Contemporary Authors

• The Blurry Years - 2018 Two Dollar Radio, Columbus

• Two Dollar Radio - https://twodollarradio.com/products/blurry-years

  Eleanor Kriseman is a social worker in New York City. She was born and raised in Florida.

• LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/eleanor-kriseman/

  Eleanor Kriseman
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  Master of Social Work - MSW at New York University
  Greater New York City Area
  Message Send a message to Eleanor Kriseman More actions

  The Institute for Family Health
  New York University
  New York University
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  Hi! I'm a soon to be Master of Social Work, with a focus on adolescent mental health and integrated behavioral health. I'm also a recipient of the Council on Social Work Education Minority (Youth) Fellowship for the 2017-2018 academic year. After graduation, I plan to work with adolescents, ideally in a school or school-based setting.

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  Send me a link Or send me an SMS instead Eleanor Kriseman
  Eleanor Kriseman

  Master of Social …

  Experience
  The Institute for Family Health
  Clinical Social Work Intern
  Company NameThe Institute for Family Health
  Dates EmployedSep 2017 – Present Employment Duration11 mos
  LocationGreater New York City Area
  I work with high school-age adolescents at the Institute's Washington Irving Campus school-based health center. I provide individual counseling, integrating evidence-based treatments (such as trauma-focused CBT) into my practice. Through the Institute's medical records system, Epic, I perform rigorous and standardized documentation for each session. In addition, I perform regular psychosocial assessments and mental status exams, create and update treatment plans, and conduct occasional crisis intervention sessions. I collaborate closely with the medical providers and health educators to improve clients' outcomes. I have a caseload of approximately fifteen clients, and I also conduct walk-in sessions.

  PAVE Academy
  Clinical Social Work Intern
  Company NamePAVE Academy
  Dates EmployedSep 2016 – Jun 2017 Employment Duration10 mos
  LocationBrooklyn, NY
  I worked with students grades 5-8 individually and in small group sessions to address specific needs and social, emotional, behavioral and learning issues. I maintained a weekly caseload of individual and group students and also maintained and updated case records, assessments and intervention plans, working closely with teachers, speech pathologists and other school administrators.

  HarperCollins Publishers
  Assistant Editor at Ecco
  Company NameHarperCollins Publishers
  Dates EmployedNov 2014 – Jul 2016 Employment Duration1 yr 9 mos
  LocationGreater New York City Area
  HarperCollins Publishers
  Editorial Assistant at Ecco
  Company NameHarperCollins Publishers
  Dates EmployedFeb 2014 – Oct 2014 Employment Duration9 mos
  LocationGreater New York City Area
  HarperCollins Publishers
  Administrative Assistant at Ecco
  Company NameHarperCollins Publishers
  Dates EmployedJun 2013 – Feb 2014 Employment Duration9 mos
  LocationGreater New York City Area
  Greenlight Bookstore
  Bookseller
  Company NameGreenlight Bookstore
  Dates EmployedSep 2009 – May 2013 Employment Duration3 yrs 9 mos
  LocationBrooklyn, New York
  Responsibilities included customer service, hosting and assisting with in-house and offsite events, fulfilling web orders, updating and contributing to social media accounts, and managing the First Editions Club and publisher co-op.

  Writers House
  Editorial Intern
  Company NameWriters House
  Dates EmployedMay 2012 – Aug 2012 Employment Duration4 mos
  LocationGreater New York City Area
  Read and evaluated queries and partial or full manuscripts, wrote reader’s reports and editorial and rejection letters; granted permissions.

  My Mini Hands
  Preschool Art Instructor
  Company NameMy Mini Hands
  Dates EmployedNov 2010 – Jun 2012 Employment Duration1 yr 8 mos
  Prepared projects and activities for weekly classes of up to ten preschool students, ranging in age from one to five years old.

  Foundry Literary + Media
  Editorial Intern
  Company NameFoundry Literary + Media
  Dates EmployedJan 2012 – May 2012 Employment Duration5 mos
  LocationGreater New York City Area
  Read and evaluated queries and partial or full manuscripts, wrote reader’s reports and editorial and rejection letters.

