Contemporary Authors

• Daughter in Retrograde: A Memoir University of Wisconsin Press (Madison, WI), 2018

1. Daughter in retrograde : a memoir LCCN 2017042906 Type of material Book Personal name Kersten, Courtney, author. Main title Daughter in retrograde : a memoir / Courtney Kersten. Published/Produced Madison, Wisconsin : The University of Wisconsin Press, [2018] Description viii, 193 pages ; 23 cm ISBN 9780299317003 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER PS3611.E777 Z46 2018 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Amazon -

  Courtney Kersten is an essayist and scholar. A native of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, she teaches creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her essays can be found in River Teeth, Hotel Amerika, DIAGRAM, The Sonora Review, Black Warrior Review, and The Master's Review.

• The Museum of Americana - https://themuseumofamericana.net/interview-with-daughter-in-retrograde-author-courtney-kersten/

  QUOTED: "This is my first book. All-in-all, it took five years for me to write from the first word to publication. Much of that time felt like wandering around in a dark room, creeping up on walls that I thought may be passageways towards clarity, only to press my face against painted drywall and grope around until I found my way back around and tried again. To put it another way, it was a lot of trial-and-error."
  "I remember when I first started writing I “didn’t want” the book to be about spirituality, about any sort of connection to the divine. So, I wrote it that way—avoiding and dancing around the thing that it was about. This resulted, of course, in a book that didn’t really seem to know what it was about. A mess. It was only when I was able to embrace what my real story was—a woman grappling with her relation to the divine via her mother’s death—that the pieces fell into place. I had to own my experience."

