Kristine Langley Mahler’s erasure essay collection, Teen Queen Training: Essays after The Seventeen Book of Etiquette and Entertaining, 1963, was released in spring 2026. She is also the author of A Calendar Is a Snakeskin and Curing Season: Artifacts. Her work has been supported by an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council and a residency from Art at Cedar Point Biological Station, was thrice named Notable in Best American Essays, received the Rafael Torch Award from Crab Orchard Review, and won the Sundog Lit Collaboration Contest. Her essays have appeared in print and online at Salon, Fourth Genre, DIAGRAM, Brevity, and Ninth Letter, among others. The director of Split/Lip Press, Kristine makes her home outside Omaha, Nebraska.
I sat down with Mahler, who I first met over a decade ago through the writing community in Omaha, to talk about the process of creating Teen Queen Training, the ethical implications of erasure, and the messy realities of being a teenage girl that her book uncovers.
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Jody Keisner: The poet and essayist Mary Ruefle has described erasure as “creating a new text by disappearing the old text that surrounds it.” What would you add, if anything, to her definition? And relatedly, will you explain the different forms erasure can take?
Kristine Langley Mahler: I love that definition, so much more inclusive than what you’d find by searching “erasure” on the internet, which always directs you to erasure poetry alone. I feel a little underprepared to modify Mary Ruefle, but I think that maybe I’d expand her definition just a touch to say that an erasure does disappear old text to create something new, but an erasure also transforms a source text into a nurse log. A nurse log is a fallen, decaying tree that provides the nutrients for new and growing plants to thrive. You can usually see the remnants of nurse logs if you scan the forest floor, but if you’re not looking for them, all you see is the live growth. I think of erasure that way.
As far as the different forms erasure can take—which would also be me stretching Ruefle’s definition just a little—you can choose to selectively erase from a source text, but you can also visually modify the source text by collaging on top of it or by bolding the words you want to keep. Lots of opportunities to work with erasure, depending on the goals of your piece!
JK: What was it about the original source material for Teen Queen Training that seemed to have potential to become a “nurse log” and/or begged to be erased?
KLM: I was just so mad! The original source material is The Seventeen Book of Etiquette and Entertaining, 1963 edition, and while I love etiquette and etiquette guides and I always have, this one hit me at the right moment to be frustrated. So the book’s intention is to guide middle-class white girls through social situations they’ll encounter as teenagers, but it’s also a panegyric for the importance of etiquette, and it goes deeply into how to attract, date, and eventually marry a boy. When I was a teenage girl, that was all I wanted—to attract, date, and eventually marry a boy—and I spent hours with Seventeen magazines in the late 1990s, reading and rereading the articles before trying to modify my behavior so I could Be That Girl. It didn’t really work, and I felt hopeless and ugly and unappealing and like all the mistakes I made were my fault because I’d been given all the advice, I just couldn’t make it happen correctly.
So when I encountered the Seventeen etiquette book almost thirty years after growing up—and attracting, dating, and marrying a boy, for what it’s worth—my old frustrations re-revealed themselves. I was just so mad at the advice in the magazines that didn’t match what my experience had really looked like. It was the “Boys, Boys, Boys” chapter that set me off—you can imagine what that one was all about. I blacked out words and phrases in it so the chapter would read more like my experience, and I thought I was so incisive and critical, but when I read back over my erasure, I recognized that I wasn’t just being snide. The sentences I’d created were accurate representations of my own experiences, but they were also representative of that disparity between what you think you’re supposed to do and how you actually react. I think that redacting and reconsidering the rules of teen girlhood felt particularly important since I’m a mother of three daughters whose adolescence loomed at the time. They’re all teenagers now, so it has been a somewhat entertaining experience for them to compare those rules I felt that late-1990s society had impressed upon me as a teen against the rules they themselves feel bound by in the 2020s.
JK: Ohhh, it would be so interesting if one of your daughters erased Teen Queen Training someday to represent their own generational experiences of being a teenager and dating! Where did you first come upon erasure as a form? Do you remember the reaction you had when you saw it? For instance, my first exposure to erasure as a literary technique was via an issue of The Seneca Review called “Beyond Category.” I opened the issue to a page where words and even entire sentences had been redacted with a thick, impenetrable block. The effect stunned me, and honestly, made me a little uncomfortable at first. Erasure is a provocative art form.