  Hachette Book Group
  Subsidiary Rights Intern
  Company NameHachette Book Group
  Dates EmployedJun 2010 – Aug 2010 Employment Duration3 mos
  LocationGreater New York City Area
  Interned in Subsidiary Rights department; duties included filing contracts, reviewing royalty reports, drafting and mailing reversion letters to foreign publishers, creating rights guides and newsletters, mailing packages, and creating publication schedule spreadsheets.

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  Education
  New York University
  New York University
  Degree NameMaster of Social Work - MSW Field Of StudyClinical/Medical Social Work
  Dates attended or expected graduation 2016 – 2018

  Activities and Societies: Phi Alpha Honor Society; Integrated Youth Behavioral Health FLO
  New York University
  New York University
  Degree NameBachelor of Arts (B.A.) Field Of StudyFrench Language and Literature Gradegraduated with honors
  Dates attended or expected graduation 2008 – 2012

  Volunteer Experience
  New York Cares
  Reading Tutor
  Company NameNew York Cares
  Dates volunteeredJan 2011 – Nov 2011 Volunteer duration11 mos
  Cause Children
  Assisted ESL and below grade-level literacy standard students from 3rd to 5th grade, both individually and in small groups. We practiced reading out loud, critical-thinking skills, and test-taking strategies.

• Vol. 1 Brooklyn - http://www.vol1brooklyn.com/2018/08/28/floridian-literature-liminal-spaces-and-absent-places-a-conversation-with-eleanor-kriseman-and-laura-van-den-berg/

  Floridian Literature, Liminal Spaces, and Absent Places: A Conversation with Eleanor Kriseman and Laura van den Berg
  By Tobias Carroll On August 28, 2018 · 0 Comments · In Featured, Interviews, Lit.

