When Kristine S. Ervin was eight, her mother, Kathy Sue Engle, was abducted from an Oklahoma mall parking lot and then murdered. Rabbit Heart: A Mother’s Murder, A Daughter’s Story (Counterpoint, 2024) covers Ervin’s memory of her mother, but the story is largely grounded in the aftermath, the way that one horrible event changed Ervin’s life, and the life of the rest of her family forever.
In 2009, investigators uncovered DNA evidence that allowed them to prosecute one of the men who murdered Ervin’s mother; the other had since passed. Ervin’s own critical role in the investigation is only revealed to her after the fact, in a surprising and moving way.
The memoir in general rejects simple statements and always finds a way to root itself in complexity. This is one of the many ways Ervin’s background in poetry—an MFA in poetry from New York University—shines through.
Though Rabbit Heart is difficult to read because of the subject matter, Ervin’s poetic and nuanced writing style is immersive and deeply rewarding, and I could understand why an excerpt was named a notable essay in the 2013 edition of Best American Essays.
I corresponded with Ervin over email about how readers have reacted to the violence in the story, the nature of revisions, and her return to poetry in finding her voice for prose.
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The Rumpus: Your creative writing roots are in poetry. When did you start to shift toward memoir and this book in particular?
Kristine S. Ervin: The shift to prose began the first year of my PhD program at the University of Houston, where, at the time, graduate students were required to take a crossover workshop. If you entered as a poetry student, as I did, this meant you had to take a creative nonfiction or fiction workshop during your course of study. I was fortunate enough to take nonfiction with Rubén Martínez, which began the journey of Rabbit Heart, though you could argue its journey started in poetry. I had been writing poetry about my mother’s death for several years, needing the tight control of the lines to manage and contain the grief, but Rubén, with his expertise in reportage, encouraged me to open up the story and place it in a broader context through integrating research, something I didn’t do in my poetry. Then, Mark Doty, whom I had studied under at New York University and then again at UH, urged me to take scissors to my prose and begin braiding the vignettes, shaping my experiences with grief into lyric essays.
Rumpus: Can I ask what you mean by “though you could argue its journey started in poetry”?
Ervin: The first poem I remember writing for myself—not for a school assignment—was a poem about my father waking me up and telling me two men had abducted my mother. I was thirteen when I wrote the poem. It was terrible, as almost all poems by teenagers are, but it was evidence that I needed to write my experience and I needed a poem, not prose, to tell that story.
In some ways, I think Rabbit Heart’s journey started with this act of writing, this moment when the necessity for expression pushes back against what is unsayable. But I also mean that some of the material in Rabbit Heart, like the opening vignette that describes my father’s offer to bring home my mother’s car after the FBI had processed it, began as poems first, written during my undergraduate and graduate studies.
I’ve been writing this experience for so long, trying to find the form it needs, and ultimately I needed the expansiveness of prose to hold it all. That being said, even in my prose I approach the story with the tools of a poet by foregrounding image and metaphor—like how the car becomes a metaphor for my mother’s body—or by using vignettes and the white space around them to create meaning.
Rumpus: Poetry plays a strong role in the memoir, not just in terms of poetic language but in terms of including some of the poems you wrote as a child and teenager, which I found really helped make the past feel close. Were those always part of the manuscript? How did it feel to revisit older work and include it?
Ervin: The poems were always part of the project, and I originally included more pieces written during my childhood. The earliest draft of the memoir, written before we had the DNA match, was a collection of lyric essays exploring grief and the differences between losing my mother suddenly and through violence versus losing my father through diminishing health. In that collection, I had an entire chapter focused on storytelling and on how writing poetry and using music lyrics to generate narratives of her return offered a catharsis when I was young. I also included diary entries about my sexual experiences with my high school boyfriend, which further highlighted the teenager’s perspective on her body, my body.
Just as I did now with the impulse to use the third person, I felt distance between me and my former self, as if those poems and diary entries were written by another girl and young woman, and because of that distance, I was able to be critical of her perspective, to dissect it and place it in a larger conversation. A concern that I had with including the poems from my childhood though was that the reader might disengage because the writing is juvenile and cliché, though the subject matter may not be. Finding the balance between giving the reader insight into the child’s experience, in order to authentically represent grief and not lose the reader’s interest because the writing shifts to a less sophisticated style and voice, was difficult at times. I am very pleased to learn that including the poems made the past feel closer for you as a reader. Perhaps I was able to find a balance after all.