KLM: Honestly, with the exception of a black-out poem scattered here and there throughout the years, I don’t think I’d encountered erasure before I started this project. I knew enough to call the work erasures, but nothing had really knocked me out like you’re describing with the Seneca Review issue. Then again, I think there was this DIAGRAM issue (16.5) that had a bunch of erasures in it. Could have been! If I’m right, the timing’s quite interesting, because I completed my first erasure draft in early November 2016, and that issue would have been published at the end of October 2016.
I’d been dismissive of the idea of blacking out in erasures, mostly because I really disliked the work of reading blacked-out erasures and having to jump from word to word on a page. When I turned that chapter “Boys, Boys, Boys” into a blacked-out erasure and realized I might actually be onto something, I transcribed it immediately into sentences and paragraphs. That was something I could work with! That was something I could understand!
JK: Did the narrative focus for each chapter emerge as you were erasing and transcribing it into sentences and paragraphs, or did you initially set out knowing the direction you wanted to take each chapter in? In my mind, I imagine the letters and words rising up from the original text and appearing to you—sort of hovering a few inches above the original text—kind of like spotting words in a Word Search game.
KLM: Honestly, that’s not too far off from the truth. I’ve described the process of creating an erasure as somewhat mystical, which is very annoying to hear, I know. I would read each chapter from the etiquette book all the way through, to settle it into my mind so the rules could live in the background, and then I’d start the erasure process, which for me—and I recommend this to everyone—wasn’t erasing or blacking out, but circling. It’s so much easier to revise when you circle! And everything has to be revised, because often I was writing in sentence fragments, or inconsistent tenses, and would need to go back through and find space for the sentences to make sense. But yeah, like a Magic Eye poster, some words just pushed themselves forward, and I would work on finding the other words I needed to write the sentence that was beginning to form in my head, and then I’d know what I basically wanted to say next, but would let the next word that jumped out at me help guide it. The results wound up being much more fragmented and language-driven than my writing usually is, but all my em-dashes remain intact. They’re very helpful when you need to conjoin two thoughts and don’t have enough letters or words on the page to do so otherwise!
JK: I’m also fascinated by your ability to craft a distinct, angsty, teenage narrator from the original text, which is narrated by this sort of prim and proper matronly voice, who imparts lessons on talking to boys, going to the prom, dining out, picking out presents, driving a car, and all the more or less typical concerns of teenagers. For instance, consider this original passage from the chapter “Nice To Be With: At School and College”:
In the bigger world outside your family, there are rules that make you nice to be with:
At school You are respectful and considerate to your teachers, whether they are male or female…
you say “Yes, Miss Smathers” or “Yes, Mr. Darrell,” rather than “yes” or “uh-huh”
you’re silent when the bell rings for class to start
you do your homework on time, ask for extensions only when necessary (bad habit to get into, anyway)
you do your homework neatly—in pen or typed, except, perhaps, math and lab reports
you pay attention in class: while the subject may be massively boring to you—or you read the book under discussion as a small child—you at least look bright and interested. (Teaching is a give-and-take operation, and an alert class makes a teacher more interesting.)
Here’s your erasure, from the new chapter “Cool”:
Before, you were a lightning rod. Excitement slivered through note-passing and whispering in a classroom, and you knew the cliché idiosyncrasies of positioned fear. They would court you. You knew to take pity on the class showoff; she was your best publicity, theatrical declarations that she may be quick, but no one’s as fast as YOU.
The voices are so vastly different (though both have wonderful vocabularies). How did you picture the original narrator of The Seventeen Book of Etiquette and Entertaining, 1963? What was the process for discovering the narrative voice for Teen Queen? Did you ever feel as if your narrator was in conversation with the older narrator or sort of defiantly “backtalking” her?
KLM: For me, I think the original narrator of the etiquette guide felt like a married big sister or like a young aunt speaking to the next generation down, but not like an actually “cool” relative. More like someone who had done everything correctly and was the model to strive toward becoming. And as a firstborn oldest daughter, that was something I understood innately! I’d wished I had that older sister myself when I was growing up, but I definitely felt like that was my responsibility, to make sure I was her.
