When Kate Zambreno and Elvia Wilk visited Pioneer Works last winter to speak at Press Play—our annual fair of books, small presses, records, art, ephemera, and publications of all kinds—it was clearly a reunion of minds that have long been in conversation. The occasion was the release of Zambreno’s new book The Light Room, a memoir of the pandemic that explores what months of sheltering in place, then years of living with “the new normal,” looked like for the author’s family and community. The book’s title comes from what Zambreno imagines as the “translucencies” of her mind’s explorations, observing her internal world against the backdrop of works of artists and writers who also accompanied her during this time—including Joseph Cornell, Natalia Ginzburg, Italo Calvino, David Wojnarowicz, and Hiroshi Sugimoto (whose resonance she also reflected on in a contribution to our series, “13 Ways of Looking”).

Wilk, who is a regular contributor to Broadcast—most recently reporting on a Land Back artist’s movement to rematriate an Indigenous mound—found much to explore through Zambreno’s reframing of caretaking and creating work, which she conceives not as vocations in opposition but as a mutually reinforcing dialectic. The writers spoke of their shared interest in speculative fiction and aesthetics in the time of climate crisis, as well as the way in which understandings of community and kinship function in The Light Room. As much as it is about togetherness, the book is also about the internal solitude of the artist’s mind making sense of a seminal moment—and the tension and creativity specific to such a mind when it also happens to belong to a mother. Together, Wilk and Zambreno pored over shared themes and interests as if looking through an album of photographs and their negatives.

—The Editors

The Light Room is really special. It is a light in dark times. There were all these little Easter eggs in it that coincided with my time in lockdown, in Brooklyn, which is when and where the book mainly takes place. It’s structured by the seasons and pays intense attention to minor changes in the landscape, to objects and places that I was familiar with. So it felt very intimate to me in that way, but one need not have survived the pandemic in Prospect Heights or somewhere in the five boroughs to feel very connected with the work.

This book, which is so much about isolation—so much about your time trapped with your family, when many of us were trapped with our loved ones—also feels very social; this is partly because of the sense of connectedness that happens through mutual isolation, when your friendships and other relationships occur virtually, in the ether. So I'm curious to talk a little bit about that tension between isolation and connection in your work at large. But also, when I was thinking about community and kinship, there is a huge group of artists and writers in The Light Room who are no longer with us. That's something I also do a lot in my work: find connections with an intergenerational or historical community whose projects have persisted through time, because you have to believe in some kind of legacy. A lot of The Light Room is about caretaking other people's work and reinterpreting it.

Before The Light Room there was a loose idea for an essay that later became the book’s second part, “Hall of Ocean Life.” I had begun thinking about the artist David Wojnarowicz before the pandemic; I was asked to give a talk on poetry and religion, and I didn't really know what that meant, not being religious nor a poet. So to me that meant thinking about Wojnarowicz’s grief journals with their gorgeous descriptions of animals and the environment. In the book I was trying to find other models of being an artist that felt like just a form of being in the world, like also Derek Jarman's gardening journals or Natalia Ginzburg's essays about being in exile with her family. And I think that's what Wojnarowicz especially was for me: can you be an activist and a writer and a thinker? Can you attempt to think about the world but also want to make beautiful things?

There has been a struggle to try to ask what kind of writer I want to be. And at some point I realized I wanted to be part of a community. I'm not the most special. I don't need to be the shiniest. I don't need to be the center of attention. It is about engaging with something that feels deeper and bigger than the self. I think for me the past few books have been really assertive in making meaning through others as opposed to just myself. Who are your elective affinities, dead or alive, and how can writing be that sort of conversation?

You have to invent a way of being, because the ways of being that we're given are not good—or they're not good enough. So you have to combine and you have to invent. The subtitle of The Light Room is “On Art and Care.” Thinking about your community—alive or dead—in art, writing, and literature is one way you do this, and another is by constantly thinking about the relationship between art and caregiving. The book has a lot of your kids in it. They're delightful characters, and the intense intimacy and stickiness of those relationships while being really, really together for quite a long period of time [during lockdown] is really one of the beautiful things about the book.

There's a long history of women-identified writers, especially, dealing with the supposed opposition between caretaking and creating work. And I find your book is doing something really unusual and interesting and new—it's reframing or refusing to see them as competing, while acknowledging constantly there will never be enough of both. Or that both of them will always be demanding more than we can ever give and get.

There's so many narratives about parenting while being an artist or a writer, and I think it's probably true [that they’re only in tension] if your only goal in life is just to succeed at one thing and that's it. I’m probably in some ways spread way too thin. I don't have enough time. But I never really had this Renaissance concept of a studioli, the space you go to to work. Most people who live in a city don't have that because of housing issues. Most of us don't have studios, most of us don't have these open spaces we can go to and be ourselves. Early on when I was pregnant with my first, I wrote Drifts, which deals a lot with the agony of, "Oh, I'll never be viewed as this solitary male genius." But I wouldn't be anyway, to be honest, and I don't think it's just because I was pregnant or had children. I realized it's not children, it's capitalism. The answer is always capitalism. While there isn't enough time and there’s always scarcity, I think it is important for us to rethink what it means to be an artist.

I constantly tell myself that even if it feels like everything is scarce, that I can act like it's not. There could be an abundance of care and attention and resources if we pooled them in a different way.