Rumpus: Once you started integrating research, how did the project change?
Ervin: I think of the research as doing two things for the memoir: it allowed me to place personal experiences in a broader context, and it provided paths forward through some of the most difficult moments to write.
In that first nonfiction workshop I referenced earlier, I researched the history of Shepherd Mall and began to understand why the mall mattered, or matters, to other people and also the mall’s connections to acts of violence, to other abductions, to the Murrah Building Bombing. My intensely personal stake in the mall began to ripple outward, or perhaps a better image is that my family’s experience became one ripple among others. But I also used research when I was curious about something, like why my brother felt the desire to place a monument in the oil field where the men killed our mother and abandoned her body. That type of research, stemming from a need to better understand someone or some aspect of grief, also broadens the conversation because my brother’s need to mark the place of death is not unique, though the circumstances are specific and personal.
Then there were moments when research, like metaphor, offered a veil and a way through. In the early drafts, I struggled with returning to memories of the judicial proceedings, after we got the DNA match twenty-two years after my mother’s murder. The evidence—learning the specific cause of death, the man charged with her murder and what it was like to face him in court, the rage and desire for revenge that I felt—I didn’t want to return to those scenes, though I knew the memoir needed me to. So I turned to research and to metaphor, specifically to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison and research about boardgames and chess sets, to give me the distance I needed and to reveal meanings I couldn’t otherwise see. For example, a chess set by Salvador Dalí, its pieces cast from human body parts, or the game Operation, where you use tweezers to pull bones from a body and are shocked if you make a mistake, allowed me to write about the death penalty and my ambivalence toward it. Almost all this researched material was cut during the editing process (I originally braided narrative, Foucault, and games together), but the effect of the research, its ability to aid the writing process, remains.
Rumpus: The start of the memoir mostly takes place during your childhood and teen years, but then it progresses forward in such a way that by the end, some of what is taking place in the memoir is happening in the fairly recent past. Was one part easier to write than the other, or did they both contain their own separate challenges emotionally and logistically?
Ervin: I’ll answer first about the logistical challenges. With a few exceptions, the material from childhood and teen years was easier to write and shape than the experiences that are more recent. This is partly due to memory, or, more accurately, to the lack of memory. For example, I have so few memories from the days and weeks after my mother’s abduction—I have fragments, slivers really— that I am not faced with the problem of having an abundance of moments and details to select from, where I must choose what to include and what to exclude.
But that isn’t the case with the recent past. I struggled with writing and shaping and editing the experiences after we received the DNA match and moved forward through the judicial process, precisely because I had so much to work with—my own experiences but also the courtroom testimonies—and I had less emotional distance to see the meaning and through line clearly. All of the material mattered to me,but that doesn’t mean every moment and every memory are what the story needs.
Without a doubt, some vignettes were more emotionally challenging than others to write. Writing the scenes of my own sexual abuse and subsequently having to shape and revise them for an audience was the most difficult, frustrating, and confusing part of the process. Revisiting the memories was hard enough—to write it well, I needed to, in some ways, reexperience the violence—but then shaping the scenes for a reader’s thresholds was a whole other challenge, and I discovered that readers seem to tolerate the violence against my mother’s body easier than the violence against mine, something I still struggle to fully understand. I also found it difficult to write about the moment we learned the specific cause of death, another memory I didn’t want to return to because it hurts, will always hurt. I remember, too, wanting to avoid the vignette about the death penalty, about how the decision to seek the death penalty was ours as a family. In this case, I didn’t want to return to and revise the vignette because I knew I had to go deeper, that I had to confront something I am ashamed to admit, both to myself and to readers.
Rumpus: The book communicates a lot of difficult stories in a complex way, and you go deeper with the writing, more often than not. Did you develop any strategies that helped you confront yourself in this way?
Ervin: The strategy I find most helpful for going deeper is to gain enough distance that you can ask and address questions about the self, the significance of a moment, or a person who is represented in the story. Often this requires the passage of time—weeks, months, even years—where you return to the story you have written and begin asking questions as if you were reviewing the work of another person.