  Interview with Courtney Kersten
  Novelist, poet, and playwright Thaïs Miller delves into Courtney Kersten’s ideas about astrology, Americana, and research.
  Your coming-of-age memoir, Daughter in Retrograde, paints an incredible portrait of Midwestern culture. When you think of Midwestern “Americana,” what comes to mind?
  I think of wood-paneled bars on dirt roads with neon beer signs, KISS pinball machines in the corner, and dramatically posed taxidermy bass on the wall. I think of the Dickeyville Grotto in southwest Wisconsin at the intersection of Highway 151 and Highway 35. It’s an elaborate series of shrines, honorees include the Virgin Mary, Christopher Columbus, and, if you walk across the parking lot, Jesus Christ. I drove to Iowa City once five years ago and stopped in Dickeyville for gas. I walked across the street and spent two hours wandering around the Grotto, looking at objects and stones stuck into mortar. There’s a gift shop too. I think of Packer’s foam cheese head hats and cross-stitched lamb patterns and prom corsages, crispy and forgotten inside high school closets.
  I think of WCFW 105.7 FM broadcasting out of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. They play deep cuts of Simon & Garfunkel and the Fifth Dimension right along with the Backstreet Boys. Once I heard some polka. The radio announcer pauses between “The time is” and “twelve-thirty-two!” The station will stay with you on I-94 West past Menominee and fades out going East near Stanley. Sometimes I can’t find it on the dial in town. It’s a gift of a radio station.
  How many different types of fortune telling have you dabbled in? Can you name them all?
  I’m not sure if I would call my spiritual divinations “fortune telling.” I’m not looking for “fortunes” necessarily though I did cycle through many of those “Fortune Telling Fish” when I was a girl. I would get them in the quarter-candy dispensers at a pizza parlor or in the company of my mother or father at a bar. The fish were red cellophane and would writhe in your hands via your palm’s moisture. I thought they were magical and terrifying and completely full of meaning. I always forgot them in the pocket of my jeans where their cellophane bodies would shrivel and harden by way of the washer/dryer.
  I’ve studied and practiced tarot, astrology, numerology, and the iChing. I’ve been to psychics and healers. I pray. I believe in being guided. I believe the universe speaks to us in lots of ways.
  Can you tell me a little bit about your interest in American astrologer Linda Goodman?
  Linda Goodman was the first astrologer I ever read. I’ve shared her work with friends who, aptly, tell me her work is antiquated—she writes within the normative gender roles of the time she was writing, the 1960s and 70s. But looking past this, her work is unabashed—it’s spot on, humorous, and spiritually radical. I think she’s fabulous and bizarre. I wish I could’ve known her.
  I’m also interested in her life and experiences with loss. When I was a teenager I read about the lengths she went to in order to “find” her daughter Sally. Sally took her own life at the age of eighteen. I remember howling in laughter while reading about how Linda tried to find Sally—camping out on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City to protest the supposed “cover up” of her daughter’s death, hiring investigators and detectives, and spending a small fortune. Yet, years later I would experience similar feelings of disbelief in trying to reconcile my mother’s death. Linda dreamt of Sally and this dream initially led her to believe she was alive. I dream of my mother often. When I wake up, for mere moments, I feel such bliss at having seen her, even if only in a dream world. Sometimes I’ll go the whole day in a kind of giddy haze because I’ve “seen” my mother. Linda’s story resonates with me.
  How has your writing shaped your current research, or alternatively, how has your research shaped your writing?
  For me, research is integral to my creative work. As a nonfiction writer, I am constantly attempting to project past the “I,” past “me,” and into something more universal, more human, more relevant. I’m not sure if I’m successful in that, but it’s something I think about. I’m really no one—but through research and looking past myself, maybe through myself, I hope my writing can mean something to someone else. Research illuminates what can be universal, larger, more associative. It’s a humble and curious act to walk directly into the unknown and look around, to open a book and learn. I’m in a teaching group with doctoral students from all disciplines across campus and it is incredible what other people are doing and working on. Someone drew a picture of a myoglobin protein structure on the chalkboard yesterday. It was beautiful. I had no idea.
  How would you describe your writing process for this memoir?
  This is my first book. All-in-all, it took five years for me to write from the first word to publication. Much of that time felt like wandering around in a dark room, creeping up on walls that I thought may be passageways towards clarity, only to press my face against painted drywall and grope around until I found my way back around and tried again. To put it another way, it was a lot of trial-and-error. A big leap for me was working with one of my advisors at the University of Idaho, where I did my MFA, Mary Clearman Blew, who worked patiently and fastidiously on the sentence level clarity of my prose. It wasn’t until I was working with the University of Wisconsin press when I felt like I knew how to write Daughter in Retrograde. With the help of the anonymous reviews I received, my editor, and copyeditors, I felt as though I could finally see my way out; I understood what the book was about. I am deeply indebted to those that have helped this book come to realization. There are lots more people—friends, mentors, workshop peers—whose generosity and suggestions helped make this book.
  Part of what my editor at UW Press helped me come to terms with was that my book truly is a spiritual coming-of-age story. I remember when I first started writing I “didn’t want” the book to be about spirituality, about any sort of connection to the divine. So, I wrote it that way—avoiding and dancing around the thing that it was about. This resulted, of course, in a book that didn’t really seem to know what it was about. A mess. It was only when I was able to embrace what my real story was—a woman grappling with her relation to the divine via her mother’s death—that the pieces fell into place. I had to own my experience.
  In your book, astrology helps you engage with and navigate the unknown, particularly surrounding your mother’s terminal illness. What advice do you have for writers exploring grief and loss?
  My advice for writers exploring grief and loss would be to carefully discern and weigh the advice they’re given about how to write about grief and loss. I should also specify that I mean writing about grief and loss for an audience—not personal writing or writing for therapeutic reasons. In terms of writing for an audience, I was told to wait to write about my mother’s death, that I was too young, it was too fresh. I was told this was a book to write when I was forty or fifty or fifty-six. I should wait until I was older than my mother was when she died. Maybe I should’ve—I suppose I won’t know until I, or if I, am able to look back and speculate. Maybe I’ll write another book about my mother’s death if I make it to sixty and compare it to this one. I, clearly, didn’t heed the advice though I do understand the spirit behind those recommendations. And, in some ways, I agree with it—don’t write until you’re ready to do it, emotionally, physically. If you want to publish and/or share your work, think of your audience and why you’re writing whatever it is you’re writing. Make sure you are in a place to be self-reflexive. To be comfortable with showing yourself as ugly and human, with showing those you love as less-than-perfect. Death and watching those you love pass away can rip you apart. Be willing to look at where the seams have torn and how they may be put back together or never be put back together. Be willing to meditate on that. Be willing to let others in. Know that this may be challenging. Know that this may be painful. I think, perhaps, that’s what the advice I was given was really suggesting. But, at the moment, I think I just needed to write it.
  I suppose I wrote when I wrote, in the months immediately after my mother’s death, because it felt urgent. And, of course, most of that writing wasn’t meant for an audience. Details about my mother—her walk, her skin, the way her left pinky finger was crooked—had I not written them down would I have forgotten them? Moments with her, however mundane, had to be made semi-permanent in print just for my own memories and healing. Even now, when I think of the contours and wrinkles of her face I don’t know if I can even remember them with clarity without looking in my diary or at a photograph. I can’t truly remember her voice beyond a few phrases. Sometimes when I dream of my mother, when I can catch myself in the space between consciousness and a dream, I see if I can take her in, memorize her image. It’s usually then that I wake up.
  What are you working on next?
  I’m working on a hybrid-biography of Linda Goodman. I’m hoping to go to where she lived during the final years of her life this summer: Cripple Creek, Colorado. I’m also working on an essay about the history of mooning. Maybe I’ll write something about myoglobin protein structures now that I know how beautiful they are.

