Kate Durbin Discusses Los Angeles, Literary Television, Costume and More With Dorothea Lasky

Dorothea Lasky is back at the Los Angeles Review of Books with a brand-new three-part series of interviews as part of her column "Five Questions and Five Answers." The theme of this latest sequence is imagination. The first Q&A in the series stars Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist and writer, Kate Durbin. The second and third interviews are with Roxane Gay and Corina Copp. Check it out! Here's more from Dorothea Lasky's interview with Kate Durbin:

LA is such an inspirational landscape for so many writers. (I know that I will never seem to get over the existence of palm trees.) How does the landscape of LA fit into your work? Do other landscapes (physical, emotional, imaginative) sneak into your work as well?

I am in a long-term committed relationship to Los Angeles; she is my lover and muse. As I write this, I’m flying back to Los Angeles from Denver while wearing a sweatshirt covered in the beaches of Southern California. One of the things I love about LA is that is it a very honest city — it doesn’t pretend that its facades are anything more than constructions, and the darkness at its heart is the void of the world. Swimming pools and hotels are two spaces that make me think of LA, and those are both voids. LA is the place where the collective fantasies of the world take form. I feel that to live here is to participate in that process, and also to transmute and shift it, as an artist.

It’s also a beautiful and lonely place, and I can relate to both those feelings very much in my life lately.

Continue reading at LARB.