The Shore Interview #43: Julia Kooi-Talen

Questions by Ella Flores, Art Editor

EF: As a poet and essayist, were either of your two poems in Issue 22 ever considered as possibly being part of essays during the drafting process? Or did any particular aspects about either poem feel like they could only function in poems?

JKT: I never considered either of these poems to potentially be essays, but I think there are threads in these poems that I find creeping into my essay writing. Threads about lineage, longing, relationships, loneliness. "Bugs" to me is so sound and rhythm driven, a feature I love to play with in poetry. I'm tuned into sound in my essays too, but in a different way, because I'm not as concerned with the line break. A line break can so deeply impact the rhythm and sound of a line. "Given Up Hearts" was written after Paige Lewis, and because I admire their poetry so deeply, I didn't want to stray from the genre of poetry. When I read Lewis's poems, I feel like they take me through these brilliant facts and scene snippets that only a poem can bring together and see something anew through. I suppose I was playing with that associativity in "Given Up Hearts." I love a little bit of randomness in a poem. Poetry feels like the closest writing to thinking and I really wanted to play with that here.

EF: In "Bugs," there is a fly that whispers to the speaker and later the speaker confides in the fly. I found this exchange surprisingly haunting and reverent. Why do you think this exchange felt vital for the overall stakes of the poem?

JKT: In this poem, I really wanted to even the animate playing field between human and non-human beings. At the time of writing this I was reading Robin Wall Kimmerer, Mel Y Chen and Karen Barad, and thinking about what the Eurocentric western world considers and doesn't consider to be alive. It was important that the fly spoke first, to push back against human beings having the first say. I also wanted the reader to consider what the non-human beings in their homes are witnessing. The speaker then intones a prayer to the fly, before the fly's death. I think ensuring that the speaker speaks back to the fly, allows for the death of the fly to feel more mutual. A part of the speaker is also gone with the fly. This felt vital to again help even the scale of animacy between humans and non-humans in this poem.

EF: There is this beautiful moment in your poem, "Given Up Hearts," where the speaker describes giving stories to the stones they skip at a place called Echo Lake and how the speaker thinks to "stretch the glittered skin of the fish...to gather the entire lake into its anatomy" and thus the speaker would find that stone, and its story, again. I particularly enjoyed the play between the lake's name and the speaker's desire to find what they'd let go of and how the moment augments the separate images introduced in the poem up to that point. But my question is this: how do you see the Echo Lake moment as it pertains to the poem's finale between the speaker and the "you?"

JKT: Wow, thank you so much for this generous and insightful reading!  When writing this poem, I spent time at a tiny lake in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan called Echo Lake. There, you can hike into this peninsula in the middle of the lake and when you shout across the lake, your shout comes back to you. That movement, that reverberation, back to the self, moves parts of this poem forward. I think that this poem is trying to construct a relationship between Echo Lake and the speaker's heart--the expansiveness of both, the stories in each, the wishes in each. The speaker is casting a wish for the "you" in their heart and I think the imagery and sounds of Echo Lake are imbued in that wish.

EF: Are there any journals or magazines you are currently enjoying?

JKT: Oh my goodness, so many! I've been really into past-ten, a journal that publishes flash essays about where the writers were ten years prior to the date the essay is published. I'm also a fan of the beautiful anthologies fifth wheel press has been putting out. Some other incredible journals I often go to for inspiration include DIAGRAM, Black Warrior Review, Longleaf Review and Passages North.

EF: Please speak to how two poems in this issue of The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other.

JKT: I found "Sonder" by Brett Griffiths and "Diagnosis as Fishing Net" by Sarah Fawn Montgomery to speak to one another in strange, beautiful ways. There is the overlapping imagery of the spider and its myriad of webs as well as the fishing net. Both images call back to one another. Additionally, I found both poems to be pondering time, grief, longing, in different ways and different contexts, through these intricately woven lines and images. It's really cool to find these echos in a literary journal.

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Julia Kooi Talen is an essayist and poet based in the Midwest where she teaches creative writing and composition. Currently a PhD Candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Missouri-Columbia, Talen lives with their cat, Otis, and holds an MFA in creative writing from Northern Michigan University as well as an MSW from the University of Denver.