  ~ ~
  Courtney Kersten is the author of Daughter in Retrograde: A Memoir (University of Wisconsin Press 2018). Her essays can be seen or are forthcoming from Brevity, The Normal School, River Teeth, Hotel Amerika, DIAGRAM, The Sonora Review, Black Warrior Review, The Master’s Review, and elsewhere. She was a Fulbright Fellow to Riga, Latvia, the 2016 Writer-in-Residence at the Great Basin Writer’s Residency in Baker, Nevada, and is currently a PhD student in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

• Farsickness - http://farsickness.com/four-questions-on-farsickness-courtney-kersten/

  Four Questions on Farsickness is an interview series with creative writers for whom place is essential to their work. Each writer answers the same four questions—and featured here is nonfiction writer Courtney Kersten, whose memoir, Daughter in Retrograde, will be published in May 2018 by the University of Wisconsin Press.
  1. Share a little about where you’re from. When you were growing up, what place—real or imagined—most fascinated you, and why?
  I grew up in west central Wisconsin smack-dab between Rib Lake and the Mississippi River. The place that fascinated me most was the plot of land my father lived on outside of Colfax. He dug a moat in the back acre to attract geese. When they arrived, they swarmed the lawn and sat on the roof, leaving the moat untouched and piles of spiraling feces on the blacktop driveway. I would sit in the basement and watch them, surrounded by dozens of taxidermied ducks, caught in mid-flight, hanging on the wood-paneled walls around me.
  2. What travel has been a particular inspiration to your work?
  I lived in Baker, Nevada, outside of the Great Basin National Park for eight-weeks during a writing residency a few years ago. It was inspiring in the sense that I couldn’t afford to be careless or take for granted what I was doing creatively and personally. According to the last count, Baker’s population was sixty-eight people. It’s all wind, dust, and wild sage. It was beautiful and terrifying. I would wander around the scrub and think about how fragile life is. One wayward turn, one forgotten water bottle, one misplaced map, could you find your way home? Would one of those sixty-eight people find you? I would watch the chipmunks skitter outside my window; sometimes they would stop and pause for a moment, raising their hands as if in prayer. I thought about death a lot. My time there reminded me that sitting down to write is a gift, to be alive even more so. I also unsuccessfully tried to befriend the cows on the property.

  Cows of Baker, Nevada (Credit: Courtney Kersten).

  3. Where do you “escape to” to recharge creativity?
  Various places. Sometimes it’s my bedroom or a quiet bus ride home. Sometimes it’s wandering around second-hand stores in Idaho. Sometimes it’s beside a lake in Wisconsin. Sometimes it’s a friend’s spare bedroom or couch they’ve let me crash on.
  4. Where would you most like to travel to next?
  I want to visit Sedona, Arizona, with my ever-skeptical significant other. I want to visit the vortexes and get a picture of my aura taken. I want to plop an Ouija board down in the red dirt and see who shows up. I want to cleanse my soul and watch my husband roll his eyes at me. I can’t wait.

  Sagebrush in Nevada (Credit: Courtney Kersten).

  (Credit: Kat Lewis)
  Courtney Kersten is the author of Daughter in Retrograde, a memoir forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press (2018). Her essays can be seen or are forthcoming from The Normal School, River Teeth, Hotel Amerika, DIAGRAM, The Sonora Review, Black Warrior Review, The Master’s Review, Brevity, and elsewhere. She was a Fulbright Fellow to Riga, Latvia, and is currently a PhD student in Literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz where she’s at work on a biography of the 1970s superstar astrologer: Linda Goodman. Find her online at courtneykersten.com.

