The “Empty” Is Always Already Inhabited

Elvia Wilk interviews Jennifer Kabat about her new book, “The Eighth Moon: A Memoir of Belonging and Rebellion.”

By Elvia WilkJuly 18, 2024

• Memoir & Essay

• Nonfiction

• History

THE WRITER Jennifer Kabat lived a largely urban existence until 2005, when she moved to Margaretville, a village in Upstate New York with a population of about 500. Her new book, The Eighth Moon: A Memoir of Belonging and Rebellion, is, among many things, a portrait of—and ode to—this place. Kabat layers the history of the area with narratives from her own life, producing a wondrous and sometimes uncanny sense of simultaneity. Kabat shows how the landscape is anything but a tabula rasa—and that dedicating one’s time and attention to a place can be the deepest of political and artistic commitments.

The week after the book came out in May 2024, I spoke with Kabat about the transformative process of inhabiting and writing about one’s environment, complicated inheritance, and what it means to work against sequential narrative.

¤

ELVIA WILK: Your book is billed as a memoir, but it starts with a historical scene rather than a story about your life. This feels like an important and clever formal choice that subverts expectations for the memoir form off the bat—still, I want to start with a more traditional, “memoiry” line of questioning. What led you to move to Margaretville?

JENNIFER KABAT: I was living in London, where I’d moved from Brooklyn, because I got married—for visa reasons. Day one: My body was just allergic to London. I got a rash from washing powder. Then it was blisters in my mouth from trying to buy clothes and sinus headaches from diesel exhaust. I ran the gamut of medical testing and hippie interventions. Some doctor told me, “Well, you have to leave.” I tried everything to stay in London, but it didn’t work.

I didn’t begin the book with this story because I didn’t want to write an illness book. I needed to explain why we left in order to begin the story of the Catskills, but I didn’t want sickness to be the narrative. I don’t like the memoir tropes of recovery or overcoming, or the way women are put in a position of saying: “This is my broken body.”

In London, which is such an old city, I felt claustrophobic, sick, and surrounded by ghosts. As someone from the United States, I still felt like you could reinvent yourself in the US. I had this fantasy that I would come back and be healthy and—voilà!—free. I had the trope of reinvention in my mind, which is also the trope of pioneering, of empty space—which obliterates the idea of previous histories.

And lo and behold …

This is a whole book of “lo and behold …”

So you ended up in Margaretville partly just because it’s … not a city. I love this thing that you write:

To leave all cities, where do you go? Particularly when your existence has been aimed at the urban, at places of burnishing and polishing, where you feel part of the forward march of the future, of art and design, music, clubs, parties and writing, […] where “work” isn’t a job but identity.

How did you manage that shift—in your location and in yourself?

The choice was haphazard. My husband and I found a place we could rent for two months that had high-speed internet, which was the deciding factor. Then we met someone who had just moved back from New York City, who was our age, which helped. But no one was a writer or an artist. Not then. It was freeing to move to a place where nobody asked me, “What are you working on?” Also, when it comes to political engagement, I learned it can matter more here. Your vote matters. Protest feels like it can be more profound. It’s smaller, but people see it—people who might not have similar political views.

So you arrive and you quickly begin to learn about the area, which is a beautiful natural landscape but is in no way “untouched.” As you investigate the long, complex histories of human inhabitation—displacement, struggle, coexistence—you get particularly interested in a series of mid-19th-century rebellions.

Yeah, the Anti-Rent War. It was an uprising that started in Rensselaer County in 1839 and got to my town in the summer of 1844. The first scene in the book recreates an 1845 standoff in my community where the sheriff holds a “distress” sale to auction off a farmer’s livestock, basically a few pigs and cows, to try to recover the farmer’s back rent.

The people here were farmers in perpetual peonage to wealthy landlords, which was this weird feudal system that existed in New York. The Dutch started it in the 1620s and then the English adopted it wholeheartedly, and it endured even after the Revolution. Alexander Hamilton wrote some of the leases that bound farmers to the land they lived on. Tenants would start off paying little rent, and eventually it would go up and up and up, and they became more and more indebted.

The farmers started organizing in the wake of an 1837 recession and were like, “Let’s stop paying rent.” It was a traditional rent strike, and it spread across the Hudson Valley to the Massachusetts border. The idea was to redistribute land to redistribute wealth. It was the dream of a kind of socialist anarchism.

