Jennifer Kabat’s The Eighth Moon and Nightshining are forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2024 and 2025. Her essays are sweeping histories that interleave socialism, modernism, and science with her own longing for a way to understand socialism and democracy today. Included in Best American Essays, her writing has also appeared in McSweeney’s, BOMB, The New York Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, Granta, and The White Review, among others. She frequently writes for Frieze and has contributed to artists’ monographs and museum catalogues including London’s Victoria & Albert museum.

Nightshining has been supported by a Silvers Foundation grant, and early research from the book was a finalist for Notting Hill Editions’ essay prize and subsequently published by Harper’s. The Eighth Moon grew from an essay in Granta.

She often collaborates with artists, including working with Kate Newby on a rolling site-specific project The January February March, and with Marlene McCarty in Buffalo, NY exploring capitalism, modernism and invasive weeds. For Coffee House Press, she wrote “A Dangerous Ornamental” on filing for unemployment and foraging for weeds, examining structural unemployment.

Her writing has been supported by grants from SUNY Albany, NYSCA and NYFA as well as a residency at Headlands Center for the Arts. Part of the core faculty of the design research MA at SVA, she is on the advisory board for the poetry collective Ugly Duckling Presse. An apprentice herbalist, she is most proud of serving on her local fire department. @jenkabat

Where were you born and raised? How did it influence your writing and your thinking about the world? I grew up in a modernist subdivision of glass houses outside Washington, DC. And it was a bastion of left leaning values, where also nature --inside/outside--boundaries disappeared. It has a bylaw preventing fences, and its earliest residents created cooperatives for everything. That porousness and permeability, that sense of dissolving into the world around me, feels central to my writing and thinking, but so too politics. And then there is that wild Modernist dream (the one conveyed in, say, architecture and design, not so much the literature) that our stuff could change the world. It's radical and strange and a fairytale realm. Maybe not so surprisingly after my parents died, I wanted to rebuild their home in a field in upstate NY - which was the starting point in some ways for both The Eighth Moon and Nightshining.

What kind of reader were you as a child? What books made you fall in love with reading as a child? I read and loved books about wild children being wild in the world. I still love My Side of the Mountain, which is about a boy who runs away from home and learns to live and forage on his own. It's set in my county seat, Delhi NY, and it is actually a great guide to foraging (though the kid in it -- Sam-- eats some plants that I would never since they are so rare).

Describe your typical writing day. A typical day feels itself atypical, given that I have retreated to bed and written off my writing on this very day. And, it depends on where I am in the process. If I am just starting (today) it can be miserable and I try to be gentle. I use a timer, set it for 45 minutes then leave my desk and try to keep my expectations low. I need to go for walks and for me I find comfort or companionship in the plants and plant adjacent species around me, looking at horsetails and moss and lichen. They feel like friends and it feels strange to write about here but that might be the biggest part of my writing is thinking about and researching the world around me. I also stick notes up across the wall as I go. I don't like the linearity of writing. It comes bound with so much: chronology, which itself smuggles in ideas about progress and then capitalism and colonialism. I stick these notes up so they work by being adjacent and I can move them around, which makes my writing more thematic than linear. The whole process is pretty messy. The lichen keep me real or at least grounded. I love their conjoined partnership of fungi and algae, this idea of not being separate or individual. That too helps by taking some of the me/the selfhood out...

Tell us about the creative process behind your most well-known work or your current writing project. Nightshining and The Eighth Moon are a diptych (though they actually read as separate books, so don't fear if you read one and not the other) but they grew out of so much- -maybe the compost of time and ideas. I wanted to write about time and how linear time broke for me, and Chris Kraus wanted me to write about moving to the Catskills. Somehow, one and the other became linked as ideas. In moving here too I got obsessed with trying to understand the values held in this place-- and there were two historic events here that felt important to me as I started to learn about them. The first was a socialist uprising in the 1840s and the other a flood caused by weather manipulation in 1950 (caused by what had been a Cold War weapon Kurt Vonnegut's brother created for GE). Somehow, both of those felt like ways to understand this moment, that uprising had parallels to Trumpism but opposite ends, and that weather manipulation became geoengineering and a way for me to think about climate change and all the floods I've experienced here.