• Leader-Telegram - http://www.leadertelegram.com/Entertainment/local-entertainment/2018/05/02/Eau-Claire-natives-memoir-puts-faith-in-the-Midwestern-stars.html

  QUOTED: "Retrograde is a really good metaphor for what it’s like to grieve. ... You feel sort of stuck, but you’re really not. You have to evaluate who you are, what this person meant to you and how to move on with your life from that person."

  Eau Claire native's memoir puts faith in the Midwestern stars
  Courtney Kersten's debut memoir grapples with spirituality and grief after losing her mother
  By
  Katy Macek

  Published on May 2, 2018

  Eau Claire native Courtney Kersten recently completed “Daughter in Retrograde.” The memoir is a spiritual journey as well as Kersten coming to terms with her mother’s death.
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  There is an underlying theme of aching loss in Eau Claire native Courtney Kersten’s new memoir, “Daughter in Retrograde.”
  When writing about grappling with the death of a parent, that would seem to be at the forefront.
  Related Underage sex sting nets jail, 7 years’ probation
  But her memoir, aptly described by Kirkus Reviews as “refreshingly quirky,” also finds moments of humor — something she hopes anyone who reads it while dealing with loss might be able to relate to.
  “It (the book) can widen the narrative of what grieving can look like,” Kersten said. “It allows people, if they are grieving, to be okay with moments of levity and humor, or stepping outside themselves and seeing how something might be more light-hearted.”
  Kersten’s debut memoir was published by UW Press in April.
  She is a Memorial High School graduate who is currently working toward her PhD in creative and critical writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
  She received her Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing at the University of Idaho and was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Riga, Latvia, where she researched Baltic performing arts and literature.
  Her mother, Victoria, was diagnosed with lymphoma in her brain in 2013, and died just a few months later. Coming to terms with that, Kersten said, was a reckoning not only for her, but her brother, father and step-mother.
  “It is the defining narrative of my adult life,” she said. “My mother was the anchor for all of us, she took care of us. I think her death was really hard.”
  But one thing that surprised Kersten, looking back, was her ability to laugh. No matter how deep the pain got, she said she and her family — in part her brother, Donny, who she said is “hilarious” — still stumbled into light-hearted moments.
  “There were moments underneath all of the doom and gloom that were actually really funny,” she said. “There were moments where things were so strange that you could only laugh.”
  Just about a year after her mother’s death, Kersten began writing about their relationship, and the two had a great one. When Kersten, at a young age, discovered her interest in alternative spiritualities — looking to the stars and planets for meaning — her mother was the one who indulged her and by doing so encouraged her to pursue it.
  So when Kersten lost her mother, she not only had to grapple with the death of a parent but struggled to remain faithful in her spirituality as well.
  “I put my faith into these things, so what does it mean now that the person who was my center is gone?” Kersten said. “How does that invert or rupture my belief of what the universe was? I had to figure that out.”
  Through a journey with her mothers ashes that takes her from the lake in This Place (her unnamed hometown that could be any northwestern Wisconsin small town) to a beach in Split, Croatia, and, finally, to Riga, Latvia, Kersten is able to answer those questions for herself.
  “Daughter in Retrograde” is darkly comic, but at its core it is a daughter, filled with wanderlust and yet deeply attached to her mother, learning to navigate the world after losing the person who kept her balanced.
  It’s also a story about family and grieving and, beyond all of that, about putting your faith in what you believe in, no matter what that is.
  The title, about the phenomenon that occurs when a planet viewed from Earth looks as though it is moving backwards, when in reality its path is altered based on the Earth’s alignment with the planet.
  “Retrograde is a really good metaphor for what it’s like to grieve,” Kersten said. “You feel sort of stuck, but you’re really not. You have to evaluate who you are, what this person meant to you and how to move on with your life from that person.”
  In the midst of all of that is This Place, which Kersten doesn’t name in the book, but said she spent her young life in Eau Claire, attending both the middle school and Memorial High School.
  This Place is complete with friendly neighbors who bring over cheese curds and casseroles as Kersten’s family grieves, the local bar where everyone hangs out and the extra-long winters that skip right to summer northwestern Wisconsin folks know well.
  The book will resonate with readers in many ways, but its Midwestern charm is an added bonus for anyone familiar with the area.
  Perhaps it is her deep familial roots, but though she’s been all over the world, she said the Chippewa Valley is still her home.
  “Growing up in the Midwest has been really formative for me, and, especially now living in California, it’s really thrown it into stark contrast how deeply Midwestern I feel,” Kersten said. “Even though I’ve lived lots of different places, I still feel really comfortable and really love it here.”
  For more on her book, visit courtneykersten.com or listen to Wisconsin Public Radio’s “Spectrum West” at 10 a.m.today, where she will be a guest.
  “Daughter in Retrograde” is available through booksellers such as Books-A-Million, Barnes and Noble and online atAmazon.com.
  Contact reporter: 715-833-9214, katy.macek@ecpc.com, @KatherineMacek on Twitter

