldn’t be accessible to the other character. That helped me to define two separate voices. Of course, Liz’s voice came relatively easier because it is contemporary, but it does take place a few years ago, so I wanted to make sure that if there was any slang, it wasn’t super contemporary, something being said in 2024. It had to be something that would have been said in 2017 and there are some differences there. 

In terms of Elinor, I felt that it was important to walk this line of having the language be a little bit distant from our own, but not so distant as to be unrecognizable or unbelievable. I was very aware of wanting to avoid what in my head I kept calling ‘ye olde medieval’ talk. I really didn’t want to slip into kind of an affected, overdone type of stereotypical old-time medieval voice. Harky, lasses and lads, I feel like I really didn’t want to do that because it just felt silly. So I ended up in this place where I decided that Elinor's voice should be slightly more formal than Liz’s voice, and a voice we hear in most contemporary writing, because just that tiny amount of formality, I felt would create just enough distance to remind us that this is a different person, in a different time, but the distance wasn’t so great that it became silly or overdone or cliched or distracting. That was another concern: I didn’t want it to be so different that it became distracting or difficult to read. I was really trying to walk this line of what I was thinking of as just enough distance between the two voices to keep them distinct. 

MM: There are a series of medieval studies courses mentioned throughout the novel. During your time at Connecticut College and University College London, were there any courses that you took that had an influence on your writing?

KH-B: You know, it’s funny, but I barely studied medieval history or literature at all in an academic setting. Like, I took literally one undergraduate course on an introductory, interdisciplinary medieval history in literature when I was an English major at Connecticut College in the olden days and then, when I went to grad school, I was actually studying modern literature. My focus was Virginia Woolf and early 20th century literature, nothing to do with medieval stuff at all, so I really didn’t draw on my own academic background that much. What I was able to draw on was, I work as a freelance book editor, and I edit a lot of academic work; I do a lot of work for like university presses, so I’ve actually edited, copy-edited, and proofread a lot of scholarly books on different aspects of history, literature, religion, everything. Including quite a few in the medieval era. I was able to call back to that kind of language having worked on academic articles and books on the medieval era. It really came out of my current professional life, way more than my academic background. Kind of random, kind of weird. 

MM: That’s so interesting, especially since you have the short stories starting in your workshops and then you have this coming from your career. I love how it feels like everything just had to be set in place.

KH-B: Life is long and sometimes it takes time for all the pieces, I guess, to align. Sometimes I’m sad like, “Oh gosh, I wish I’d done this when I was young,” but then I remind myself, clearly I just couldn’t. Clearly, this book was ready when it was ready. It is what it is and that’s fine.

MM: What did the research process look like for you and what helped you accomplish integrating that research into your story as it engaged your reader in the content?

KH-B: I definitely did a ton of research just reading. I did read a lot of academic books on medieval history, and medieval religion, specifically medieval Christian practices. It was helpful because not only did it give me the information I needed to write Elinor and Adela’s story, but just absorbing that academic language, and academic approach, I think, helped me when I was trying to create Liz as an academic living in an academic environment. 

I was very aware that I didn’t want the narrative and the plot to become overwhelmed by the research, I didn’t want the research to be super obvious or heavy and I didn’t want to feel like I was lecturing the reader, you know? I really wanted the research to support the narrative, not overshadow it. So what I would do is I would do research, but then when I was sitting down to actually write the novel itself, I put the research away. I didn’t have it anywhere near me, and I wouldn’t let myself look at it while I was writing. If I came to a point in the plot where I wasn’t sure, you know, would their fireplace look like this? Or would the window be made of this material? If I kind of stumbled on those types of details I wouldn’t stop to check the research. I would make a good guess and make a note to myself to check it later, and just kept going because I really didn’t want the plot to ever slow down for the sake of the research. I had this idea that if I was constantly stopping writing to go check my fact and go double-check my research it would kinda bog down the writing a little bit, and slow down like the sense of narrative and momentum that I wanted to keep going for myself and the reader. So that’s what I did. I was very aware of when I’m doing research, I’m doing research; when I’m doing the writing, I’m doing the writing. They’re two separate things and I keep them separate. Otherwise, you just do the research all day and never get to the writing, or I would.

MM: In the novel, Liz asks the question “Why would precious time and paper be devoted to tracking something as trivial as the mysterious workings of women’s bodies?” Throughout the book, we see a variety of consequences from this act in the history of belittling women and their work, and you highlight the importance of women’s stories, not just in the present time but also all throughout history in the cracks we tend to overlook. Who and/or what influenced you to touch on this topic and how do you hope this novel will contribute to the discussion?

KH-B: I mentioned earlier, I did study Virginia Woolf quite a bit in grad school, and she remains a favorite of mine. A real lone star for me. She wasn’t perfect, but her approach to writing women’s interior lives was so revolutionary when she was doing it and in my opinion, it holds up so well. I don’t know if you’ve read any Virginia Woolf but I feel like you can sit down and read Mrs. Dalloway or Orlando and it’s really fresh and it’s really accessible, but it’s also so penetrating in the way that it really gets into women’s interiority. She was really a guiding light and a guiding principle for me, but also, I hope this doesn’t sound too cheesy, but I’ve taken a lot of writing classes—like writing workshops—both as a student and now as an adult, and I have met so many interesting and talented women, and men writers, of course, but I’ve just been so inspired by so many of the women that I’ve been writing with. Especially as I get older, a lot of them are women who are trying to write while also holding up a full-time job, while also raising kids, while also taking care of sick parents. There’s so much going on in their lives, but seeing that they are still really driven by this need and desire to tell their stories, to tell other women’s stories, I find it really inspiring. Especially now, obviously, post-election day. I never want to suggest, or imply, that I think women’s stories can be collapsed down into this simple, singular narrative, I mean, Liz and Elinor are just two characters. There are millions and millions and millions of women’s stories out there. They are not representative of all, but I think it’s really telling and kind of disheartening that issues around bodily autonomy and women’s ambition still need to be talked about and still need to have a light shown on them because they’re still under attack and they’re still questioned and pushed back against. Even now, in 2024, here we are.

MM: Finally, the 2016 election is mentioned a couple of times throughout the story. With the recent election results, what do you wish for your readers to take away from your themes of women’s livelihoods and the complexities of choice? 

KH-B: I hope that if readers find themselves despairing or frustrated, or sad or angry, about the state of these issues around women and choice at the present moment, I have a couple things. First of all, on a very simple, modest level I hope the book is an enjoyable read that gives them comfort, solace and interest—a distraction for a few hours—but in greater terms, I hope that they can also see that these issues have kept recurring, coming and going, in waves, for hundreds of years, across oceans and women haven’t given up. We haven't stopped trying, we’re not going to stop trying. We’re just not.

Marissa Miranda is a 3rd year student at ASU working on a BA in creative writing and her minors in communication and business. Her writing focuses on speculative fiction short stories.