ALL Review: Do you find that there are moments when you are taken by an idea?
Katrin Talbot: More often when I’m traveling, it’s interesting that the wildness of a space that’s not familiar opens doors in my brain.
AR: I know you lived in Australia. Did the beauty of Australia inspire any of your writing?
Katrin: Australia is Paradise, of course it’s filled with many terrible poisonous things, but you learn to live with them. The huge tarantulas on the dining room wall and the little black widows and red backed spiders under the patio table. You work around them, but…there was so much beauty. We had this yard full of every possible fruit and we lived on the beach. Then we went to cold Germany. We went on this big journey across the Pacific and then the Atlantic to get there. That was fabulous and unsettling too.
When I got back from Germany we were four, I say we were four because I have a twin sister, I think I realized I needed to start capturing these moments because I knew they could be taken away. I mean it wasn't a traumatic thing, but I did want to capture it, and then what really was traumatic was moving to Thunder Bay, Ontario, in Canada. The kids were mean because we had these funny accents, now it would be cool, but back then it was not. I dreamed every night we were back in Australia.
I'm glad that I had this technique to preserve things and then later, actually early on, I grabbed the Polaroid. I'm also a photographer. I grabbed my parents' Polaroid to try and capture those important poetic moments like when you crack eight eggs into a bowl. That was very, very, very important to capture. I'm sure I wrote a poem about it too. It was a way to process and it was a way to preserve.
AR: Did this writing to preserve happen while you were in Canada? Was it a tool to recover those memories of Australia?
Katrin: Not so much. I wrote on my mother’s Olivetti under the almond tree in Australia, in the backyard. I didn't write so much in Canada, but I definitely had that sensitivity of remembering how to remember, how to remember in a positive way, in a very focused way. That has carried me through life in four countries and moving around quite a bit.
ALL Review: I love what you said—remembering how to remember. Do you feel like that's a through line in your approach to poetry?
Katrin: Even though I don't intend to sit down and write about my past, there are days when it comes crashing in. So I don't always choose to do that, but I think that the focus of the poetic lens is a comfort. For example, I'm spending time every week with a friend who's dying of brain cancer and this week, yesterday, I went in and I had not been told that she had declined and hospice would be coming in. It was so disturbing as a mortal being to see someone in their last days. Usually we sit there and we listen to three Brandenburg concertos in a row. It's joyful even though she can't communicate, but yesterday was completely different. I was, as a mortal, slammed. This morning when I sat down to write, I thought, oh, what shall I write about—boom and I was like that.
Poetry can also help me process things. Big time.
AR: Thank you for sharing that experience. Can you also tell me what your revision process is like?
Katrin: I edit as I write. There will be all of these arrows and scratched out and circled text and dadadada. The New York Times had a call for messy handwriting samples that my dear, darling twin sister sent me and I was like thanks. She has this perfect writing and mine is not. So I sent some samples of edits. And I did say, and I was hoping they would use this, that sometimes my poems look like hurricanes.