• Masters Review - https://mastersreview.com/author-interview-a-language-translatable-by-no-one-by-courtney-kersten/

  Dec
  15
  Author Interview – “A Language Translatable by No One” by Courtney Kersten
  We’re so pleased to share our third volume, The Masters Review with Stories Selected by Lev Grossman. This annual compendium of stories reflects the best emerging writers in graduate-level creative writing programs, and continually impresses with a diverse range of content and style. To offer you a little more information on these authors and their stories, we’ve put together a series of interviews with the writers in the book. In a “A Language Translatable by No One,” Courtney Kersten writes about losing her mother. It is a beautiful piece and continues to be a favorite among readers. Enjoy!
  “I arrange the boots, the dress, and the swimsuit so that we can powwow together: a triage support group. She left all of us! She was supposed to wear me! The Easter dress wails Irish wake style, her boots whimper, the swimsuit has retired to the far corner of the closet to weep.”
  Interview
  “A Language Translatable by No One” is such a personal piece. Rather than ask you about the motivation for the story, I’m curious how the process for writing this was. How did you approach the topic?
  Initially, I was fascinated by the material aspects of mourning—the things we give, the things we keep, the material things left behind that loved ones must face. Yet, as I was writing, I realized that it was about something deeper than the things themselves. Ultimately, I was trying to figure out how to reconcile this dichotomy of my mother’s silence and the abundance of material things my family had. When, in reality, I longed for an abundance of her thoughts, her words, her final goodbyes, and would’ve asked for nothing else. So, when approaching the topic, I used the material goods as a starting point to access deeper emotional truths about my experience.
  To me, there is a subtle and wry humor in this essay. Even the opening line: “Obviously when you are mourning you need cheese curds.” Was this a natural choice? Did it surprise you, or does your writing style often incorporate humor?
  For me, it was a natural choice. Not only did I find the gifts like the cheese curds to be sort of absurd and estranging in light of the severity of death, but I also did think it was funny. A woman is dying and you give us seven pounds of cheese curds? When it happened, of course, and we were given gifts, they were given in kindness and we accepted them so. And I’m sure that none of our friends and family gave us gifts to be funny—they were earnestly trying to help and show support. But, on the page, I think the humor is highlighted when you isolate the object apart from the person who gifted it.
  One of my favorite parts in “A Language Translatable by No One” is when your mother’s inanimate object come to life. “She left all of us! She was supposed to wear me! The Easter dress wails Irish wake style, her boots whimper, the swimsuit has retired to the far corner of the closet to weep.” It offers such a lovely balance of, again humor, but it was also one of the saddest moments for me as a reader. When did this make its way into the essay. How does it elevate the piece for you?
  For me, that particular part arose when I started to think about the “ripple-effect” of losing someone. In the months directly after my mother’s death (and still now), I was and am continually aware of the scale of grief and how far the loss of someone extends. Not only do you lose that person, but you lose their role and their effect in communities small and large. When tasked with the job of sorting through my mother’s belongings, her absence, for me, felt so absurd and overwhelming, that I felt it even extended to the objects and clothing she left behind. In a way, I connected to the abandoned clothing as though, somehow, we were all in this together—trying to figure out where we belonged after the woman who had taken care of us was gone.
  Can you talk about some of your favorite essayists and short story writers? Who are you reading now? Who did you turn to when you were writing this piece?
  One of my favorite essayist is Jo Ann Beard. I initially connected to her work because she, too, is from the Midwest yet I also admire her work on a sentence level and her own brand of understated humor. She’s the author I read again and again while writing this piece when I needed to re-center. I also admire the work of Dinty Moore and Ander Monson. Both are quirky, imaginative, and supremely clever. They inspire me to keep challenging myself through form and to examine how playfulness in writing can lead you to examining deeper emotional truths.
  What are you working on now?
  Right now, I’m working on a memoir about my experiences with astrology, my mother’s death, and mourning in the Midwest. This fall, I’ve also been exploring photo essays and am currently working a photo-essay about Elvis impersonators.
  At the time of submission you were pursuing your MFA from The University of Idaho. Can you talk about your experience there?
  My experience in Idaho’s MFA program has been spectacular. First off, I’m a huge fan of the location in Moscow, Idaho. We’re situated right in the middle of the rolling Palouse hills; it’s a beautiful and invigorating place to write. The writers and teachers I’ve been able to work with have all been generous and supportive in their feedback and imaginative and inspiring in their own work. Both inside and outside of the classroom, I am very thankful I have the chance to study and write here.

