Jennifer is a storyteller with a gift for making associative connections between time, place, memory, and land. In Nightshining—the second in her diptych of memoirs that began with The Eighth Moon—she weaves personal and generational grief, mid-century weather experiments, community resilience, and many other threads into a multi-layered tapestry of a place and the histories that have shaped it.

After her basement in Margaretville, New York, fills with water from a burst creek and her town is deemed a federal disaster area, Jennifer discovers a bizarre connection between the catastrophic 1950 “Rainmaker’s Flood” and geoengineering experiments conducted in her town by Kurt Vonnegut’s scientist brother, Bernard, and the chemist and meteorologist, Vince Schaefer—two men determined to control the weather.

Jennifer also examines the loss of her father—a man dedicated to a utopian vision of cooperative society—the climate crisis, the question of who is asked to sacrifice what to whom, and finding community with human and other-than-human beings.

In reading it, I was struck by the timeliness (and timelessness) of Nightshining, much of which is set during the first term of President Trump. Jennifer contends with legacies of genocide and environmental manipulation as political polarization, global warming, and the COVID-19 pandemic rewrite the landscape. She writes, “all the smoke and war here. It feels like a portent, or a palimpsest whose traces you can read into this place.”

This interview is a composite of two conversations, the first over Zoom and the second at a book tour event at Split Rock Books in my hometown of Cold Spring, NY.

A Jack-in-the-pulpit is an elusive pitcher-shaped spring ephemeral wildflower.

Summer J. Hart: You open Nightshining with this paragraph: “You and I are with Iris and her baby on a cliff edge in the Catskills as I tell this story. Farm fields quilt the valley below. Looking down on it, other bluffs like this, long and flat, frame the view. I imagine the mountains all filled in and the land a thousand feet higher in the air, as if we are all floating, levitating together.” 

I’m struck most by your use of collective pronouns.

Jennifer Kabat: The collective pronouns are intentional. I wrote that scene hoping it would feel cinematic because it’s on high. The opening of The Eighth Moon has a similarly zoomed-out-from-on-high sense to watch this shootout in a corral in drag. Here, I wanted this idea of us all being together in nature. That was also a pandemic experience. What I loved about the pandemic was that nature was no longer a white place. It wasn’t about one’s private experience; everybody was in nature together. I’m opposed to the white guy and his shining, romantic experience of nature—like the Emerson and Thoreau or Casper David Friedrich kind of experience—that is bullshit. I wanted a feeling of “us” and for it to be weird and strange. I use inclusive pronouns throughout the book to build that sense of collectivity. Writing almost feels like the fine point of neoliberal activity because you do it by yourself. But what I yearn for is collectivity—the shared and the social—the social part of socialism. 

SJH: Much of this book is about absence. You describe your father not only as a powerful advocate for cooperative energy, but also as vapor, smoke, a trick of light, a ghost, snow, and blue butterflies. He is a man who spends his daughter’s childhood writing letters from the sky. 

Do you see your father’s work as an act of love? If so, for whom?

JK: That is an amazing question and a beautiful reading of my dad.

For me, he was this person who became a kind of ghost, who was with me after he died. We had this beautiful in-death relationship. I was lucky I didn’t fight it. I was lucky that he stayed with me. It’s one of those experiences where I have a hard time putting it into language because it sounds crazy. The rationalist language of my upbringing doesn’t have a voice for those experiences. I do think my dad’s work was about love. It was also problematic. He was a person of a certain era, you know, and throughout U.S. history, all the utopian dreams have had dark sides.

Capitalism also failed my father in every way it could. As a child, he lost everything. He suffered from antisemitism. A cross was burned on his lawn. His family lost their home, and he moved into his grandparents’ unheated attic when he was eight. His mother was institutionalized. He never talked about his childhood with me. He went to school on a scholarship and dedicated his life to cooperatives, which was both an evasion of family life, because he wasn’t there, and a deep belief that the world could be a better place with workarounds to capitalism. I found in his papers a speech that he gave in the eighties against individualism and the growing yuppie era. At the end, he quotes a letter I wrote him from summer camp. It was amazing to find myself in a speech he gave about the idea of us being better together. So, I do think it was love.

SJH: Jonathan Lethem writes, “Nightshining sifts a riveting exposé of the Cold War technocratic fantasy-state through lyrical family memoir …”

Do you think of this book as an exposé? If so, what did you expose?

JK: You know, I never thought of it as an exposé, partly because to me it feels like an essay. I go to an archive, then I respond to the archive. When the word exposé was used, I was like, wow, is it an exposé? We live in this moment where Marjorie Taylor Greene can tweet about how Democrats can control the weather. She’s not right, but she’s also not wrong. She’s batshit crazy, but the government can in some ways control the weather. Not how she thinks—it can’t prevent a hurricane. In my town, the government took what had been developed as a Cold War weapon by General Electric and used it at the wrong moment, which caused a devastating flood. 