I have so many printed drafts of the memoir where in the margins I have written things like Why do I keep mentioning the sky-blue shirtdress? Why do I keep wanting to return to the mall? Why might my father feel rage toward the men who killed Mom but not toward the men who harmed me? Why did I end this section so abruptly, what am I avoiding here?
But there are limits, I think, to how much distance a writer can gain on her own. This is why outside readers, ones who can see beyond the blocks you put up and who are attuned to your voice and purpose, are essential. I think back to the conversations I had with my agent Mary Krienke, a deeply astute, empathetic reader who could see my memoir more clearly than I could see it myself. She’d push me to go deeper by either asking questions or arguing with the choices I made in the writing.
In the chapter “Truly Innocent Victim,” I have two voices, two selves, in conversation about how to define my experiences with sexual abuse. I remember Mary commenting in an earlier draft that the self that hesitates to call it rape cannot win the argument, but I fiercely defended my decision to give that perspective so much power. What was interesting was that as Mary and I talked it through, it was as if she and I were occupying the characters of those two selves, and I realized that what I was arguing to Mary—that I don’t want to call my experience rapebecause it feels like it diminishes my mother’s experience—was not in the text itself. I hadn’t gone there yet in the writing, and the back-and-forth exchanges with Mary showed me that I needed to.
But Mary got close to the memoir, too, the more she and I worked on it—which is why it’s important to have a fresh set of eyes on the text from time to time. I think of joj, a writer I met at a panel at the AWP Conference. We later traded work because we were both stuck in our manuscripts, and they gave me a response that I needed to hear, that no one else could articulate. They said, “In this scene, the writing about sex is very male.”I had known something was wrong with the scene, had known it for years, but joj’s showing me that the gaze, the perspective on the page was a masculine one allowed me not only to revise the scene but to better understand my memory, my experience.
I lament sometimes that it’s taken me so long to publish Rabbit Heart, that my debut memoir is coming out in my forties. But deep down, I know that the memoir is stronger because I’ve deepened the reflections, something that, for me at least, required a lot of time and distance.
Rumpus: What books influenced Rabbit Heart the most?
Ervin: It’s difficult to say which books influenced it the most. There are the texts that inspire me to play with form or genre and that remind me, when I am feeling apprehensive about the subjects I write, that it’s powerful when women break silences about their bodies. Here I’m thinking of bell hooks’ Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water: A Memoir, Elissa Washuta’s My Body Is a Book of Rules, Gina Frangello’s Blow Your House Down, and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, along with essays by Julie Marie Wade and poems by Sharon Olds.
There are the books with similar subject matter, written with complexity and nuance and depth, like Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial and Alex Marzano-Lesnevitch’s The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir.
There are the poets I turn to when I struggle to write—Tarfia Faizullah, Li-Young Lee, Ocean Vuong, and Stanley Plumly. I still find it interesting that I turn to the poets and not to prose writers when my voice feels far away on the page.
Rumpus: There’s a line from the end that I keep returning to: “There’s a story I don’t know how to tell.” Part of why I kept returning to it was because I wasn’t sure if it referred to the story that followed, or the whole book, which covers a lot of ground, but obviously can’t cover everything. Is there an intended interpretation of this?
Ervin: I can understand why you might interpret this line as relating to the entire book, not only about the details that are there but also the parts that are missing. After all, how does one tell the story of murder, of rape, of an unrelenting, brutal grief and a search that spans twenty-five years? But I found it easier to write the details of my mother’s death and my own experiences with violence than I did the story that the quoted line refers to. With the former, I needed to shape, to control, and to better understand what was unbearable and horrific and ultimately to transform it into a work of art, into something that is hopefully beautiful.
But the story that I didn’t know how to tell—that I met a young woman named Lesley Katzilierakis and told her about my mother’s unsolved murder, that my telling this story inspired her to go to graduate school for forensics, that she was the one who later processed the evidence that got the DNA match in my mother’s case—didn’t need to be transformed. It was already beautiful, already perfect.
I think language will always fail in some ways, that no matter how well we write, the words will ultimately never fully capture and convey an experience, and as a writer I can better accept this when I feel like I’ve at least reshaped what is painful and made it easier to bear. With the story of me and Lesley, though, I was always aware that every time I attempted to write it, my words couldn’t fully express what was unbelievable and transcendent, that nothing I could write would do it justice.
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Author photograph by Jon Ervin