• Chippewa Valley Writers Guild Website - http://www.cvwritersguild.org/writing-the-valley-1/2018/3/14/craft-talk-preview-courtney-kersten-talks-memoirs-and-reality

  Craft Talk Preview: Courtney Kersten Talks Memoirs and Reality
  BJ Hollars March 14, 2018

  By Emilia Hurst
  I recently had the chance to speak with Courtney Kersten, the author of Daughter in Retrograde, a memoir forthcoming in the spring of 2018. Find out what she has to say about writing and her upcoming craft talk!
  Emilia Hurst: What are some tips you wish you had known when you first started writing?
  Courtney Kersten: If I could’ve spoken to myself then, I would’ve told myself to be patient, to know that your work will take revision and lots of insight and occasionally major overhauls to feel anywhere near “complete.” I would’ve told myself that letting your work “marinate,” so to speak, to put it in a drawer and not look at it for a while, will help you see your work with new eyes when you return to it. Suddenly, wacky sentences will stick out, moments too slow or too quickly paced will be glaringly obvious, and the path towards revision will seem clearer. I wish I would’ve known that often clarity and concision trumps gimmicks of language and form.
  Why did you decide to write nonfiction instead of fiction? Do you have a preference between the two?
  Courtney Kersten: I guess I didn’t really make a concrete decision to write fiction rather than nonfiction. I suppose the kind of stories I had always found myself drawn to were nonfictional. I don’t prefer one genre over the other—fiction can intervene in nonfiction; what is fictional can be nonfictional on the level of emotion or in other ways. I think the boundary between the two genres is fascinating and complex.
  Can you tell us a little more about what we can expect from this craft talk?
  Courtney Kersten: You can expect a little reading from the memoir. You can expect to hear about process and the major questions I had to answer in writing this memoir and how it shaped the book on the level of form and content. You can expect to hear about rendering the Midwest in language. You’ll hear my Midwestern accent come through.
  What are some memoirs that you really enjoy?
  Courtney Kersten: I love Kim Barnes’ work. I love Sarah Manguso’s work. Micah Perks’ Pagan Time showed me new way to envision memoir. In writing Daughter in Retrograde, I was particularly influenced by Joan Wickersham’s The Suicide Index—it’s a brilliant memoir. There are also lots of poets, fiction writers, and essayists I love too. Reading Jo Ann Beard’s collection of essays was what hooked me into writing nonfiction. I love Gloria Anzaldúa work. Leslie Marmon Silko is fabulous. Svetlana Alexievich’s work is amazing. I’m grateful for the chance to learn from other writer’s work.
  And you, dear reader, can look forward to learning from her work! Be sure to swing by the Local Store at 7PM on Thursday March 22 to hear Courtney Kersten’s craft talk, “Rendering Reality: Writing with Honesty and Complexity in Memoir.”

• Literature Department, UC Santa Cruz Website - https://literature.ucsc.edu/faculty/singleton.php?&singleton=true&cruz_id=ckersten

  Courtney Kersten

  Title
  Graduate Student Instructor,
  Doctoral Student
  Division
  Graduate Studies Division
  Department
  Literature Department,
  Creative Writing Program
  Affiliations
  Creative Writing Program,
  Feminist Studies Department
  Phone
  831-459-4778
  Email
  ckersten@ucsc.edu
  Web Site
  Author Website
  Office Hours
  Spring 2018: email for appointment
  Campus Mail Stop
  Literature Department

  Research Interests
  Creative Writing (Nonfiction, Memoir, the Essay, Hybridity, Auto/Biography), Feminist Theory and Literature, Pedagogy
  Honors, Awards and Grants
  CITL Pedagogy Fellow 2018

  Fulbright Fellowship; Riga, Latvia; 2010-2011

  Writing in the Wild Fellowship 2016, University of Idaho

  Great Basin Writing Residency 2016, Baker, Nevada

  Virginia Wolf Distinguished Service Award 2016, University of Idaho

  Grace/Nixon Fellowship, 2013-2016, University of Idaho.