Or, maybe in this world where I am porous and grew up with all being interconnected in that modernist house I saw them as all connected. Anyway, telling those histories, writing about time and writing itself, and place, and my parents-- I was convinced that these books could hold that. I was really interested too in Nathalie Leger's triptych, where she was writing about women artists, and those books were in fact a reflection of her parents' marriage. (It helped to have a model).

And some of it too was ripping apart a memoir I'd tried to write about rebuilding my parents' house. That book was too tightly woven, too narrative, linear, and chronological for the way my thinking worked. That book was overstuffed-- it felt claustrophobic-- and also I didn't want to write about building. So the building got reduced to a sentence or two but the things that mattered to me my feelings about narrative or constructing a self to fit into a narrative became more central to the books themselves.

Do you keep a journal or notebook? If so, what’s in it? I do-- mostly lists and strange notes. I like to write longhand and have a ton of different notebooks around, like yellow legal pads which I inherited from my father (both literally and otherwise). When he died, there were a ton in my parents' house, and I adopted them, but also, even before that, I had started to write in ones too, I think because he had.

How do you research, and what role does research play in your writing? I can't write without research. I don't feel like I have any standing without it. I tried to write fiction-- have an MA in Creative Writing (fiction) from UEA, but just at this point fiction is not my form. I need research. I love connecting ideas across time, seeing how they are held in a place, shaped by that place and then they in turn shape the place where they exist... But really, the books try to physicalize the act of research, that moment when you're in an archive and the wood grain in the table you're sitting at seems to march and move and you go cross-eyed, and the facts on the pages swim and start to come to life. I find that for me, research starts to move into my world, and the dead seem to be alive and with me. There were moments as I was reading a poor tenant farmer's lease from the 1830s, and the woman who signed it only used an X, and the deed recorder got her name wrong and between those two things-- her inability to read or even write her own name and how the man who held authority misidentified her-- a world opened up. In that lease, too, they had to sign away so many rights, and the sadness for me was physical but also felt held in the paper itself, in the stains and the way the ink bled.

Which writer, living or dead, would you most like to have dinner with? I feel like I could have too many answers for this. I remember writing my college essay about wanting to have dinner with Frederich Engels, and I think I'll go with that still. (I love his writing on marriage and how he loved his life partner yet believed marriage was a tool of capitalism). Then maybe after that let's say Adrienne Rich (childhood fave poet for her activism). George Eliot-- I want to talk to her about seaweed (which she loved). And I have so many writers I love who are alive who I would love to meet to learn about their processes too: Amitav Ghosh, Lisa Robertson.... I feel like my list could be endless, and then we'd be building something like Borges' map that would keep going and growing until all writers were here with me as I type.

Do you draw inspiration from music, art, or other disciplines?
Yes-- I am also an art writer and love criticism as a form, but especially thinking about and responding to visual art. As a form, it's hybrid and compressed with ideas being manifested non-linearly and held in a single object. In a way it's like poetry, but for me a writer who pushes against linear time and the idea that a narrative unfolds in a single direction (even on a sentence level I feel like writing pushes us into linear thinking), I love writing on art, because it's a way of thinking laterally but also thinking alongside of. I have been lucky enough to write of artists like Ellen Lesperance and Rochelle Feinstein and others whose work also feels like the essay form in how it pulls ideas through their visual practices. I happily could go on and on about this, and looking at art makes me want to write, to talk about and think about the ideas being manifested before me.

