interview with Kristi D. Osorio

Kristi D. Osorio is the author of the memoir The Sound of Burning: a Mother, a Daughter, a Murder (University of Georgia Press, 2026). In 2023, she won the Indiana Review Creative Nonfiction Prize selected by Camonghne Felix and the Sonora Review “Mercy” Contest in Nonfiction selected by Maggie Nelson. 

If grief can turn into a spectator sport, something people prod at with podcasts, cop shows, and condolences, then Kristi D. Osorio’s writing is the moment the room goes quiet and you realize you’re the one being watched. Her sentences move with a razor-bright intimacy, equal parts mordant and tender, refusing the tidy arc of “tragedy” in favor of what trauma actually feels like: repetitive, invasive, weirdly ordinary, and always alive in the body. She braids time without announcing the seams, slips from dark humor to dread in a single breath, and uses cultural noise not as decoration but as indictment, a chorus that exposes how easily pain becomes entertainment. At the center is a narrator who won’t perform purity or easy forgiveness; instead, Osorio writes the lived cost of survival with unsentimental precision, turning the most personal details into proof of personhood. The result is prose that doesn’t ask for your pity, it takes back the story.

We interviewed Kristi about her piece, Matricide Makes People Say, published in The Palisades Review. Read that story here and read her interview below.

TPR: The essay is composed almost entirely of other people’s voices: condolences, speculation, pop-culture references, invasive questions. What drew you to this structure as the best way to tell this story?

Kristi: I wrote this piece during my time as a Fellow at the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop two summers ago, where I was working with the poet Nabila Lovelace and some of the most talented young people I’ve ever met. That program is very poetry-heavy, and as someone who loves reading poetry and is married to a poet (!), I look at poetry and think it’s the most intimidating, terrifying genre. I simply never felt confident enough to work in that more poetic mode. Nabila and the young writers that summer really inspired me to concern myself less with the traditions and boundaries of genre, so that was how I ended up with this piece that resembles a prose poem more than it does an essay. I thought, what if dialogue didn’t have dialogue tags? What if there was no end and no beginning? What if there were no scenes? What if I didn’t speak at all? I could have easily written a two thousand word piece on the various offensive and strange comments I’ve heard over the years, but it was very freeing to feel like I didn’t need to write a traditional longform essay to get my point across. I also learned what a bleeding title was from Nabila, and I loved getting to try that out!

TPR: There’s no explicit response from the “you” being addressed. How did silence function for you as a narrative choice? What does withholding the speaker’s interiority allow the piece to do?

Kristi: I’m really interested in the ways in which, especially in our culture that is obsessed with true crime, we engage with families of murder victims and families of people who commit murder. I happen to fall into both categories, and I can say both are treated really uniquely in our culture. Often, I’ve found, we don’t actually engage with people who’ve had these experiences. We don’t listen to them. We imagine what it must have been like. We put words in their mouths. We compare it to the worst thing we’ve seen on TV. Then we go and tell someone about it. This was and has been my experience from the very first round of questioning I endured the night of the murder at fifteen, to testifying at the trial a year later, to sharing my work in writing workshops since then. My origin story as a nonfiction writer is actually that a boy I had a crush on Googled me, about two years after the murder, and the things that came up were my mother’s mugshot and news articles about what happened. This was horrifying to me. I was so sick with shame over it. It’s enough to make you want to hide in a dark room and never come out. And it continued to happen, especially as Googling everything and everyone became more common in the 2010s. I had to do something. I wondered, what if I rewrite the story? What if, when someone looks up my name, my version of events comes up instead? What if my picture comes up, or the one and only existing picture of me with my grandmother? I thought that would be empowering, a path toward reclamation. So I registered as an English/creative writing major in undergrad with that as my goal. To return to the piece, as much as I have thought about writing as an opportunity to retell the story in my words, I love how this one does the opposite. Writing memoir, especially about trauma, involves so much looking in the mirror. After finishing my first book last year, I am so tired of looking in mirrors. The silence here not only subverts my own idea about what my writing “should” do, but it forces the reader to look in the mirror for a change.  

TPR: The piece reads almost like a single, breathless paragraph of interruption. How did you think about pacing and accumulation while writing it?