  Pushcart Prize and AWP Intro Award Nominee

  Selected Publications
  Author of Daughter in Retrograde: A Memoir (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018).

  Essays in and forthcoming from Prairie Schooner, Hotel Amerika, The Normal School, Brevity, The Masters Review, DIAGRAM, River Teeth, Hayden's Ferry Review, Sonora Review, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere.

• Courtney Kersten Website - https://courtneykersten.com/

  Courtney Kersten is the author of Daughter in Retrograde (University of Wisconsin Press 2018). Her essays can be seen or are forthcoming from Prairie Schooner, Bellingham Review, River Teeth, Brevity, The Normal School, Hotel Amerika, DIAGRAM, The Sonora Review, Black Warrior Review, The Master’s Review, and elsewhere.
  Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, an AWP Intro Award, and she was the 2016 Writer-In-Residence at the Great Basin Writer’s Residency in Baker, Nevada. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Idaho where she was awarded a Grace/Nixon Fellowship and the Writing in the Wild Fellowship. She has also been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Riga, Latvia, where she researched Baltic performing arts and literature.
  She currently studies in the Creative/Critical Writing Doctoral Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she teaches Creative Writing and is at work on a biography about the late superstar astrologer of the 1970s: Linda Goodman.

QUOTED: "Alternately comic and poignant, Kersten's book is a coming-of-age story about faith and a searching meditation on the mother-daughter bond that will hold the most appeal for fellow seekers."
"a refreshingly quirky memoir."

Kersten, Courtney: DAUGHTER IN RETROGRADE

Kirkus Reviews. (Feb. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
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Kersten, Courtney DAUGHTER IN RETROGRADE Univ. of Wisconsin (Adult Nonfiction) $24.95 4, 10 ISBN: 978-0-299-31700-3
An essayist's story of her relationship with her mother, who accompanied her on voyages "to the Deep End of mysticism, astrology and signs from beyond."
Kersten often wondered what, in the world of "pleasantries, gossip, and compulsory warmth" that defined her rural Wisconsin hometown, she could trust. Her quest for understanding led to explorations of New Age ways of knowing before she was 10. Of all the "woo-woo" esoterica she studied, astrology was the one area of study to which she most naturally gravitated. It also became the way she bonded with Victoria, her free-spirited mother who loved outrageous bathing suits and discussing "the afterlife." Kersten's study of the planets and stars revealed that while her mother's life goal was to "express her own personal truth," hers was "to transcend doubt." The author and her mother met a psychic in a run-down bar who told Victoria that he saw her death linked with the phrase "five years." His message intrigued both mother and daughter, yet neither considered it seriously until Victoria received a diagnosis of terminal brain cancer a few years later. Blindsided by forces that stood poised to rob her of her major life guide, Kersten began to fear the future. She searched desperately for signs that would help her make sense not just of Victoria's impending passing, but of her own life and its meaning. After her mother's death, she went to old European haunts in Croatia and Latvia, where she looked for answers "about the workings of the universe [and about] trusting in a larger order." Her journey inevitably took her back home and to her mother's favorite lake, where, in an act of celebration and self-definition, the author cast the "confetti" of her mother's ashes. Alternately comic and poignant, Kersten's book is a coming-of-age story about faith and a searching meditation on the mother-daughter bond that will hold the most appeal for fellow seekers.
A refreshingly quirky memoir of soul-searching and family.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Kersten, Courtney: DAUGHTER IN RETROGRADE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527248065/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6433a7c1. Accessed 6 June 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A527248065

"Kersten, Courtney: DAUGHTER IN RETROGRADE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527248065/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6433a7c1. Accessed 6 June 2018.

• Foreword Reviews
  https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/daughter-in-retrograde/
  Word count: 381

  QUOTED: "At times, scenes can feel cluttered. Others, like a masterful passage about the astrologer Linda Goodman, positively sing."
  "Daughter in Retrograde is a finely written memoir."