The narrative voice in Teen Queen Training is certainly me speaking to me—I’m not speaking to the current generation, like my teenage daughters, and I’m not confronting the generation that raised me, like my mother. I’m speaking to a Me frozen in teenage time, trying to show her all the things she was misunderstanding or—more realistically—failing to understand were not going to bring her either “success” or happiness.
JK: Can you talk about the ethical implications of erasure and the power dynamics between “first author” and “second author,” the latter the one who erases? Did you follow any ethical guidelines when selecting what to erase or when choosing the primary text?
KLM: Conversation around the ethics of erasure is almost more central to the form than the rules of erasure itself! I’m fortunate that I encountered writers who were critically discussing erasure very early on in my process with Teen Queen Training, and I think that the ethical implications of erasure cannot be separated from the decision to perform an erasure on a source text. Chase Berggrun, a poet who did a book-length erasure of Bram Stoker’s Dracula into their book R E D, wrote a few considerations I still hold sacred. The first is that erasure is always an act of destruction. As such, you have to consider whose words you are removing, and whether you are positioned to appropriate or destroy them. There are so many texts that I would personally feel uncomfortable erasing or otherwise redacting, but in particular, I would never consider erasing texts written by historically underrepresented voices in literature. In my work as a small press director at Split/Lip Press, it’s the preservation and uplifting of those voices that we strive to secure! That being said, I understood the Seventeen etiquette guide as a manual written for middle-class white girls . . . and I was their target audience. It was always mine to redact.
JK: On that note, where is the line between erasure as art and erasure as, I don’t know, complete annihilation of the original form? Or does there need to be any preservation or nod to the original text? Does it depend on the source material? I’m thinking of the poet Isobel O’Hare’s erasure poem of Louis C.K.’s infamous, hollow-sounding public apology to the women he sexually harassed, which was originally around 500 words. O’Hare’s erasure reads: “My dick / is a question / I run from.” This erasure is more powerful within the context of its original source material.
KLM: I’ve found there to be a lot of strength in knowing the site of the original source text. With the erasure essays in Teen Queen Training—and in particular through the copious amount of word creation I deployed beyond simply lifting words and phrases—many of the essays do not remotely resemble the original text at the end of the process. Arguably, I could have published the book without even calling it an erasure! But I think that knowing that the essays come from redacting the etiquette guide—and not just any etiquette guide, but one supported by Seventeen magazine, which was the etiquette guide of my generation—is crucial to the project of my book.
JK: The narrator of Teen Queen struggles with self-acceptance and belonging, societal messages about beauty and ideal body types, peer pressure, her own early sexual desires and longing, and more. How much of this book is autobiographical?
KLM: TQT is actually one of the most on-the-border-of-nonfiction books I’ve written! Kaleidoscoped inside the essays are several direct experiences I had, taken wholesale, utterly unadulterated. And yet there’s definitely projection into experiences I didn’t actually have as well—the answer that’s closest to the truth is that everything that happens in these essays either happened directly to me, or they are how I expected I would react when I did encounter these situations—because I expected to encounter them all! It wasn’t an if but a when. There are no surprise revelations in these essays for the friends and family who knew me as a teen—if you’re questioning whether that situation really happened, it probably didn’t. Or did it . . .
JK: Well, I love the ambiguity of your answer and am seeing a lot more creative nonfiction that is “creative nonfiction-ish” or “beyond category.” How has the practice of erasure influenced your writing in other genres? Teen Queen is full of wonderful word play, word invention, and metaphor. Has the practice of erasure changed your relationship to language?
KLM: So I do consider myself a nonfiction genre-purist, which probably seems funny or even insulting after that last answer, but I don’t write fiction, not even under the guise of autofiction. I’m absolutely terrible at inventing for fiction, and I believe in owning what I did (or didn’t do). And I don’t write poetry either, because like I mentioned earlier, line breaks are not my jam and as you can also probably tell, I tend to go long, in my comma-after-comma sentences and extensive paragraphs. The essays in TQT required concision, for sure, but poetic language belongs to all the genres.
As far as my relationship to language since writing erasures, I would say that I’ve become more aware of the language living inside the subfloor of a piece of writing. I don’t believe that a sentence is dead once it’s committed onto the page. Layers of meaning accrue with each new read and reader—we already know that a sentence is open to multiple interpretations, but I also feel like those interpretations aren’t just takes, they live concomitant with each other. Language is layered, even when it looks static. And I love that.