I was also grappling with the language of modernism and rationalism, and this world of pure science where Bernard Vonnegut and Vince Schaefer existed. Their work had no ramifications other than the pleasure of exploration, which is so colonial.

SJH: At first, I thought, these are brilliant guys. They’re conducting experiments to stop a drought. They’ll save people from dying in wars. They, too, are working for the greater good. Then, it became a sort of villainy. I was like, are they villains?

JK:  Bernard is my bad guy. Vince is heroic. The only sympathy I have for Bernard comes from his brother and the deep love that Kurt had for him. Their mother committed suicide. Everyone thought Kurt was dead in Dresden. I can kind of understand, given that background, how he might have thought using weather to stop war was logical.

Vince loved being outside. To have spent enough time observing hemlocks and pine trees to realize that they exhale and that transpiration is a way to test for ozone is amazing.

To realize the same logic behind seeding clouds with silver iodide was poisoning the world through leaded car exhaust, and to dedicate his life to campaigning against leaded fuel, was beautiful. Then something dark happens. The Defense Department learns about this technology and takes it.

We’re a country that has used weather for war. We’re also a country that developed nuclear weapons, which create their own clouds. So, you know, basically the things that I expose are the ways research, defense spending, and dreams of a better world are tied together. There’s no way to get through this moment, through climate change, without sacrifices. The U.S. and many European countries have benefited from the extractive industries that created the crisis. We’re not talking about who is sacrificing. I live in a community that was sacrificed for the greater good. 

SJH: People in your community watched as their homes were bulldozed because New York City needed water.

JK:  “We have it. We give it to them,” one person who lost his home said about the water. “You can’t stand in the way of progress,” someone said in news footage just before his home was torn down for the reservoir. It’s profound living in a place where the trauma of being separated from the land that you identify with is carried and held alive. It’s not something that most people in this country have. Europeans came here with the idea that land is ahistorical. When it’s ahistorical, there’s no connection to place and no connection to that place’s meaning. It’s moving to live in a place that holds its histories tightly.

SJH: A palimpsest of memory, place, trauma, sacrifice, resilience, and …

JK: Love.

SJH: “I think about how the Rainmaker’s Flood happens in November 1950, when all time becomes present tense.”

Can you talk about this sentence?

JK: My husband, David, and I were hiking in winter, and it’d been raining. It’s warm. Winter isn’t winter anymore because we’re so far into climate change. So, the present is already crazily altered. 

He tells me about this moment in 1950, where all time is declared the present. It has something to do with radiation and atomic testing. History ends because we can destroy the world, and time ends in terms of being able to carbon date things. Then there is this flood in my town.

That moment is also about arriving at a tipping point. At the same time, I’m thinking about club moss, which I love. They look like little fir trees. They aren’t mosses at all but are related to some of the very first plants on Earth. They have a very complex sex life, taking years to reproduce, and because their sex life is so tricky, they can replicate themselves by throwing out an arm. 

SJH: You write beautifully about the flora and fauna of the Catskills. You describe the people in Margaretville with equal affection. While writing Nightshining, did your idea of community evolve?

JK: Yes. The backstory is, I wrote a novel that failed, and I turned it into two memoirs. My parents were dying and I wanted to write about the meaning in that loss. They were deeply committed to the public good and modernism.

This book is also a way for me to write about the climate crisis because the geoengineering experiments conducted in my community are like what is being done to mitigate the climate crisis. There’s very little difference between cloud brightening schemes—where you put iodide in the clouds to make more clouds—and the kinds of floods geoengineering—rainmaking—causes. It’s the same technology. As I was writing, my sense of the community that I’m committed to expanded. 

SJH: The river is alive. Everything’s connected. Everything’s meandering. 

JK: It’s all hydrology. Hydrology and club moss.

I think also when you live in a place, you develop relationships with things in your environment. This feels true for me with the plants that I encounter. There’s this kind of magic hemlock forest that I live on the edge of. When you observe another creature intimately, it becomes a familiar. Like the phoebe nesting under my deck. Because I have a Nest Cam, I’ve formed a deep intimacy with her. She sleeps in her nest overnight. She settles in at 7:45 pm and leaves at 5:40 am. 

SJH: I think we are all so isolated these days. There’s sort of a plague of loneliness—at least in my family—and especially during the pandemic. But not me, I think, because I have horses and art and walks in the woods, and you know, I’m talking to my ghosts, and I feel like I have this weird …

JK:  Community.

SJH: I tracked 77 instances of the word “blue” in Nightshining. My favorites are: “a blue I learn that if not for vapor, for aerosols, would be black;” “Impossible blue;” “Blue of disaster;” “Blue of distance—of breathing trees;” “Even the blue, blue sky this day foreshadows darkness;” and “Karner blue.”

Can we talk about color as a throughline?