So much of The Light Room is just beginning to try doing that work. Beyond being home with my children, it was experiencing cooperative parenting pods. It was essentially the idea of socialism; we're going to watch each other's kids, we're going to be together. And that was just the beginning of me being like, "Oh, maybe it doesn't always have to feel like this." There is a possible abundance, but there's always this ambient paranoia. There's always this sense of, I need more. And I think that's really what's necessary beyond writing, beyond books: it's for us to rethink how we think about our relationship with others. And that's why a writer you write about in your book, Death by Landscape—whom I've been thinking about a lot now—is Mark Fisher and his idea of capitalist realism. How can we imagine other ways of being with each other?

Yeah, I've been revisiting capitalist realism too, just because I’m teaching a class on speculative fiction where I'm like, "Realism is a political orientation as much as an aesthetic one." What's real, what we make into realism, is actually something we really have to consider; we could just shift the frame a little and insist that almost anything is realism. Mark Fisher has given a lot to me, such as the generative way he includes other people in his work. And in Tone, your new, collectively written project with Sofia Samatar, you also take one of his walks…

On Vanishing Land. That was a huge inspiration for Tone, and also for The Light Room. Sofia and I are thinking through Fisher and especially his idea of speculative fiction, which we have to look to to actually imagine other ways of being together. We're also looking at Doris Lessing's Memoirs of a Survivor, which I think you write about as well. We're just stealing from you, Elvia. We're reading you.

We're sharing, back and forth forever.

Yeah. Marlen Haushofer's 1970s feminist classic The Wall, and all these models and novels and literature where mutual aid happens.

I taught The Wall in class a couple weeks ago. That book, man, it just...

I also taught The Wall; my undergrads and I read it together over Christmas break, and then we wrote collaborative notebooks to each other. It was really one of the most amazing teaching experiences. They were all so incredibly moved by the book, which is about the end of the world. A wall is literally erected. And so she's the last woman on earth. But most of the novel is her taking care of this cow and this dog.

Her whole family becomes a cow, a dog, and a bunch of cats. And people always ask me, "What's an interspecies novel?" I'm supposed to recommend an alien book, but instead I recommend The Wall. It’s the most interspecies book ever.

Yeah, my partner read it and wept, and he never cries.

It should be so tedious and banal. It's all, like, "Today I got the hay for the barn." But it’s riveting; it's the most dramatic book in the world, even though it’s this woman alone with her animals. I wanted to bring it up, because I wanted to talk about animals in The Light Room, of which there are many. There's a scene I think about often where you're teaching on Zoom, on your sofa, and you and your students are looking at animal videos. Elsewhere in the book there's a taxidermied creature, visits to zoos, and the specter of extinction everywhere.

They do.

I often think about how young kids now might never see animals outside of zoos and images. All we're going to have left of a lot of species are images and videos. And that's really devastating.

When we were feeling really down, we'd watch videos of these polar bears, a mother and her newborn cubs, emerge from their den and sled down a hill, over and over. And we were all like, "Oh, this feels so good." I’ve had an interest in animals even since having children and taking them to zoos. I've also published a couple of pieces I call zoo stories, in which I think through the idea of a zoo.

But it all goes back to John Berger. He was newly married, 55, and with a toddler when he wrote his famous essay, “Why Look at Animals?,” where he's so upset about Donald Duck's nephews and how obsessed they are with money. He's so upset about the zoo. He's so upset about Beatrix Potter.

But it’s this thing where we have to decide when we begin teaching children about the natural world. It’s so comic and delicate—yet incredibly melancholy—that it has fueled a lot of writing. A big inspiration for me was an essay that Emily Raboteau wrote for the New York Review of Books, where she recounts going with her children to the Natural History Museum, and beginning to talk to them about the Anthropocene, about the concept of extinction. It becomes a different existential weight to teach that to those who love animals but don't know animals, who are so alienated from them.

The way you structure your book through seasons made me think about how, in realist fiction, using the weather as a metaphor for, say, the emotions of a character, doesn't work the same way as it used to. Because if there's an aberration—a freak storm—I have a hard time reading that as the character's mood. I read it now as a coming apocalypse. The small changes in the weather that are the backdrop of a lot of fiction or memoir no longer signify the same thing to me now. I'm thinking the same way about animals. There are different kinds of stakes to nature writing, if you want to call it that.

I was asked to teach a class on nature writing, which taught me a lot about how we don't live in this white, European, male, solitary or romantic idea of nature anymore. What does that mean, nature? What does it mean to think about the outdoors differently? What does it mean to think about home now?

I've been obsessed lately with this parenting thing where you're supposed to take your kids outside for a thousand hours a year. When I heard about it I felt really bad for not taking mine outdoors enough. But what is the outdoors where you live? Do you live on a street with lots of trees?

Is it very polluted? Is there traffic?

Especially last summer in New York, with the wildfires. And of course in other places there’s this idea of the pollution index. So even the concept of the outdoors has completely changed. I'm trying to read and think critically about it.

Yeah, me too. The moral terrain of nature versus home, or outdoor versus indoor, has become very confusing and very fraught.

Writing about the weather is maybe one of the most important things in literature.

It has been for ages, but it's important in a new way. There's a lot of potential in that. That was just one of the many, many things that The Light Room brought up for me that I wasn't expecting. ♦