KA: I have been reading Nin for many years—since college when I discovered her fiction. I even wrote my senior thesis on the differences between scenes in her edited diaries and the first volume of the so-called “unexpurgated” diaries, which had then just begun to appear. So I carried a book around in my head for years. It wasn’t until the fall of 2010 that I began writing. The previous year, during Ramadan, the Muslim fasting month, I had kept a blog which was published as a book called Fasting for Ramadan. So I had this idea that I would write every day during Ramadan and it occurred to me that I could finally write about Anaïs Nin. Throughout the month I sat down for hours a day, carrying all my Nin books out onto the dining room table. By the end of the month, I had a first draft of around 150 pages. Of course, there was a lot of work after that. The structure developed because I began writing about the various images and forms of art that appeared and reappeared throughout Nin’s work.

KA: I do talk in the book how Nin’s poetic approach, not just to language but really to the structure/architecture of fiction, had a strong influence on me as a young writer. I do think that the typical influence she has had has been about style and language and also on the courage of women and other marginalized writers to bring their internal experiences out into the world. But there really is an influence Nin had in terms of how she constructed her novels, how the plot was created and refracted throughout the separate books. There were times it felt she was really writing music or making a painting or choreographing a dance. So in my research and writing process for the book, it was gratifying to discover that Nin herself really did believe she was doing those things as well.

KA: It made sense to me to create my own creative responses after that. The “instruction painting” came because in one of her essays Nin discusses Yoko Ono but Ono herself also discusses Nin in one of her own essays that she publishes as liner notes to one of her rock albums from the 70s. I am not clear on whether Ono and Nin ever met each other but they were certainly in New York at the same time and knew the same people. That connection further inspired the other creative responses, as did the choreographer Leah Stein’s collaboration with poet Josey Foo where Stein wrote choreographic notes on Foo’s texts.

KA: It is both critical and creative engagement. It’s my hope that it provides some window into Nin for people who are unfamiliar with her work. It would be even more gratifying if it suggested new ways of undertaking scholarship. There is excellent scholarship on Nin but the way that the archives are closed to only a very few number of scholars has definitely bottle-necked and dissuaded scholars from working on Nin. Perhaps soon that will change—it is up to the trustees of the Nin estate, all of whom have worked and are working very hard to promote Nin’s legacy. There have been critical engagements with Nin’s work, but none by fiction writer himself—and there have been more creative responses to Nin but none of these had an academic or critical approach really, or used the form of the essay (there have been novels, poetry, and at least two films)—so I do think this book is unique.

KA: I am working on a short book of essays, journal entries and lyric prose entitled Silver Road. It’s a swirl of a book, very widely ranging over its 80 brief pages, but among other things, it engages astronomy, Urdu grammar, contemporary poetry, Emily Dickinson’s “open folios,” Vedanta philosophy, Islamic metaphysics, yoga, translation theory, contemporary Indian gender politics, a possible scientific and geological basis for astrology, Israeli settlers in the West Bank, Barnett Newman’s “Stations of the Cross” paintings, quantum gravity, and the discovery of a new poem by Sappho.

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