What is the title of your memoir? The short piece, which opens Timber Ghost Press’ collection Out of Time: True Paranormal Encounters, is called “Floor Song Tango.” In the volume, it runs for twelve pages. What’s really cool is that we still have the creepy drawing my sister made when she was a kid that figures prominently in this history, and she gave me permission to use it, so that’s also in the book. It’s small and in black and white, but it’s there. People who want to see it larger and in color can reach out to me.
Click on the link below to purchase Out of Time: True Paranormal Encounters from Timber Ghost Press
https://www.timberghostpress.com/out-of-time1.html
What is the date you began writing this memoir and the date when you completed the memoir? I’d never actually planned to ever write about my haunted childhood home. The structure itself would often show up in my fiction, but mostly in a way that was symbolic: that house translated to oppression, decay, hopelessness, and loss due to my mother’s prolonged sickness and eventual death when I was a parentified teen. It was traumatic enough to deal with it on that level, let alone process the supernatural layer; it was too overwhelming. And yet, even though we’d sold the place in 2009, there wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t think about it and feel at best burdened, at worst angry.
LEFT: Kristi’s family in 1981 at her grandmother’s house in Daytona Beach, FL. From left, Kristi (she was 10 at the time), her baby brother Chip, her mother, who had already been sick for four years at that point—her face had already had nerves removed, so that’s why her smile is crooked—her dad, her sister Missie, and her brother Chuck. As her mother’s illness progressed, she resisted having photos taken, so not too many exist from 1982—1986. Copyright by Kristi Petersen Schoonover
MIDDLE: Kristi, left, and her sister Missie out Christmas shopping in 2017
RIGHT: Kristi’s haunted childhood home. Copyright by Kristi Petersen Shoonover
Then in the summer of 2021 I saw a call that Timber Ghost Press was looking for true paranormal stories for their collection Out of Time: True Paranormal Encounters. I’ve had a great many paranormal run-ins over the years outside of that house, but for some reason, my soul was ready to talk about my childhood home’s long-avoided supernatural layer. Writing has often been a catharsis for me, so I started thinking about it—how do you take several years of being creeped out and literally dozens of experiences in one place and communicate all of that in so few pages? It was ready to be penned on October 20. I started on that day, and gave this piece its final polish on November 14. Very often, the act of writing for me isn’t in the putting it down on the paper. It comes long before that, as it incubates, shaping itself in my head. A short piece will often take weeks or months, as ideas need to germinate in between sessions.
RIGHT: Kristi in November of 2021, having a glass of wine to mark the completion of “Floor Song Tango. Copyright by Kristi Petersen Schoonover.
Where did you do most of your writing for this memoir? And please describe in detail. When any piece of my writing—including this—is ready to emerge, there is no one place that it happens. Everything in my life stops whenever the words come—even places like the shower (I have a waterproof notepad on the wall) and the car (where I keep notepads and pens in my cup holder).
Most of the time, I write in my home office, but sometimes it’s with my laptop on the couch, or in the dining room, or wherever else I am camped out. “Floor Song Tango” was mostly written in my home office, where I sit on the floor in front of a coffee table and my laptop is up on a tilted stand to keep carpal tunnel at bay. I have two windows in there that have trees against them, so it’s a little like being up in a tree house since it’s on the second floor. The room is full of books and piles of other projects I might be working on, I have a CD player for all of my favorite musical scores, and I’m always burning a Bath & Body Works candle that’s appropriate for whatever I happen to be writing. During “Floor Song Tango,” the candle I burned was an older scent of theirs called Smoked Birch, which reminded me of the smell of my dad’s den.
RIGHT: The treehouse-like view from Kristi’s office. This is what she sees while she’s writing. Credit and Copyright by Kristi Petersen Schoonover
What were your writing habits while writing this memoir- did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day? “Floor Song Tango” was composed completely on a laptop, although various paragraphs, lines and notes were scrawled first on a variety of note papers. Note pads and pens are in every room in my home, and I don’t travel without them, either. The process for “Floor Song Tango” during the month I was working on it was to come home from work in the early evening, make coffee (I have several favorite flavors—at the time, I was really into Donut Shop brand’s Chocolate Glazed Donut), and work until about midnight.