Kristi: My friend and colleague, the poet Jess Smith, has a poem in her book Lady Smith (University of Akron Press, 2025) called “Things People Say to Me After.” She calls the poem, which is about her experience of intimate partner violence, a cento. The lines consist of the comments and questions people inundated her with when they found out she had been abused, ranging from instances of victim blaming to sympathy and everything in between. I heard Jess speak about that poem at an event about gender based violence last semester, and wondered if my piece in Palisades might be considered a cento, too. I had never thought of my work fitting into a tradition like that. (Again, you can see the poets have really gotten into my head!). They really are just lines other people have said to me over the years, even immediately after it happened. I think a container like this is perfect for writing about the unspeakable, especially acts of violence. My favorite line of this piece is the one where someone asks, “Actually, did you know matricide is really rare?” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that. People always want to give you little factoids about the worst thing you’ve ever experienced in your life. It’s such an odd human reaction after hearing something awful. Being connected to a horrific crime like this in a small town–a thing that should have been private but was actually very public–was overwhelming. I felt exposed but at the same time completely invisible. I felt like nothing I said was right–in my interrogations, in my testimony, even now, almost eighteen years later, when I try to give presentations or readings. I never know how exactly to say the thing. It’s overwhelming, and I really wanted to invoke that feeling of overwhelm, but just for a brief moment. 

TPR: This piece engages with public curiosity around private grief. How did you navigate writing about trauma without re-centering the violence itself?

Kristi: In addition to my work as a creative nonfiction writer, I have a secondary interest in archival studies, which has informed how I work with archival materials related to the murder. I am really interested in what’s known as postcustodial archiving, which sort of decenters the traditional “powerholder” who might “own” a record. This process, in contrast to traditional archiving where an archivist may be seen as a gatekeeper, allows for a kind of repair work to take place. In the process of writing my book, I have worked directly with a variety of artifacts from the crime: police records, interrogations, newspaper articles, even the autopsy report—records I had never seen before, and some I now wish I’d never seen at all. Some of those are referenced in this piece. At first, having these records in my home–”owning” them, so to speak–was really hard for me. In these pages, my grandmother’s humanity, my humanity, my brother’s humanity–it’s almost completely erased. The records are cold and their only concern is describing the violence. Describing the blood. Describing “the scene.” My task as a writer is to call attention to and restore that humanity. I love that little moment in the piece where someone talks about the way my grandmother spoke–she was a 68-year-old poker dealer who swore more than anyone I’ve ever met. She was so unique and memorable to people in our community. It’s like, in the midst of all this actual horror, there was once a fully dimensional human being who has been reduced to a headline. That happens to murder victims a lot. I really want to push back against that with my work. To go back to the archive, no one gets to “own” my grandmother, the murder victim. No one gets to “own” my brother and me, the witnesses. We don’t just exist in those records. The story is ours.

TPR: How do you know when a piece like this is finished, especially when it’s built from fragments and voices rather than a traditional arc?

Kristi: As an MFA student, when I had my thesis defense almost ten years ago now, one of my thesis readers called my project (an early iteration of my memoir) “a litany of horrors.” That phrase has always stuck with me. It was pretty mortifying to hear. At first, I felt defensive: but the thing I experienced feels like a litany of horrors! Now I have come to think about that phrase as a sort of permission to keep some things to myself. To write memoir, you don’t have to write down everything that ever happened to you from the moment you were born. You don’t have to give them every gory detail (even though they may really want that). With a piece like this, where I was doing something very different than anything I’ve ever done, I thought, I get to decide what this is going to be. I don’t have to meet a certain word count or craft a series of scenes that take a horrible thing and make it beautiful. This doesn’t have to “fit” into anything. I have called this piece a micro-essay, and I’ve also since wondered about the term cento, but I’m not even sure what it is, and I love that for me. This piece was very freeing to write in ways I really needed at the time.   

TPR: What do you hope readers take away from this piece?