AI and technology are changing the ways we write and receive stories. What are your reflections on AI, technology, and the future of storytelling? And why is it important that humans remain at the center of the creative process? Well I am hardly the only one who has had their work stolen by AI to train a machine. I don't have enough language here to unpack how strange that is. One of the essays it used was the one that grew into my book Nightshining. It's about war and weather, so that machine learning (which was also a tech fantasy at that time the geoengineering in that essay and the book was developed) then stole those ideas from me... well, another line goes here with all that is impossible to say. And it's not just cruel ironies. It is also something about the erosion of intellectual and academic freedoms now, that we think it is okay for machines to take this. That is also about undervaluing thinking and ideas today in our country. Maybe more than that is this line that Damian Barr wrote about AI and its taking his work: "Oh and Every ‘fun’ query on ChatGPT wastes the equivalent of a bottle of water from cooling the vast data centres needed to fuel this venture based entirely on theft. So, yes, it’s adding to the harm our planet is enduring." More than my language, I am angry about this-- the energy and sheer waste...

Tell us about some books you've recently enjoyed and your favorite books and writers of all time. Right now I am reading two books-- Claire-Louise Bennett's Checkout 19 and Helene Bessette's Lili is Crying (trans. Kate Briggs). I love these both so much. The Bennett is just this beautiful, delirious book about reading and writing, and her language is full of so much beautiful joy in it. Then I'm reviewing Lili and wanted to because I found the language so sparse, with so few extraneous details. Like it feels like a wild experiment in modernism. The book was written in 1953 and Bessette essentially disappeared, and here is Briggs who as a translator found Bessette's voice to be amazing, moving, powerful... I feel so lucky to be in this world right now with lines like "It's night-time, cold white electric light illuminates..." 
I'm also rereading Lynne Tillman's short fiction, thinking about that too, and how the characters are all porous with the world around them. I remember first reading her when I was 20? 21? and it was a revelation, also comic and tragic in one fell swoop and felt like the city alive in the work. But in Bessette and Lynne Tillman, both of them have a kind of flatness that I love, where the details of the world around them bleed into the characters without their having to hold the strange weight of detail that realist fiction demands. Daisy Hildyard wrote about that level of detail in realist fiction in a review in the NYR calling it an "ethos of annihilation." Instead in these women's writing (in Hildyard's too which I love and Kate Briggs own writing) detail does something much weirder and stranger that also doesn't have to mirror a character's emotions.

The Importance of Arts, Culture & The Creative Process
You've interviewed people who have been really central to my thinking and writing like Paul Chaat Smith, who is also a dear friend, and for me, writing is lonely, or okay, maybe not lonely because I keep going out to hang out with the lichen, but it is done alone. It is highly individual and individualizing, and for me, that's a problem, that replicates the world we live in, where isolation is part of capitalism vs our coming together, and I crave community (see the lichen) but also in partnerships and shared world, words, realms with other writers and artists. I want forms that can break down our isolation, and for me, to me, that is what The Creative Process offers...

Interviewed by Mia Funk

Nightshining
Excerpt by Jennifer Kabat

I visit the reservoir, and the water is low. It is before the summer solstice, and the winter hasn’t produced enough snow. Spring brings a drought and a season of brushfires. The reservoir holds the river’s path. The East Branch is still there, beneath the surface, still following the river’s memory and the laws of hydrology.

I stand on the shore, and most people just see how bucolic it is: boats on the water and people fishing. I see the river beneath the reservoir, but I cannot see the town, not the three churches or train station or rooming houses, not the post office in the general store, not the next village up—Steve’s village that you could see from the bridge— not the bridge itself that collapses as the water rises because the bridge is too sad to leave.

I study maps trying to make the edges hold, and Gary has also told me there was once an acid factory at the water’s edge, making acetate for weapons and explosives and commercial dyes. In dry years, the old roads rise from the water, and I imagine Gary that child in the film on his tricycle.

Below here was a place called Pepacton. Originally pronounced paw-pachton, it was a Munsee community, then the name is said as pee-packton by white settlers, with the accent on the “pee.” Now the village is gone but it is still the reservoir’s name, said with a sigh, puh, like a puff of air. It means the place where calamus flowers—sweet flag—grow, and it makes me think of Walt Whitman and his poem cycle in Leaves of Grass, where the plant’s erect spadix becomes a stand-in for his quest for “the manly love of comrades.”