And the rent warriors wore these bizarre costumes …

At the first protest, they wore disguises to hide their identities from the sheriff and the landlord’s agents. The insurgents—all men—wore loose calico dresses with pantaloons and a leather mask. After the uprising got to my town, the state outlawed masks and disguises. That same law was used to bust Occupy Wall Street! I’m very interested in how one event, this quasi-anarchist uprising in 1845, ripples through time and space.

The uprising was also violent. In the scene at the book’s start, the county’s undersheriff is shot. And the lawyer representing the landlord is wearing a corset, which was the style for fashionable men of the time. It’s a shootout in drag, in a corral.

The rebels called themselves the Calico Indians, a name that makes me wince, since they were obviously settlers—both expropriating land and appropriating culture.

Did they feel like calling themselves “Indians” gave them an excuse for violence? Or did they see themselves as true inheritors of the land? I will never know exactly. These guys were also fighting for things I believe in. But the fact is, all the wild socialist traditions in the United States that come from Europe were invested in displacing Indigenous people. The Shakers kept building communities on Haudenosaunee and others’ lands. The Oneida Community simply adopted the name of the Haudenosaunee nation on whose lands they settled. All of them saw the country as a blank slate or promised land. These Anti-Renters were aligned with abolitionists, but they didn’t align themselves with the Indigenous residents, which is disturbing and heartbreaking.

You’re grappling with that legacy in the book when it comes to your own move to the Catskills too. You speak about how your choice risks perpetuating aspects of that long history of displacement. The area might be rural, but the “empty” is always already inhabited.

Totally. The 1840s, when the Calico Indians were active, the same era that the Indian Removal policies were happening across the South and New York State, and the federal government was displacing the Seneca nation from Buffalo. Here’s this group of white farmers who are fighting for their right to land—while the federal government is stealing land. And at the same time, the Hudson River School paintings are being made. There’s a whole painting tradition that is about either making land seem empty and available and transcendent or making the people on the land look tiny, as if they are part of the landscape themselves.

When you got to Margaretville, you began writing a crime novel set there, which I think of as the sort of shadow book behind the book. It made me think of Jonathan Lethem’s Brooklyn Crime Novel (2023), a narrative that shows how any singular crime can also be seen as a systemic crime—in his case, how gentrification was hardly one climactic incident. The shoot-out in the first scene of your book involves a straightforward “crime,” whereas the rest of the violent history of the Catskills that you write about doesn’t necessarily have a single shooter or a victim.

Yes, like in Jonathan’s book, the crime in my book is also a kind of gentrification. The housing crisis here, as in Brooklyn, is part of that crime.

A contemporary crime inspired that crime novel I tried to write. A guy passed through my village and shot a cop at a traffic stop in 2007. I wanted to write about the fear I imagined he felt when the cop first pulled him over. But I couldn’t write the novel. I could write a scene, but I couldn’t connect my scenes. I felt like I had to explain everything. At the same time, I was working on a memoir about rebuilding my parents’ house while they were dying. That also became way too linear. Both the memoir and the novel were stuck, so I decided to write against the expectation of plot. I wanted to destroy the connective tissue between times and scenes.

By connective tissue, you mean sequential time, cause and effect, and this sort of superposition of narrative that we put on life to make it seem teleological?

Totally. The teleology of narrative implies that we’ll get to a new phase where something better happens.

Progress.

Progress. The novel is part of the project of capitalism. What does it look like to write against it?

I was doing all this historical research, and it started to feel like all time was alive. I don’t think that’s a particularly new experience for people doing research—for instance, some historians working on the Shakers experience the “gift,” these spirit hauntings—and I wanted to represent that feeling of being alive in the past. Chris Kraus told me to write a book about how I moved to the Catskills, and I was like, “yes!” But for me that meant writing a book about how time broke open. I wanted everything in my life and in the history of this place to happen in the present tense, for the events to be simultaneous. I’m also interested in other temporal scales, like seasons.

You do a lot with the seasonal cycle to structure the book. And then there’s geological time, the deep time of the place, the mountains.

Geological time became central to me. Here, the first trees on the planet emerged 380 million years ago (by some estimates). Those first trees—actually giant ferns—changed the oxygen level on earth, which eventually led to a mass extinction. This felt like a place where time could begin, or a place where you could decide to set a clock for a way of understanding earth, and that all the things that happened here could be part of the same drama.

That simultaneity of time periods requires you to carefully juggle stories, choosing whom or what to foreground at different times in the narrative. There are plenty of contemporary characters—your family, neighbors—and lots of historical characters, who feel like they’re part of the same moving, living cast.

