“Kabat is a rural flaneur, probing for exit from the Capitalist endgame in this psychogeographical memoir of the Catskills. As political time collapses the events of her study into the present day, mysterious doors open into the possibility of an encounter across history with every risk attached, including that of renewal of our most elusive faith in one another. This is a sublime book.” —Jonathan Lethem, author of Brooklyn Crime Novel

In this Author Talk and discussion, Senior Curator Susan Cross talks with Kabat about her capacious memoir, The Eighth Moon: A Memoir of Belonging and Rebellion, in which the past comes alive in the present. When Jennifer Kabat moves to the Catskills, she has no idea that it was the site of the Anti-Rent War, an early episode of American rural populism — a rebellion, guns, and murder.

As Kabat forges friendships with her new neighbors and explores the countryside on logging roads and rutted lanes — finding meadows dotted with milkweed in bloom, saffron salamanders, a blood moon rising over Munsee, Oneida, and Mohawk land — she slowly learns of the 1840s uprising, when poor tenant farmers fought to redistribute their landlords’ vast estates. In the farmers’ socialist dreams, she discovers connections to her parents’ collectivist values, as well as to our current moment. Threaded with historical documents, the natural world, and the work of writers like Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth Hardwick, this visionary and deeply compassionate debut gives us a new way of seeing and being in place — one in which everything is intertwined and all at once.

About the Author:
Jennifer Kabat received an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her criticism and has been published in BOMB and The Best American Essays. Her writing has also appeared in Granta, Frieze, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and The Believer, among others. She’s part of the core faculty in the MA, Design Research at the School of Visual Arts and often collaborates with artists. An apprentice herbalist, she lives in rural upstate New York and serves on her volunteer fire department.