Even being so dry, the light flashes through the trees, glistening as if lit with life itself and a taste in the air of late spring. Most of the flowers here are weeds, marginal plants of marginal places—fields turning to forests, plants of disturbances and ditches, plants for the overlooked. They hold this place. Poison hemlock (the flower, not the tree) spills its loose umbels, and golden Alexanders grow in tight explosions. While Iris was pregnant, she told me that umbel means sustenance delivered to nodes—like Queen Anne’s lace or the placenta and the umbilical cord.

Low-hugging violets with heart-shaped leaves clutch the ground. There is clover and agrimony, motherwort (calming, good for the heart), mugwort (bringer of dreams). I tally the names and hold them close: honeysuckle takes over old farm fields and forest edges, creating a haven for birds; wild lettuce (pain relief to rival opium); mint; dandelion; strawberry; sedge; plantain (good for cuts); Saint John’s Wort (depression); dock and common nettle (both iron and mineral rich); daylily; daisy; dame’s rocket; herb Robert (the Robert of its name unclear, but it repels mosquitos and fights infections. One of my sisters tells me that this tiny pink cranesbill always reminds her of our dad, and he, too, is with me here right now). There is touch-me-not and goldenrod, months from blooming. I’m sure the plants know something of the ground and what it needs.

At water’s edge a thick steel chain encircles an ash tree. The bark grows around the metal. The trunk absorbs the lock into its flesh as if to say You will not have private property here. Or, to insist that this is a shared space. I find no calamus, though. Instead garlic mustard thrusts its long green seed heads into the air. Walt Whitman writes:

(For I must change the strain—these are not to be
pensive leaves, but leaves of joy)

There is something else in this reservoir built for the greater good. In the parched ground, by broken glass and a beer can’s pull tab, slender, nodding heads emerge. They peer just above the soil. I have stumbled on a secret, and the whole place feels like a secret, the promises of a river and its currents, and here is this flower. It has no leaves, no green, no chlorophyll, no way to get nutrients from the soil. How it survives is a mystery. The tea-pink stem is the shade of my inner arm. Its petals are veined, with a slim purple outline on the edges, and they beg hello. There is this tiny flower’s nodding head, and the golden hairs in its mouth, yellow tongues as if to speak, and what would they say? This relation of beauty from dry, cracking earth.

Each stem bears a single bloom, and the ones yet to open look like periscopes, trying to learn something of this world. I picture Gary. He tells me of visiting in another drought. He comes in his good sneakers when the water is low. And, I come over and over to visit this tiny plant.

Look closely at its downy hairs like tender skin. The flower has had multiple names. Sometimes they include ghost. Sometimes its name is given as orobanche uniflora, sometimes aphyllon. The original name, the orobanche comes from the Greek for strangling. Sometimes it is introduced as single flower cancer root, not because it cures or causes cancer but because it gets its nutrients from other plants. It is an “obligate parasite,” or a “benign” one. This ghost flower spends most of its life underground, possibly years waiting to sense a chemical from the goldenrod. Scientists know little of this single flower. It is chemotropic, growing toward something in goldenrod’s miniscule rootlets, thinner than a single hair. I return over and over to visit these pale pink flowers. Maybe they self-fertilize? Maybe a bee does? Maybe both? One person records a honeybee on the flower in 1929. Maybe it is an annual, maybe a semiperennial taking years to emerge, only to flower fleetingly and go to seed. I see its shared existence in the tiny hairs and knotted roots of the goldenrod. I see the public, I see us. And, I see Gary, and I hear Steve talk about the reservoir and its water. We have it they need it. Of course we share.

This flower is endangered in seventeen states. I visit it until I can no longer find it. The blooms don’t seem to die. They are just gone. I read about this cancer root, “It appears unexpectedly, only to disappear and reappear in the same habitat.” Gary returns searching for his lost home and finds his toys from his childhood in the mud one summer of drought. He walks on a road that is right now water. Next to his garage where there had been a dirt cellar, he finds a truck, a tractor, and a toy monkey. I hear him say, all this time . . . it’s just a body of water. And, he tells me, I’ve only been twice. The bridge, of course, is still there. You know, he says, you know.