Memory and Theory: An Interview with Kimberly Grey

Kimberly Grey is a hybrid writer working across essay, poetry, and multimodal forms. She is the author of the essay collection A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing and two collections of poetry: Systems for the Future of Feeling and The Opposite of Light, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize from Persea Books. Her fourth book, BEWILDER MEANT: Poems & A Theory, is forthcoming in spring 2027. She is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship in Umbria, Italy, and a Taft Research Grant from the University of Cincinnati, where she earned a PhD in Comparative Literature and Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in journals such as A Public Space, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Narrative, Tin House, PN Review (UK), and elsewhere. She has taught at universities around the US and is currently Assistant Professor of Creating Writing at the University of North Texas.

Interview conducted by Bethany Loehrlein

The following conversation took place on March 16, 2026, in person.

Bethany Loehrlein: In your hybrid essay collection, A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing, I was immediately drawn to the catalog of abstract nouns as titles. How was playing with language and experimenting with form for you?

Kimberly Grey: The book didn’t start as poems or essays, but as intellectual exercises. Rather than leaning into poetic forms or memoir, I was interested in shifting attention from narrative to mechanisms of thinking. How do we remember? How do we perceive? How does relation happen? Having titles as conceptual inquiries made the page a place where thinking could occur, rather than a place where I was simply recording the past. The intellectualization—and the use of abstract nouns as titles—were ways of navigating what I didn’t want to say, or couldn’t say, directly.

BL: Does having specific expectations for a piece limit you?

KG: Yes, but in a good way. Anytime you impose a framework or set of rules for yourself, the constraints become generative. They don’t just limit what you can say—they shape how thought itself can unfold on the page. The narrowing is productive because it forces a kind of precision, or even invention, within the boundaries you’ve set. I think of constraint less as restriction and more as a condition for making something happen. It gives you a structure to push against, something to work within and resist at the same time.

BL: I loved one specific essay’s limitation of narration to two or three sentences.

KG: Yeah, that came out of playing with narrative theory and earlier ideas about what makes a story a story. In Aristotle’s Poetics, he describes a well-formed story has a beginning, middle, and end, with each part following logically from the other. But of course, those structures don’t fully account for lived experience. That was a kind of cheeky way of avoiding too much exposition while still rendering the central rupture—which was: I had a mother, and then I didn’t.

BL: Is there a line between narrative poems and lyric essays?

KG: I don’t think there’s a particularly strong relationship between lyric essays and narrative poetry. There’s actually more in common between a lyric essay and a short story than between a lyric essay and narrative poetry, especially in terms of how narrative pressure accumulates. For me, story tends to emerge within the prose sentence—through its movement, its sequencing, its logic. If it’s not emerging that way, then it often appears as a lyric burst, something more compressed and image-driven, like in a poem. So while both forms can engage narrative, they’re operating through very different formal logics—one through the unfolding of thought in sentences, the other through the intensities of the line.

BL: It’s a writer’s intuition of which direction to go.

KG: It’s very instinctual. It comes down to the kind of inquiry you’re making. For me, the lyric essay is fundamentally a mode of thinking on the page—associative and fragmentary, but still deeply invested in the sentence. Narrative poetry may use sentences, but it primarily operates through the logic of poetry: rhythm, compression, image, line. The lyric essay is driven by the movement of thought, while narrative poetry is driven by the movement of the line.

BL: There’s some musicality, maybe?

KG: Oh, of course—but there’s musicality in every genre. We’re always working with rhythm and sound, just in different registers. So yes, there’s overlap—but also clear distinctions.

BL: I remember in our earlier workshops, you introduced Virginia Woolf’s A Sketch of the Past, her essay on reconstructing memory.

KG: Yeah, I brought that into class as I’ve been reading a lot of Woolf’s essays—the way she renders childhood memories back, and that idea of stitching or reconstructing memory. We looked at collective memory—how memory is shaped and held by groups rather than individuals; cultural memory, which gets transmitted through stories, images, and rituals; post-memory, or the way we inherit memories we didn’t directly experience but still feel shaped by; even things like prosthetic memory, where media and images can implant or simulate memory in us. What interests me is how all of these forms complicate the idea that memory is private or stable—it’s always mediated, constructed, and, in some sense, shared.

BL: In one of your essays, you quote Paul Valéry: “Every theory is a fragment of autobiography.” How has theory and research by philosophers played a role in your writing?

KG: In my PhD, I was reading theory and the history of genre, so a lot of inspiration came from that time of study—but I also think theory is such an amazing way to investigate the self and selfhood. Most of my work is auto-theoretical—auto coming from “self”—and theorizing, where lived experience and intellectual inquiry are happening at the same time on the page. It’s not just applying theory to the self, but letting the self generate theory—letting experience test, bend, or even revise the frameworks we inherit. I’m much more interested in examining other disciplines like philosophy, science, and math to understand my own experience of the world, and to see where those systems clarify something and where they fail.

BL: Any other current inspirations?

KG: I’m really interested in what memory is and our relationship to it. Right now, the people circulating in my head are theorists and scholars of memory like Maurice Halbwachs, especially his idea that memory is socially shaped rather than purely individual. I’m writing a book of essays around memory—the idea of memory as a kind of grammar. There’s a lot of engagement with Jacques Lacan’s idea that “the unconscious is structured like a language,” and I’m interested in what that might mean for how memory gets organized, distorted, or misremembered. One of the epigraphs of the book is from Emily Dickinson, where she says “memory is a strange bell”—something that resonates rather than records. I’m focusing on how memory operates, from my point of view, like a language: it has its own syntax, its own breaks, its own silences. It’s something we stitch together and remake over time. It’s not a portal, and it’s not a filing cabinet where we keep things—it’s an active, ongoing composition.

BL: What if your memory isn’t the strongest bearer of truth?

KG: My relationship to truth is very unstable. I don’t know if I really believe in truth as such. I don’t think it’s a stable or singular thing. I believe in expressing true ideas, and I think the exact details of what happened are less important. Of course, when it comes to factual truth or things that can be verified, I don’t lie—but otherwise, I feel a lot of freedom to rearrange and restitch things together.

BL: I think memory can hold imagination and fiction.

KG: Writers have to remember the way they’re presenting things. When presenting memory, readers already understand that there’s some instability at work. We remember traces, fragments, impressions—that’s how memory functions. I’d rather render or reconstruct it in a fragmented way than try to make it cohesive or create the illusion of coherence. I’m more interested in letting the pieces remain pieces—that feels more authentic to what memory is and how we experience it.

Bethany Loehrlein is an emerging poet and essayist residing in Dallas, Texas. She serves as the undergraduate fellow for American Literary Review. Her work can be found in NavyPen Lit.