  Eleanor Kriseman’s new novel The Blurry Years traces the coming of age of a young woman named Callie as she travels across the country and comes to understand herself. Laura van den Berg’s new novel The Third Hotel centers around Clare, who discovers her apparently dead husband walking around while visiting Havana for a film festival. These novels share a detailed approach to place; they also utilize absence in fascinating ways. I talked with both writers over the course of numerous emails about their books, the literary works that influenced them, and the role of Florida in their fiction.
  Both of your novels deal with questions of place, but also with questions of distance from that place. In The Blurry Years, Callie has a kind of breakthrough when she and her mother temporarily leave Florida for Eugene, Oregon; in The Third Hotel, there are plenty of details about Clare’s life near Albany and childhood in Georgia and Florida, but the bulk of the novel is set in Cuba, a place to which she is far less connected. What are the challenges of writing a work in which a place takes on elements of a character–but so does the absence of that place?
  Laura van den Berg: I love the idea of thinking about place as both presence and absence. Generally I think about a character’s “filter” a lot in respect to place. What they are noticing and why? What kind of lens are they using? Clare has traveled to Havana to attend a film festival and is filtering the city through cinematic language with a particular emphasis on horror films, as her recently deceased husband was a horror film scholar (my secret dream job!). And then her filter grows more distorted as her comprehension of her own reality becomes increasingly unmoored. In terms of the past, Clare grew up in an inn managed by her parents, and I see the ghost of her childhood setting, that particular slice of Florida, as a link between her theories on travel/travelers and her position as traveler in Havana—among other things.
  Eleanor Kriseman: Laura, I love that idea of a “filter,” and–though I hadn’t consciously conceived of a filter in regards to Callie’s point of view, I think it works just as well conceptually as a description of adolescence–a natural filter for the world. As for writing about place in terms of absence or presence, it was very different for me to write the chapters that took place in Oregon (somewhere I’ve never been) than it was to write the bulk of the novel, which takes place in Florida (where I spent the first eighteen years of my life). I was so afraid that my portrayal of Eugene wouldn’t ring true that I spent a lot of time on Google Maps and Street View, looking up what neighborhoods might have been considered middle or working-class, researching the weather. (While Callie’s isolation and boredom in Eugene was intentional, it also meant that most scenes in Eugene took place inside, in a house that really could have been anywhere, which did make it easier!) Callie only realizes how much she feels at home in Florida when she’s elsewhere, and I think that’s common, to need that removal or distance from a place to understand the depth of your connection to it. I don’t know that I would have been able to write so easily about Florida had I still been living there.
  Both of your novels involve temporary spaces–whether it’s the hotels in Clare’s life in The Third Hotel or the way Callie is constantly on the move in The Blurry Years. Did you both know from the outset that these books would be set in, for lack of a better phrase, liminal spaces? What were some of the challenges and benefits for you as writers of setting these books there?
  van den Berg: Yes, definitely—my projects always evolve so much over time, and often in unexpected ways, but I had been thinking so much about the layers of travel and so I knew “transit spaces” would be a huge part of the novel’s landscape. I think a lot about how fiction can navigate the different layers of self: the public self that we present to the outer world, the private self we share more selectively, and then the secret self, that submerged layer we don’t really understand and that we often reveal on accident—and, to my mind, this connects over to that unique blend of intimacy and anonymity that we can encounter in transit spaces. We find people’s hair in hotel carpets. We hear arguments and nightmares through the walls. We see people fall asleep and dream on planes (or I have, at least). We often have an front row seat to people’s anxieties and the curious things these anxieties will compel people to do (as someone who has issues flying, I have definitely displayed some odd and illogical behavior on flights). What I mean to say here is that the secret self is sometimes on full display in transit spaces, which feels so intimate to me, and yet there is a pact of silence around this intimacy. We don’t ask what the person sitting next to us is dreaming about, for example—we just take it in.
  In terms of challenges, I think making sure I was seeing these spaces through Clare’s lens—versus what is objectively interesting to me—took some time and calibration, and also making sure I was creating enough imagistic touchstones and patterns to ground the narrative.
  Kriseman: I actually felt that this book was pretty rooted in place until other people started reading it! And now I definitely see how it can also be read as a more liminal text. And the main way that I see that is through Callie’s growth not only as a character, but also as the narrator. Childhood and adolescence are perhaps the ultimate liminal spaces: periods of growth, transitions but also waiting. Callie spends so much time waiting, for something, anything to come next. So in that sense, I think Callie’s age (and aging throughout the novel) provide that liminal space within a book that is also so physically rooted.
  Eleanor, you talked about the role of Callie’s aging over the course of the book, and as she grows older she becomes more aware of both the truth of certain things around her and has a greater sense of herself. Laura, The Third Hotel abounds with narrative ambiguity surrounding what exactly happened to Richard. What were some of the challenges you faced constructing the knowable levels of reality in your books?
