What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? I’ve probably been intensely working on and revising the book for five to six years.Ģ. Soon after I moved to New York City, I began compiling the notes and journals that would later be the raw material for the novel. I started writing through this elegiac, hungover period as soon as Heroines was published eight years ago in essays that were prodromal to Drifts. How long did it take you to write Drifts? She teaches in the writing programs at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College, and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her writing can also be found in BOMB, the Paris Review, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among other outlets. “Reading her is like looking through a kaleidoscope-the world is at once more beautiful and more terrifying.” Kate Zambreno is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including Screen Tests, Heroines, and Green Girl. “Kate Zambreno’s writing is mysterious, unclassifiable, and yet intimate and familiar too,” writes Jenny Zhang. “A better question to ask, though, than What are you writing? Or What is your book about?” Her questions, notes, walks-and a number of dramatic, unexpected disturbances-gradually give rise to a shift and new understanding. “What is the landscape you’re working in, I start to ask other writers…rather absurdly,” she says. Taking long walks around her New York City neighborhood, she searches for a new way to talk about and make art.

She lives an active creative life-she corresponds with fellow writers, photographs and documents obsessively, analyzes the work of Rainer Maria Rilke and Albrecht Dürer, and writes exquisitely of her terrier, Genet-yet the various pieces of her life seem to conspire against her most important work on the page. The narrator of Drifts is a writer at work on a long-overdue manuscript. This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Kate Zambreno, whose latest novel, Drifts, is out today from Riverhead Books.

Heroines by kate zambreno