About Kristen...
I come from a long line of voracious readers, writers and historians of various stripes (my geologist parents jokingly called what I do “small” history.) My fascination with language and with material culture began early, sparked by being born in Japan and growing up surrounded by Japanese art, clothing and food. Japanese was my first language, which I babbled happily until my family moved back to the United States and no playmate could understand me. An awareness of history came early too in part because generations of my family were so widely spaced; for example, my mother could remember stories told by a great aunt who had lived through the Civil War.
As a PhD student, I was lucky to receive a fellowship to study paleography (the study of ancient and medieval handwriting) in Florence, Italy. There, I spent an entire summer deciphering a single long document in the Florentine archives: the diary of a fourteenth-century city councilor. I sweated over one particularly cryptic passage before finally realizing that it recorded a purchase—of two oil-soaked torches, “so that I can see when I go out at night,” noted the councilor. For me, this was a tantalizing juxtaposition of infuriating script, obscure foreign words and utterly mundane artifacts. My research moved to France, and later to Britain, but I remained fascinated by language as a medium of culture and by the stuff of people’s lives.
A job teaching history at Duke, three books and a smattering of articles followed, happily interrupted by meeting my fellow-historian husband and giving birth to a son and a daughter.
Then, in the early 2000s, came an “aha moment” in my writing life. I signed up for a creative writing workshop because I was dimly aware that I wanted to nurture this capacity in myself. When the instructor remarked, “You are all here because you have writing projects you are working on,” I thought, “except me.” Then I realized I had pages and pages of a memoir as well as some essay drafts already in hand. I needed practice—a lot of it—with craft, but I had already launched my creative writing life and had not truly known it until that moment.
I began to experiment with approaches to teaching with writing that made room for the passion and creativity usually absent from students’ experience. Serving as Director of Duke’s Thompson Writing Program from 2009 to 2016 was a logical extension of my interest in both academic and creative writing, and in bridging the artificial distance between the two. My newest book, Writing with Research (co-authored with colleague Ann Marie Rasmussen) continues my commitment to exploring the possibilities of writing for students and professionals alike. Since its publication, I’ve returned to the memoir I began some years ago.
I have been fortunate to live and conduct research in Italy, France and Great Britain. Home most of the time now is Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where I live with my husband and (sometimes) with our grown children, all accomplished writers. My passions beyond reading and writing include travel (unsurprising), cooking (unsurprising for a French historian), and an addiction to World Cup Soccer. But it is hard to beat the pleasure of finding my son’s or daughter’s writing waiting in my inbox.
Praise for “Writing With Research: A Practical Guide”
“An excellent guide for helping writers do what they need to do: write. Writing is thinking. This book helps established and aspiring writers break free from the linear-model of writing we so often slip into and instead embrace the creative, dynamic process of writing as thinking.”
—Professor G. Mitchell Reyes, Lewis & Clark College, USA, author of Global Memoryscapes and The Evolution of Mathematics