  Kriseman: One of the challenges was that I did not write these chapters in order, which might have made it easier! But I think I definitely drew on my own experiences with children–I’ve been a babysitter, part-time or full-time, for the last decade and a half of my life, and for children really of all ages. And so I feel like, as a result of that, I have a sharper understanding than most of how children arrange their thoughts, what questions they ask and don’t ask, what stands out for them and what goes unnoticed. Since writing this book, I’ve actually had more of a formal education on child development (I recently graduated with a Master’s in Social Work, and focused on clinical work with adolescents), which probably would have been a good reference. But I purposefully wanted Callie to wonder and consider more than she says aloud–I like the narrative tension that that creates.
  van den Berg: So many! Distribution of information took a long time to sort out—there is the material that is truly inaccessible to Clare, the unanswerable, and then there is the material that is accessible but that she is actively avoiding. Unraveling what was what, and the pace at which Clare should begin to turn toward the latter category, was one of the major puzzles of this book. There are a few mysteries that do get solved in a more definitive way—where a missing actress has been, what’s in a white box that Clare has been carrying—and it was fun to offer a more concrete answers to a few of those subplots, a kind of counterpoint to all the ambiguous liminal. But the most interesting material to me in fiction is nearly always the irresolvable, what can be explored and illuminated but not really answered or explained, and so then it becomes a matter of trying to name whatever what material is, for a character, in the most precise language available. That’s what I’m aiming for.
  The state of Florida plays a significant role in both of your novels. In recent years, it seems like there’s been an uptick in the number of high-profile literary works set in and around said state. Do you think that we’re in the midst of a literary Floridian renaissance?
  van den Berg: Well, Florida literature has always been great—from Zora Neale Hurston to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. I grew up in the Orlando area, where Jack Kerouac had a house, which is now a residency program. I do think we’re in a moment where the wider public is acknowledging that the state has something to offer culturally beyond Florida Man memes (though I am now chagrined to confess that as a young person I believed Florida to be a cultural wasteland—I was very wrong!). Also, the literature currently coming out of Florida is representing the breadth and complexity of the state. Florida contains so many different worlds, with major regional differences; parts of the state still feel very unknown to me even though I lived in Florida for 22 years. And we’re now seeing this range in the Florida literature that’s being published, or starting to at least. Jeff VanderMeer and Sarah Gerard and Jennine Capó Crucet and and Susanna Daniel have, for example, all written writing vastly different Floridas. And then of course you have writers who are from or who have made a home in Florida and write largely about other places. And in turn writers who have written important works about the state without living there for extended periods of time.
  Kriseman: I don’t know that we’re in the midst of a literary renaissance in Florida as much as maybe a recognition of–or higher visibility around–authors from or writing about Florida (which might be part of a larger shift, not just in the literary world, of identity and place becoming much more salient and urgent topics in the political sphere at large). I want to second Laura’s emphasis on Florida containing so many different worlds–if you drove the entire length of the state you would cross through so many starkly different communities, both in terms of the natural (and artificial) landscapes and the people that inhabit them. But there have always been notable writers from or in Florida–Joy Williams isn’t from Florida, but she’s made it her home for decades now, I believe, and she’s written what I think is one of the best novels set in Florida, Breaking and Entering.
  Each of your novels has a very archetypal title. Eleanor, you mentioned Breaking and Entering — do either of you see your book as being in dialogue with literary works (or creative works, period) that have come before?
  Kriseman: I would be honored to be seen as in dialogue with Joy Williams in any way! If The Blurry Years has anything in common with Breaking and Entering, it would be the current of restlessness that runs through both novels. Restlessness in terms of both place and age, if that makes sense. In that way, I might consider The Blurry Years to be in dialogue with (or, perhaps more accurately, inspired by) some of my favorite novels, like A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews, or I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. Both of those books are radically different in terms of time period and setting and style, but they’re narrated by adolescent girls who feel trapped in some way (by poverty, by isolation, by social standing) and are yearning for something new.
  van den Berg: It’s hard for me to imagine writing something that isn’t in dialogue with art that has come before. That’s part of what motivates me, the desire to speak back to work that I love, work that has moved me, rescued me, changed me. The Third Hotel actually started as a kind of call-and-response to Jean Echenoz’s novel Piano, in which a character dies early on in the novel and then must traverse the afterlife. He’s eventually repatriated to Paris, where he lived at the time of his death, but his appearance has been changed so he is indistinguishable to those who knew him when he was alive—but one person does manage to recognize him and the order of things is upended. I thought, what if a story like that was told from the opposite POV, from the alive person who did the recognizing? I do think influence can be a kind of scaffolding in some ways, an initial point of entry, and that scaffolding of influence in respect to Echenoz had to be torn down at a certain point—but it was an important book for me. As was Yoss’s A Planet for Rent. And I forever dream of being in conversation with Cortázar (his story “Blow Up” was especially important to TTH) and Yoko Tawada’s The Naked Eye and Marie Ndiaye’s Rosie Carpe and Ladivine and Mishima’s short story “Death in Midsummer” and Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel.