  Daughter in Retrograde
  Courtney Kersten
  University of Wisconsin Press (Apr 10, 2018)
  Hardcover $24.95 (208pp)
  978-0-299-31700-3
  What would we do differently if we knew where we were going? Crackling with detail, Courtney Kersten’s memoir Daughter in Retrograde explores her relationship with her mother through the lens of horoscopes, astrology, and other divination tools. Set in the Midwest, it finds miracles in the mundane and illuminates the deeper truths of love.
  Kersten and her mother Victoria are the perfect pair of oddniks, complementing one another and rarely at odds. Their challenge isn’t a mother-daughter conflict; rather, Victoria has cancer. The memoir chronicles her last years, decline, and passing. Throughout, Kersten asks herself: Could I have seen this coming?
  Despite her fascination with the occult and her desire to predict the future using every new-age tool known to man, the answer is still no. Victoria’s illness is a shock, and Kersten makes it clear exactly what, and who, is lost.
  Victoria is larger than life, leaping from the page like a character from myth. Sunbathing in an early spring heat wave, flashing the camera in a family holiday photo, believing her parents are reincarnated as a pair of red cardinals: she is vivacious, messy. Kersten is her foil, an emotional, introspective girl who yearns to travel and see the world beyond Wisconsin. The tension between the two heightens as Victoria’s cancer progresses, forcing Kersten to leave the world of make-believe and return to earth.
  Daughter in Retrograde is Kersten’s first book. Chapters sometimes read like short stories, packed with dialogue, flashbacks, and astrological detail. At times, scenes can feel cluttered. Others, like a masterful passage about the astrologer Linda Goodman, positively sing. Through it all, Kersten alternates between a gimlet-eyed perspective on who she and her mother really were and the childhood dreams of who she hoped they’d be.
  Daughter in Retrograde is a finely written memoir that captures the sass and splendor of two unforgettable women.
  Reviewed by Claire Foster
  March/April 2018

• The Museum of America
  https://themuseumofamericana.net/courtney-kerstens-daughter-in-retrograde-review-by-thais-miller/
  Word count: 442

  Courtney Kersten’s Daughter in Retrograde — Review by Thaïs Miller
  Courtney Kersten’s debut memoir provides a window into Midwestern culture and its dissidents. She leads readers into smoke-filled bars blasting Neil Diamond while beer glasses sweat and slot machines rainbow the room. Then in the morning, she escorts them, hungover, down the aisles of grocery stores, where everyone knows each other’s business. And as they pass blondes with plastered smiles evaluating boxes of cereal, she whispers about the secrets concealed under their pristine surfaces.
  As the title suggests, Daughter in Retrograde is a spiritual bildungsroman. Kersten navigates premonitions and communes with the beyond. As she explains in her book, retrograde is a period of self-reflection, when assumptions and fears come to the surface for one to reconsider. After living abroad in Hungary, she returns to her home in Wisconsin in her twenties to care for her terminally-ill mother, Vicky Ness, who is 57 years old. Kersten is surrounded by her younger brother, Donny, her stepfather, Bruce, and her biological father, Tom. Everyone feels suspended in time. She cares for her family and wades through this process of mourning, “pulled down by an overwhelming apprehension about how to chart the unknown, about how to live without her axis point – her mother.” Her astrological chart serves as a roadmap on this challenging journey of self-discovery.
  During this time of personal awakening, she also performs an artistic metamorphosis, transforming the mundane into the magical, capturing humor amidst grief. The memoir parodies the tone of voice found in the newspaper clippings of horoscopes to which Kersten clings. She writes with self-awareness, honesty, and humility. Readers will laugh and cry as she writes and rewrites her mother’s obituary.
  Daughter in Retrograde is incredibly witty and poignant. Spiritual divinations empower Kersten to reexamine American culture, particularly our discomfort around death. A relative encourages her not to think of her mother as gone, for example, but rather to pretend that Vicky is on a trip to Hawaii. Kersten masterfully articulates emotions and experiences readers will find sympathetic. She is one of the few writers who can truly capture the feeling of being haunted by grief, not as a broad, abstract concept, but as a ghost who climbs hedges and sneaks into her classroom while she tries to teach acting and set-design to a pack of nine-year-olds.
  Courtney Kersten’s memoir is emotionally haunting and darkly funny. Daughter in Retrograde captures a woman grappling with her relationship to the divine near her mother’s deathbed. On this emotionally-compelling odyssey, she emboldens readers to embrace mystery and learn to let go.

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