I also usually listen to music that’s keyed to the project I’m working on—always scores, though; nothing with words. For this one, I was working to the disturbing—but lovely—score to 1980’s The Changeling.
Click on the below link to hear the opening musical score by Howard Blake, Ken Wannberg and Rick Wilkins.
Out of all the specific memories you write about in this memoir, which ONE MEMORY was the most emotional for you to write about? And can you share that specific excerpt with us here. The excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer, and please provide page numbers or Chapter number as references.
This was a difficult and intense piece to write, and I spent a great deal of time talking with my sister; we also spent lots of time looking at old photos and sorting through whatever broken junk we still owned (which wasn’t much). It made me so angry that we were living in such a dangerous house, which I figured out when the contracting were fixing it back in 2009, but to have to make lists of everything that was wrong with that place just brought me to new heights of rage, as in, how could our parents allow us to live in such an unsafe, broken place? How could anybody think this was even remotely okay? I also had to deal with old wounds and a general feeling of dread. I really didn’t want to go back there, not even in my mind.However, the hardest section to write was of the first Christmas without Mom. This section is from pages 3-4:
♦
After Mom died, the dark brown living room carpeting turned a sickly green in spots, and Dad angrily threw himself into “improvements,” among them a second shower “waterproofed” by Formica, a woodstove, and a Styrofoam “duct” through holes he cut in the walls to heat the back rooms. Part of this new “heating” strategy was sealing off my bedroom from the “walk-in closet” pass-through. It had the full-length mirror I’d been asking for, but it also had hinges, so it could be opened or easily removed.
That Christmas Eve, I’d been up until three a.m. getting ready for the big day after a long, exhausting month—there was the struggle with the twenty-foot tree, thirty dozen cookies, presents, stockings, parties, and church responsibilities. All I wanted from Santa was sleep.
Just as I was drifting off, the Floor Song played. After the final thud, the fake wall shimmied. Hard.
I sat up.
Thud.
Shimmy.
The reflection of me in the nightlight’s throw tittered.
Thud.
Shimmy.
Many holidays ago, my parents used to tuck me in on the couch next to the tree and let my Christmas Mouse music box’s “Silent Night” float me off to dreamland. It had always made me feel special. Special … and safe.
I turned on the tree lights and slept in the living room. I didn’t have the music box, but it was better than Fake Wall Bossa Nova.
A few hours later, doling out the kids’ gifts, I noticed they glittered with tiny silver shards—undoubtedly from a couple of weeks earlier. My favorite holiday activity was playing Plinko in the Christmas tree; I chucked ornaments as high as I could to see if they’d catch a branch. Most of the time they just shattered and rained glass, but there was something incredibly soothing about that sound, because the only thing my personal advent calendar counted was the number of days until my escape.
♦
Click on the below link to purchase Out of Time: True Paranormal Encounters from Amazon
Can you describe the emotional process of writing about this ONE MEMORY? I cried when I wrote that, because it took me back to not only that painful Christmas, but the interminable ones after that. It was also a bit shocking to realize that pitching glass ornaments into the tree and listening to them break was not only comforting, but a normal thing. That there was no guilt, no shame, no remorse. Clearly, anyone who saw a kid do that these days would intervene, or suggest therapy of some kind. This was a deeply disturbed teenager coping with her mother’s death by breaking stuff—and nobody said a word. My dad knew it was going on, my siblings just took joy in copycatting, and every year, that practice continued until I went off to college. As long as I was doing the chores and keeping the house running, nobody cared. I think that was the most heart-wrenching thing of all.