JK:  Blue is an atmospheric color. Blue is often a figment of our imagination, too, when you think about it. Bluebirds are actually black. It’s just a trick of the light that we see them as blue. I was using this vaporous sky as a theme. And there’s also the endangered Karner blue butterfly. You probably have little blue butterflies around. To me, they’re indistinguishable from the Karner blue. I don’t know how Nabokov recognized that Karner blues are a different species, but he did, and they inhabit the same landscape where cloudseeding was developed.

I wanted to capture color as a way of being evocative. In The Eighth Moon, everything begins brown. There’s a drought—all is amber and earth. For Nightshining, I used blue because it feels like air and the atmosphere, and how we see distance. Blue is created either by absence or by various vapors in the air that reflect light back. Smoke will appear blue. 

Of course, I was writing this during the pandemic, so we were all thinking about aerosols—these microns. I started thinking about them in terms of smoke and all these other things, and it became very rich for me. It was like this moment kind of doubled with our historic moment. 

We are also in the Pyrocene, so we live with smoke all the time.

SJH: Blue has a quality of childhood nostalgia. Like the idea of the color of water. 

JK: Or even the sky. Do you remember drawing the sky with Crayola crayons? I always used teal. 

SJH: I read this poem called “Greensickness” by Laurel Chen, and it has almost the same sort of saturation of green as your blues, some of which are filled with loss, like the blue window that your father looks out of while flying somewhere. In this poem, the green of grief is agonizingly green. 

JK:  Nightshining is also a book of grief. I don’t like to ascribe emotions to colors because I think our perceptions of color are culturally bound. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how blue exists on screens and how neoliberal that is. 

SJH: In The Eighth Moon, you described time held in lichen and in the bodies of efts. In Nightshining, you write about “Biblical time,” “redwood time,” and “glacial time.” But modernity and progress are thought to follow linear time.

Can you talk about the relationship between our varied experiences of time and historical progress?

JK: Well, linear time is a construction. The lived experience of time is cyclical. Linear time is based on this idea of the enlightenment and modernism that believes in progress, and progress believes we’re on a line, always improving. Like calendar time, our way of thinking is tied to that notion of chronology, but it’s a fiction, and it comes bound with violence. When you believe in that kind of progress, you believe the world is ordained. Once you have that kind of logic, you can believe that Indigenous Americans or Black Americans are less entitled to full and meaningful lives than white Americans, because they deserve to be where they are. That’s progress. There are all sorts of myths of power and about the way the world should be. I wanted to write against that. 

When you live somewhere for a while, you experience different scales of time held in that place. When your street changes, you hold the old memory. I love the idea of time held in space becoming expansive. Like, oh, I live in this place where there was a climate collapse 380 million years ago.

SJH: And that collapse was, in a way, progress. These ferns fixed the oxygen, and it caused this massive extinction event.

JK: Which made a world in which we could exist. 

SJH: Your father was a member of many political organizations—some seemingly contradictory.

What has this taught you about patriotism? Especially now?

JK: It’s an interesting moment—when things seem so dire—to ask what patriotism can look like. And, to think about my dad, who wasn’t perfect, but I share many of his values. It’s like, in looking at my parents’ lives and their choices, I’m seeking a model for how to be a citizen now. What would it mean to say I’m patriotic? In my volunteer fire department, I have to say the Pledge of Allegiance, which I find strange, but less so now than I used to. A pledge doesn’t mean it’s true. A pledge means it’s something you would like to be true. I would like this country to be full of equality. It’s not true, but I want it to be. 

I realized in writing The Eighth Moon that my rage about America and my neighbors’ rage are the same rage, expressed in different ways. Now I just wonder if somebody is going to come for me. It’s kind of this weird fear I have. I don’t know if you have this kind of epigenetic trauma, but I think I do. You know, my dad’s family escaped pogroms. There’s a part of me where somehow that fear is baked in. People react to trauma. React around it. Our wiring changes.

SJH: Bodies remember. I think of generational or inherited trauma as sort of like how the offspring of crows recognize their parents’ enemies.

JK: I would like to be a crow.

SJH: I would like you to be a crow. 

JK: Can I just ask you, what bird would you be?

SJH: I think I am also a crow.

JK: As a writer right now, I feel scared. I’m political and open about being a socialist, and I live in a small community. I’ve been thinking a lot about things like freedom of speech, which I took for granted, but feels tenuous right now. I think it’s important to be patriotic. There was a beautiful moment last summer when I was at a fire call. A milk truck had crashed. If a milk truck crashes on a two-lane state highway, you’re going to be there for six hours. While I was directing traffic, a guy who’d been in the fire department for 50 years was like, “I read your book.” I asked, “What do you think?” He said, “Well, I finished it. That bit where you wrote about the pledge … I’ve been thinking that for years.” I was like, “Okay, my work here is done.” 

SJH: And so, our work here is also done. Thank you so much for talking with me. 

JK: I feel so lucky. The only thing that would make me feel luckier is if we were looking at Jack-in-the-pulpits together.