7/26/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Print Marked Items
Kriseman, Eleanor: THE BLURRY
YEARS
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Kriseman, Eleanor THE BLURRY YEARS Two Dollar Radio (Adult Fiction) $15.99 7, 10 ISBN: 978-1-
937512-71-2
A portrait of a girl's unstable and sexually fraught adolescence in Florida.
Preteen Callie is headed back to Florida with her alcoholic, underemployed mother after a failed attempt to
start over on the West Coast. She imagines driving away: "Everything outside would begin to blur...and it
would feel familiar, which made me intensely sad, that a blur was something I could get used to."
Kriseman's debut novel tells Callie's story of these "blurry years" as a series of snapshots taking place over
about a decade as Callie's peripatetic mother ditches one boyfriend after another and tries to keep the duo's
heads above water even as her daughter is drowning in loneliness. Callie begins reaching out in the ways
that are the most familiar to her: In junior high, she's trying to cajole beers from local beachgoers and
tagging along with her best friend when an older man invites them to his apartment. By 14, she's lost her
virginity on a whim at a house party and is stealing lingerie from the woman she babysits for. Things get
worse from there. From the first pages, we can see Callie's dissolution barreling toward her, but the novel's
interest lies less in the familiar shape of its events and far more in the quiet melancholy with which Callie
endures them. That her own rueful self-awareness can't stop her self-destruction is much of the book's
power--so much so that when Kriseman tries to course-correct in the final chapters, it feels artificial. If
Callie were real, we'd be desperately rooting for her to pull it together; as readers, we want her to linger in
"the grimy bathrooms, the filthy bedrooms, the messy backseats of shitty old cars."
An elegant, but uneven, glimpse into the life of a memorable protagonist.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Kriseman, Eleanor: THE BLURRY YEARS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538294063/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=09ccc082.
Accessed 26 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A538294063
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The Blurry Years
Publishers Weekly.
265.20 (May 14, 2018): p32+.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Blurry Years
Eleanor Kriseman. Two Dollar Radio (PGW,dist.), $15.99 trade paper (162p) ISBN 978-1937512-71-2
Kriseman's assured and affecting debut follows Callie from young childhood through her itinerant teenage
years as she and her unpredictable, alcoholic mother, Jeanie, constantly attempt to restart and better their
lives. In Tampa, Callie shifts loyalties between her mother's changing boyfriends and finds a lovable, stable
adult in one of their brothers, Marcus, a person she will return to for comfort throughout her life. In Eugene,
Ore., where Jeanie is originally from, after a desperate cross-country drive and nights spent sleeping in the
car in parking lots, Callie and her mother reconnect with Jeanie's former best friend, Starr. And in Daytona
Beach, Callie and her first real friend explore the darker side of the tourist town, trying on adulthood for the
first time just as Callie's adolescence begins to look darkly and familiarly like her mother's life (depending
on alcohol to get through her days and taking bad jobs instead of focusing on school), and she attempts to
finally break out of the pattern of running she has always known. The novel's complicated mother/daughter
relationship is provocative and richly developed, and Jeanie is an unforgettable, complex character: she
starts the novel as difficult-but-loving but evolves into deep cruelty. Despite its too-neat ending, Callie's is
an honest and memorable story about growing up in a world of bad examples. Kriseman's is a new voice to
celebrate. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Blurry Years." Publishers Weekly, 14 May 2018, p. 32+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A539387393/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e003314e.
Accessed 26 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A539387393