Kristi: I wrote this piece two years ago now, and revisiting it for this conversation feels fraught in a new way. I am always thinking about how we talk about violence. I am always thinking about the ways we dehumanize the people to whom violence is done. Although my experience of that night and of my mother’s incarceration is very unique to me, it has shaped the way I see the world and how I think about ongoing issues that might seem disconnected on the surface: the war in Gaza, the endless school shootings, the incarcerations of migrant children, the recent murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. What I hope someone reading this today might think about is, how are we extending our empathy to people whose physical bodies, whose entire lives are reduced to a headline? How are we using and exploiting their names and bodies on social media? What is our responsibility as witnesses? How are we talking about their lives, their identities, their deaths? How do we restore their humanity?

TPR: Can you describe your writing routine? Do you have specific habits or rituals that help you write?

Kristi: Because my work is so emotionally demanding, I need to have physical boundaries in order to write. I can’t write anywhere near my bedroom, for example, because a bedroom is where the murder happened. I also can’t write at night for the same reason. This presents challenges sometimes (take, for instance, the pandemic–I didn’t write a single word!), so it’s important for me to have specific times and places when and where I can write. I am really lucky that my university has weekly writing groups for faculty, where you meet in a room for three hours and work independently and have brief check-ins. I would not have finished my book if not for those groups. Writing, for me, is a huge physical and mental lift, so I like to treat it the same way I might think about exercising, getting a massage, or doing EMDR therapy. It can be draining, but if you take good care after, it can be energizing, too. Drink lots of water. Have some kind of cool down/closure moment to put a lid on whatever you just did. Take a deep breath. Get rest. That really helps me protect myself while still being productive.  

TPR: When you’re working on a story, what comes first for you: the emotion you want to invoke, or the event you want to describe?

Kristi: That’s a really interesting question. I’m not sure I ever know what emotion my work is going to invoke in a reader. This piece shows how strangely people respond to the fact of a murder, and I would say sometimes people respond just as strangely to reading my writing about murder. I think it’s different every time, every piece of writing. Sometimes I’ll get inspired (read: triggered) by something in the world or in my life and feel compelled to write about it from my unique positionality. Lately, I’ve felt very activated by the discourse around the murders of Rob and Michele Reiner, which I know you actually published a piece about after it happened. The same happened when four college students in Idaho were killed in their home a few years ago. Watching the way our culture responds to murders, especially stabbing murders, which are so much more rare, has led me to some interesting places in my newer work where I’m thinking about larger societal issues that feel connected to my story now that I have finished my memoir.

TPR: Are there writers whose work you return to again and again? Who are your biggest literary influences?

Kristi: Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts is the book I return to always. I love Cristina Rivera Garza’s Liliana’s Invincible Summer. I love Sarah Perry’s After the Eclipse. I love, and would not be the writer I am today without, Lacy M. Johnson’s The Other Side. Most of these “trauma memoirs” engage to some extent with archival materials. Diaries, police records, external research, cultural artifacts that represent how we think about violence. I also love the lyric essay, so I love Eula Biss and basically everything in Seneca Review. I love white space. I love numbers and sections. I love a braid. I love work that is not tied to any sort of linear time or chronology, because that is how surviving a traumatic event feels. Time isn’t real! Nothing matters! You can’t make sense of something senseless! I love when the work embodies that senselessness on the page. 

TPR: What’s one piece of craft advice you frequently give to yourself as a writer?

Kristi: You know when you say something mean about yourself in front of your therapist, and then they’re like, “Would you ever say that about your student, or your friend, or your sibling?” And the answer is: no! Of course not. I try to keep that in mind when it comes to my work because I can be really hard on myself. Writing is such hard work. We have to be kind to ourselves. Lacy M. Johnson talks about writing The Other Side with a cover over her computer screen so she couldn't actually see the words as they were coming out. That feels so real to me. Having this life-altering traumatic experience at such a young age made me so angry at the world for so long, and the world is not a gentle place. I loved this recent Jennette McCurdy interview on NPR where she called anger a “mobilizing” emotion and talked about how it really empowers her after enduring a lifetime of trauma and abuse. That resonates with me so much. Now I try to channel that unresolved anger into softness and gentleness. My writing advice to myself is probably: be gentle to yourself, to the work, and to the world.

‍ ‍ Kristi D. Osorio