Kate Zambreno on her memoir The Light Room

Kate Zambreno speaks to me on the phone from inside a parked car, where she found a quiet moment in her busy day to discuss ecological writing, active hope, and thinking through the collective in anticipation of the UK release of her memoir, The Light Room. At first glance, it might seem that life is still as hectic for her as it was at the time of the book’s conception when, at the height of the pandemic and soon after the birth of her second daughter, Zambreno found herself overwhelmed and exhausted by the neverending labour of care, her teaching — then imparted through a screen — and the uncertainty of living through political, ecological and public health crises.

In The Light Room, Zambreno documents these anxieties through short texts that chronicle the period between roughly the autumn of 2020 and the summer of 2022, though time in Zambreno’s work rarely moves in a linear fashion. More than diary entries, however, these passages are a collection of critical meditations, brief essays on the relationship between the small and cosmic, the personal and the collective. Taking inspiration from Joseph Cornell's boxed assemblages, Zambreno uses the term ‘light boxes’ when referring to these entries in order to highlight their “translucency”; the vagueness of the time they encompass, and the seemingly insubstantial, yet luminous quality of everyday life.

“It wasn’t really journaling,” Zambreno explains about the writing process behind her hybrid memoir, “but the whole first section of the book did come out of these tiny little notebooks I was keeping, brown Moleskine notebooks that were so small I could balance them on a pillow and scribble notes. [I was writing] about this specific period of time postpartum, thinking through Joseph Cornell, outside scenes in the park, and what it was like having two children at home during the pandemic.” 

Although the book had its conceptual genesis in a proposal behind Zambreno’s Guggenheim Fellowship, a work centred around the idea of ecological grief, the project shifted once she began writing these notes as a way of processing her own feelings of anxiety and isolation. “[The book] is also about loneliness as almost a devotional stance,” she explains, “I think of The Light Room in connection with works like Maggie Nelson's Bluets, Anne Carson's The Glass Essay, and Olivia Laing's The Lonely City. I was working too much, teaching again after a brief break, and I became very interested in the question of how art can come out of paying attention to the interior space, even out of being lonely... It took me a while, at least a year, to begin to gather these notes together, to realise I was writing these light boxes.”

While so many authors seem reluctant to write about the pandemic, Zambreno directly addresses it, finding value in exploring how collective psychological distress and sorrow can result in more meaningful artistic expressions, and bring forth a deeper sense of hope and connection with nature and one another. “I found an impulse to think about how we are all breathing the same air together, we are existing together,” she reflects. “One of the reasons I think that David Wojnarowicz and Derek Jarman are such the patron saints of The Light Room is because they were gardening, taking care of others, making photographs of animals, all while dying of AIDS. And I think both of them are attributes that we can make individual art, we can still find beauty while also being activists and paying attention to the collective.”

Naturally, Zambreno’s concerns with public well-being and communal grief are not limited to the pandemic: uneasiness about climate change and environmental uncertainty permeate the entire narrative of The Light Room. Here, Zambreno’s approach seems more mournful than apprehensive, perhaps more accurately defined by the term solastalgia, or as Zambreno puts it: “a sense of a home to which one can never completely return.” She writes about taking her daughter to outdoor classes in Prospect Park (one of New York’s major municipal parks); about children sledding down the snowy hills resulting from record-breaking winter storms; about her family trips to the Museum of Natural History where, in the Hall of Ocean Life, she ponders about the fragility of existence, and planetary transformation. Her candid writing invites the question: is it even possible today to write about the environment without a sense of melancholy, or even despair?

On the phone she tells me that The Light Room is one of several of her recent projects nurtured by the years she spent teaching Environmental Writing at Sarah Lawrence College. “In a way, it was also new for me to think: what does it mean to write the environment?” she recalls. “I think environmental writing is writing about the ‘I’ in the suburbs, in isolation, or in the city amidst everything going on, and recognising that our relationship to the outside world is tinged with melancholy but also it can be tinged with joy.”

It all goes back to the idea of ecology, which she defines as something that goes beyond what would be traditionally considered the natural world, and instead focuses on the relationship between the human and the nonhuman, community and individuality. “Both collaboratively and in my own writing, I’ve been really interested in how to address climate change,” Zambreno explains. “In literature it seems impossible, but I think it's okay to still have an individual lyric impulse while being aware of the outside world and not shutting [it] out. The idea of paying attention to the small, to the everyday, to the local, is one of the ways that I try to practise optimism." She continues, "The prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba talks about hope as a practice, and I think The Light Room was a form of practising hope, in a daily way.”

Zambreno’s hopeful outlook is also apparent in her devotion to her daughters; raising children might be seen as the ultimate display of faith in the future. Much of this memoir is dedicated to recording her impressions of childhood social dynamics, non-traditional education, and the reshaping of her worldview via witnessing her toddler discover art and nature for the first time. But despite the extensive commentary on wooden toys and Montessori methods, The Light Room remains a largely universal work, the merit of which relies more on its examination of care in general than of motherhood in particular. Zambreno elaborates: “Joseph Cornell, Derek Jarman, David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar… So many of the artists I write about in this book are queer bachelors, who did not have children, but they did take care of other things. They took care of people, they took care of their parents, siblings, their gardens, and you know, their art.”

Beyond these examples, Zambreno’s work establishes a critical dialogue with a variety of artists, authors and poets, creating a record and, simultaneously, contributing to an ecosystem of ideas around topics such as light, kinship, life and death. From Yūko Tsushima to Natalia Ginzburg, Sontag and Sebald, Kate Zambreno’s narrative voice moves between these texts and images, drawing insightful parallels with her own experiences and observations. “I think it's the ‘I’ — who I was then — and the narrator's thinking, that kind of anchors everything,” explains the author on the phone, creating a discernible distance between the person she is at the time of our talk, and the woman who penned these meditations from confinement nearly four years ago. “My work can often be digressive and go on all these different historical grooves, but I also think I keep returning to the same places.”

Indeed The Light Room is a cyclical book: we visit and revisit the dioramas at the Hall of Ocean Life, and the seemingly immutable trails in Prospect Park, following Zambreno and her family through birthdays and changes of seasons. Now, almost exactly a year after the US publication of her memoir, I wonder how Zambreno’s perspective on the state of the world and how she approaches it has changed. “I've been much more active as an organiser,” she tells me. “I think this discovery I made in The Light Room, and then this current moment of protests we live in, wanting to support protestors and seeing the way they are treated, has made this shift towards prioritising collectivity much more pronounced. We have to hope and we have to not do it passively. Again, as Mariame Kaba says: ‘let this radicalise you, not lead you to despair.’”

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The Light Room is out with Corsair on 18 Jul