• The Masters Review
  https://mastersreview.com/book-review-the-blurry-years-by-eleanor-kriseman/
  Word count: 983

  Book Review: The Blurry Years by Eleanor Kriseman
  If you’re a reader, you can run, and you can hide, but you can’t escape the coming-of-age story. It’s everywhere, a part of every era, a constant of literature as immovable as Hemingway himself. The only new ground is generational: the story varies depending upon the age of the person telling it. For Millennials, the variation arrives (at last) in the storyteller. Women, queer people, and people of color are telling their stories at last, which means that the coming-of-age genre has some new life in it for the first time in decades.

  The Blurry Years, a debut novel by Eleanor Kriseman, is the kind of coming-of-age tale that we need, and the kind that likely would not have appeared on bookshelves until recently. Callie, the endearing narrator, matures from age six to age eighteen across the book, but even when she’s old enough to develop good boundaries, she can’t. She drinks with her mother’s consent and encouragement before she is in high school, has sex with boys within a few minutes of meeting them, and steals and parties her way through her adolescence. It’s a hair-raising novel, which includes types of sexual encounters rarely, if ever, recounted in fiction; shocking disregard for risk and consequence on the part of the narrator; and a well of sorrow and loneliness under Callie’s behavior that, when it becomes evident, overwhelms both Callie and the reader. “I didn’t know what to do with myself when I was alone, really,” Callie says at one point. “I hated being alone. All I could think about were bad things.”

  It’s also a deceptively simple novel. No fancy narrative tricks, no framing devices, no division of the action into distinct cinematic acts—just Callie’s story, as she lives it, in lean and attractive prose. However, there is connective tissue in more than just Callie’s voice: stars appear as a motif several times, as does a Carly Simon song. And desire, in its many forms. The book stirred long-lost memories of my tween years, when I had desperate desires related to boys, but I didn’t exactly know what their fulfillment would look like.

  I wanted him to touch me and I wanted to touch all the bodies I’d ever known, wanted to be back in bed when my mom came in early in the morning to spoon me, to be nestled in between my old babysitter and her boyfriend on the couch, to be back in the shower with Shauna in our bathing suits, bumping into each other as we both tried to stand underneath the stream of hot water to rinse the chlorine out of our hair. To be back in Eugene, looking out at the Willamette River with Starr’s hand on mine. I was so, so lonely.

  It isn’t clear whether Callie’s desire for touch and connection, in this passage and throughout the book, is about being underloved by her dissolute mother, or about the unclear longing for bodies and connection that tween girls feel but rarely record. Either way, Callie’s desires, raw and discomfiting, refuse to be ignored.

  A primary character of The Blurry Years is its setting: Florida. Between Lauren Groff’s Florida, Alissa Nutting’s Tampa, and the work of Karen Russell, this state, portrayed by women, forms a microtrend in literary fiction. Kriseman distinguishes herself by making Florida rather despicable and exploitative, blinding its residents with thick heat and an empty sun, forcing them to scrabble for pleasure on a beach filled with trash. Callie and her mother move around within the state often, from one dingy apartment to another. They rely partially on whatever man will support them. Men prove disposable, moving in and out of the book as predators and minor characters, but a few of them show good character. Marcus, a young man thrown together with Callie due to one of her mother’s many affairs, is the most continuously positive influence in her life. He takes her in after her mother commits a final unforgivable act, gently spurns her advances on him, and teaches her what unconditional love looks like.

  The book’s conclusion is difficult to diagnose. Callie leaves Florida (sorry for the spoiler, but it’s obvious from the start that she can’t stay there) and finds love with a figure whose role is somewhere between a mother and a big sister. It seems like this is another choice based on Callie’s permeable boundaries—a near-incestuous happy ending. We’ve been rooting for Callie to gain independence from her bad impulses and her poisonous mother, and although she does seem to be on a healthier trajectory once she leaves Florida, for her to end up this way doesn’t really fulfill those hopes. But perhaps I’m not giving enough credit to the role of fate in the book, or to Callie’s ability to internalize the lessons forced on her much too young.

  I felt like I might need a lifetime to learn the true difference between a debt and a favor, and the difference between the kinds of people who could turn the same action into one or the other.

  Callie is a heroine to remember, a perfect personification of the era of adolescence when decisions were easily made and long regretted. She doesn’t reflect much on her behavior, or offer evidence that she understands why she acts so self-destructively. This isn’t a negative quality; it’s another piece of the book’s authenticity. These are the blurry years, after all.

  Reviewed by Katharine Coldiron

  Publication date: July 10, 2018

  Publisher: Two Dollar Radio