Kristi and her dad, December 24, 2006. Copyright by Kristi Petersen Schoonove
A writer friend of mine, Sam Rebelein, pointed out recently that trauma isn’t something you know is happening to you as the event is going on—you don’t see the damage until a long time later, and especially in this case, that was true. These days, I love Christmas. To see how awful and depressing and burdening it was back then, and relive the depths of that despair—it just ripped my heart out.
Click on the below link to view the website of Sam Rebelein
After this was written, I literally felt ten pounds lighter. I mentioned earlier in this interview that there wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t think about that house. Now, it’s firmly in my rear-view. It literally no longer has a hold on me, and the only time it ever crosses my mind now is when I see a similar furniture item we used to own when we lived there.
Since Dad’s passing, I’ve formed a new relationship with Christmas. I shop for gifts all year, I look forward to the season, I usually get all my work done ahead of time so I can enjoy it. I had to close my eyes and force myself to mentally stand in front of my parents’ massive tree and feel that moment.
BONUS 1 – In “Floor Song Tango,” Kristi and her sister went to the house to clean out tubs of keepsakes, which ended in a scary paranormal experience. This is Kristi, laughing and trying on a mildewed hat, on that actual day, just about an hour before that experience took place. Present in the background is all of the junk that’s also described in the piece. Copyright by Kristi Petersen Schoonover
BONUS 2 – In “Floor Song Tango,” one of the items found when the girls were cleaning out the house was this hat with a one-eyed doll pom-pom—modeled here by Kristi’s sister, Missie. This photo was taken on the actual day that discovery took place—and occurred about an hour before one of the key frightening paranormal incidents in the piece. Copyright by Kristi Petersen Schoonover
I also had to go back and play not only the music that was played in our home growing up—Barbra Streisand’s A Christmas Album and the Carpenters’ Christmas Portrait—I had to play the Christmas songs that make me sad, such as the version of “Blue Christmas” that appears on The Year Without a Santa Claus. Once I was in that place, I had to sit and let myself go through all of those emotions, one at a time, and feel them, and express my thoughts, free-flow, openly, in a journal (which I did by hand). Nothing was off limits. I said everything I needed to say to those people who were no longer here and to that house. Only then was I able to sit down and put all of it into language that made sense.
Click on the below link to listen to A Christmas Album by Barbara Streisand in its entirety.
https://my.mail.ru/mail/alex-enm/video/45038/573685.html
Click on the below link to listen to the Christmas Portrait by the Carpenters in its entirety.
Click on the below link to listen to “I’ll Have a Blue Christmas” form the album The Year Without Santa Claus.
Were there any deletions from this excerpt that you can share with us? No—what you read is pretty much what I wrote, the only deletions and changes being word choices and what to include.
I would like to add, though, that one aspect of memoir/creative nonfiction that’s something one must embrace is the sacrifice of whole scenes in favor of the succinct delivery of the important information from those scenes somewhere else in order to keep the pacing taut. For example, the scene in which my sister and I flee the house and take off in the car and she confesses she heard the Floor Song too when she was growing up? That happened as-written. But the rest of that day involved the two of us having long discussions about every little paranormal experience we’d had in the house. It wouldn’t have made sense, pacing-wise, to share all of the dialogue about our common experiences during the ensuing car ride, the shocked trip to the liquor store, the hanging around the pizza place, and my house. That whole sequence would’ve been just wasted space where nothing happened—because nothing did, and even just describing that in a few sentences would’ve killed the pacing and the tension of that truly intense moment; it was better to just end it there. The key with any memoir or creative nonfiction is to make sure that, even though you’re telling the truth, you’re telling it in a way that works to the story’s benefit.
Kristi Petersen Schoonover is eternally grateful to her parents for convincing her young self that the presences in her house were just in her head, because otherwise, she never would’ve slept. Her stories have appeared in many publications, most recently in Generation X-ed, Colour Out of Deathlehem, Wicked Creatures, parABnormal, and a few others. She holds an MFA from Goddard College, is founding editor of the journal 34 Orchard, and is a member of the New England Horror Writers. Follow her adventures at https://kristipetersenschoonover.com/, or at