Moyra Davey and Kate Zambreno on Writing About Process

In the new issue of Frieze, Moyra Davey and Kate Zambreno discuss their new book projects, Index Cards (New Directions) and Drifts (Riverhead Books), respectively. "‘Try to be with flowers,’ the poet Bhanu Kapil says to you in Drifts," says Davey. "[L]ater, in an exchange with the writer Sofia Samatar, you talk about ‘empty[ing] a text in order to fill it’. This speaks to a particular difficulty I’m having with a shapeless, bloated text, about which I’ve come to feel phobic." More:

[Moyra Davey:] …I wondered if you could expand on that particular point: the emptying out that might lead to structure.

Kate Zambreno: There’s something monstrous to the shapeless. I have a fear of it as well. I like to think of writer’s block, the dread of it, as resulting from too much material – too many notebooks filled up. For the period I dramatize in Drifts, it was also about the desire for my work to feel private and ongoing – rather than being instantly published and commodified – to be read only by my correspondents, my addressees, entirely women and non-binary writers.

In the book, one of the characters, Anna, says to the narrator that the notes are the work. I tend to gravitate towards writing that is about process – yours, Kapil’s, Samatar’s, Hervé Guibert’s and W.G. Sebald’s. I don’t think about structure, per se, or story, but I am interested in narrative and form and repetition. There’s such an organic flow to the form of your books Les Goddesses/Hemlock Forest [2017] and Burn the Diaries [2014] – the titles, the places, the sense of travelling through – that every writer who reads them begins to mimic it. These books read like they were written in the time they were conceived and are about time. When my writing feels shapeless and bloated, like it does now, malingering for years around the study of Guibert I have been working on, which was supposed to be a short text, I realize that writing is time, and must take the time it needs.

Find the full conversation at Frieze.