In the research, I experienced this radical history in my town, which happened in a similar political climate to ours now. This gave me empathy for other points of view here. I love my neighbors. In a city, it’s easy to be encircled by people who mirror you and your life choices. I wanted to write about the richness of a community of people who do not look or act like me. What does it feel like to come into relationship? To discover similarities? How do you construct community and collectivity?

The question of how to construct collectivity is deeply connected to your parents’ lives and work. Let’s talk about what your parents believed in, their experiments in cooperative living, and their political convictions.

Today there’s all this left pessimism. I grew up in a very leftist family that was not pessimistic but pragmatic, even patriotic. My parents worked on co-ops their whole life. My dad’s first job out of college was to manage a tiny rural electric cooperative with my mom, in a partnership. My dad was a socialist committed to the idea that co-ops were a way to redistribute capitalist wealth. As a kid, I was inculcated with co-op language, but I didn’t really understand co-ops as part of a pre-1848 radical socialism—these Owenite, agrarian socialisms before Marx. My dad would take me to Grange Halls and say, "They fought the railroads and the banks.” And I was like, “Why fight railroads and banks? Let’s get ice cream now, Dad.”

What does it mean to inherit hopes from the past, especially hopes that weren’t realized?

When my parents were dying and our world had become increasingly neoliberal and fucked up, I needed to know: what is this inheritance? I call myself a socialist, but I’m a pretty bad socialist. I live in a house. I’m a gentrifier. My parents owned a house. All the compromises of my world are part of my life.

When I moved to Margaretville, it turned out to be very close to the place where my parents first managed a co-op. It was accidental—I didn’t know that they had this history nearby. I discovered that the origins of co-ops cross over with the history of the rent uprising here. All these pre-Marxist revolutions have things that they shared, sometimes intentionally.

This book is part of a diptych, and the second book, Nightshining (forthcoming in May 2025), is more about my father. Both books are a way for me to try and understand him. For most of my life, I didn’t see how radical he actually was. I think that when people’s parents die, they want to understand themselves—I needed to grapple with that legacy.

What becomes evident in your book is the fact that resistance is not a puncture in the flow of time. I suspect that’s why the crime novel wasn’t working for you. A narrative of causality and plot implies that there is one identifiable event in a linear story, but when it comes to things like rebellion against exploitation, resistance is constant, even if it’s not always spectacular. And there are comparisons to be drawn between so many moments—some lesser, some better known—when things do boil over. That’s one thing that a transhistorical approach like yours can show.

Causality and progress are poised to make us believe that uprisings don’t matter, and that capitalism always wins. This depends on our believing that the temporal reality of chronology is truth. Fuck that. If we could have a different temporal reality, the way we look at those uprisings might change. I think that they could be seen as pieces of something lasting.

Although you’re avoiding sequential plot, I think there is a climax in your book: the moment that you discover the mask! It turns out one of your neighbors owns a mask that one of the Calico Indians wore, because one of his ancestors was a rent warrior. Past and present collide.

My neighbor Rudd Hubbell had this mask in his garage. I thought he should donate it to a museum, and he was like, “No, I’m not going to send this to Albany! It’s my family’s heritage.”

I joined the fire department in 2018, and I now know that most of the people I’m in the fire department with are descendants of the Calico Indians.

The book’s subtitle is A Memoir of Belonging and Rebellion. Although it’s not a story of progress, there is a trajectory in terms of your “belonging” to Margaretville. You’ve chosen to stay. Do you belong now?

No. I joke that I’ve lived here long enough to be in the fire department, but even there, I’m never going to fit—not really. I’m accepted, though, and they tease me. Like in any community, people see you for who you are, sometimes despite your best intentions.

Part of belonging here is about multigenerational legacy, which I don’t have. I will never be here long enough to be local. I will always be an outsider. As writers, aren’t we always sort of outsiders? To be present in a place long enough to start observing it and writing about it, though, allows you to be a citizen of a place, to see your own place in a community—even if it’s always with some distance.

¤

Jennifer Kabat’s The Eighth Moon: A Memoir of Belonging and Rebellion was published in 2024 by Milkweed Editions. Her second book, Nightshining, will follow in 2025. Her writing has appeared in The Best American Essays as well as Granta, Frieze, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Review, and The White Review. She is on the core faculty in the Design Research MA at the School of Visual Arts, lives in rural New York, and serves on her volunteer fire department.

¤

Photo of Jennifer Kabat by CJ Harvey, courtesy of Jennifer Kabat.