— Jennifer Kabat, American essayist-writer
COMMITTED: I can get interested in something every day, says Jennifer Kabat. Photos by Jayan Orma
By Anand Holla
For American essayist-writer Jennifer Kabat, writing is the definitive means to process the world. The fact that she is exceedingly good at it merely stokes the fire of her unwavering fascination and deep-running curiosity for subjects that range from rural life to contemporary art — and occasionally, as Kabat puts it, “the two together”.
Kabat, who lives and writes in rural upstate New York and teaches at NYU, SVA and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, was recently awarded a Creative Capital Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in support of her arts criticism. Her work has appeared in a string of top publications such as The Guardian, The Financial Times, and New York Magazine.
Recently, Kabat was down in Doha to give a talk at the Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, on “longing and belonging” and how language, history and art inform her work on contemporary art and culture. Community caught up with the Empress of Essays:
Please take us through the process of how you work. How does it start?
It starts with something I am curious about. A lot of times it starts with art because art has its way of encoding a lot of things in one. Contemporary art can do that because it’s a little like poetry, with many things layered with each other. But even if you think about historical art, it’s like a time capsule to a moment — you can use it as a document to understand that moment. I am driven by visual culture but I am also curious about the places where I am, like I am in Qatar now and I am deeply curious about it. So it just starts with curiosity, and then, building up with some research, exploring, seeing what I learn, and going down another rabbit hole of research, and starting to find what would be the thread.
What does that mean?
When I set out to write about the landscape where I live, I didn’t set out to tell the story about weather modification. I did some research and found that this had happened and it became a kind of narrative. So, as I go, it reveals itself.
What sort of subjects or narratives interest or affect you?
Right now, I’m interested in what a place says about us. History impacts the present but a lot of times we don’t see it. When I mean history, I don’t mean (the usual sense of it). I am talking about the fact that somebody walked on that street, did something on that street, put something up there, and then something else happened. I am talking about very little things. I am interested in the microscopic things that reveal people and their intentions. Of course, not everything people do is worth exploring. So there’s obviously some editing function at play there.
What do you plan to do with such narrative insights?
I often hope that I don’t have to think about it because as you can tell, I think about way too many things. So, for me, the process is more about thinking about less stuff. So I try to not look at too much contemporary art, because if I do, I have to think about that art, understand it, grapple with it, which means grappling with more stuff. Sometimes, I want to shut down and put the blinders on. That was originally why I moved to the middle of nowhere so that I didn’t have to be confronted by stuff all the time. But then, that became my subject.
It seems people don’t really get to hear of or access essays today. How relevant is essay to our time?
Essay is going through a huge renaissance right now. Essay’s list form is way more relevant to the moment. It’s this weird thing that has happened. Partly because the book industry has imploded, people don’t read such long things, but people still want longer things. So essay becomes this form that’s long for the Internet. In a new, very condensed world, 5,000 words is a long read. It has a weight. So it’s like the new form of a book in a way. It’s interesting because there are places to write essays in the US. There is the big Notting Hill Edition’s biennial essay prize in the UK, which I was just a finalist for — it’s like the Booker Prize but it’s for a single essay. So I think essay is going through the biggest renaissance it has had… since the Renaissance, since Montaigne (laughs).
How can people access these essays? How does it work in your case?
Sometimes, I write for free. The Rainmaker’s Flood, my essay on human attempts to manipulate weather, will soon run in Harper’s and is also being published by Notting Hill editions because they did a book of all the winners. So essays get published in these disparate places. But I am working on one book that’s pulling together all of my essays; it’s kind of a way of exploring art, landscape, modernism, and it’s called Growing up Modern. It starts with this modernist house I grew up in, goes to my backyard in the Catskills, and looks at the values that get imbued in specific places.
Does the social media or popular media interest you enough to focus on writing for that space?
Totally. One of the ways I started writing essays was with a bunch of friends, I formed a group called The Weeklings. We created this site only because we wanted to write essays. We were all reasonably successful writers who created this collaborative together. It originally started out when we each had to write one essay for each day of the week, which was deadly. I lasted for six months. Now we have other writers who write and I mostly edit. It was a kind of a proving ground, what we could do with this.
You try to spot in the present the vestiges of the past. How much effort does looking for meaning by analysing “history” involve?
A lot. But it’s also about curiosity. I have been working on drones for a year. I have had to read war department reports from the 1870s, from these expeditions out west. They are terribly boring and are hidden in these huge congressional reports. They are volumes long. Why do I read them? Because it’s not enough to just make an assertion. If you are going to talk about these big concepts like American art and drones, and are going to mash them up together, you better have some ground, history, something that gives it a context.
What keeps you interested in this space?
I can get interested in something every day. I am very curious. The world holds many things that fascinate me. The hard part is to maintain interest. I have had a long-term project of writing about the community where I grew up — outside of Washington DC, in a community of modern glass-houses that were built just after WWII. All the original residents were like state department employees, CIA agents, those who had worked on the Marshall plan, and so on. So, here’s this place that was about a Cold War ideology but everyone was really progressive and very liberal. I am very interested in how the aesthetics of place — as they tied the modernism of their homes to their values — tied into these other ideas. Also, how that community represented those ideas. It becomes something that you want to both unknot and re-knot.
As for time, how many days does it take for you to write an essay?
It depends. When I am teaching, I don’t write much but I do research. Writing is a lot of rewriting. I take about three months or more for the usual essay, which are about 7,000 words. I revisit it a lot of times. Sometimes, you fail your ideas in your words. So you need to fix those. And sometimes, your words can be more poetic, so you need to fix those. And then, at some point, you have to stop niggling with stuff and tell yourself — now that’s good enough!
In the coming years, will people still be interested in a form as seemingly heavy as essay?
Who knows! For me, writing essays is like writing poetry. Poetry has a limited audience. You earn a limited amount of money from it. It’s a niche. Writing essays will always probably be a niche because I write weird essays. But it’s my art form. So that’s fine.
