So German!

Hello Katharina, thank you so much for this opportunity. At VERSeFEST, you mentioned that this is your first time in Canada. Where have you been and were you surprised by anything?

I was absolutely fascinated by Montréal because it is very hard to describe the feel of the city: It does not feel like a European city or like an American city. Though I am not a big fan of cities in general, I could actually imagine living in Montréal for a while. I absolutely loved the relaxed vibe, the small retailers and long-established shops like the boulangeries and boucheries. Unfortunately, I have not seen a lot of the landscape yet but we are heading to a nature reserve in a few hours.

That sounds lovely. Is there a reason why you don’t like cities?

I grew up in a rural area in Rhineland-Palatinate (a federal state in Germany). Since I started studying and working, I have only lived in big cities like Frankfurt, Hamburg, Bologna (Italy), St. Louis (USA) and, at the moment, I live in an “Altbau” apartment in Berlin. We have a rather wild shared courtyard garden with roses, apples, peaches, ferns and raspberries and so on and I take care of it. I also grow my own vegetables in Rudow (a district of Berlin). Thinking about our courtyard garden reminds me of Montréal: everything there seems a little improvised but it still looks beautiful. It looks exactly like it is supposed to look.

I would love to speak to you about your poetry. Why did you decide to write poetry, instead of prose or drama, for example?

I am not actually sure whether or not one can decide to write poetry. It all came together very organically, like my garden. Twenty years ago, I was invited to the literature competition “Treffen junger Autor*innen” (Meeting of Young Authors) in Berlin – which is quite funny, because I often meet people who participated in this competition and actually became writers!

A regional newspaper in my area wrote about this competition and printed two of my poems and also that I was planning to take cultural studies in Hildesheim. A novelist, who was also a professor at the University of Hildesheim, read my poems and sent me a handwritten letter asking if, in addition to cultural studies, I would like to take a new creative writing course at his university. At the time, they had just established the program and I was part of the first class.

However, during my first couple of semesters in Hildesheim, I was pretty much the only person writing poetry there. Eventually, I even stopped writing poetry, because the prevalent image of a writer was not that of a poet. Furthermore, it seemed like there was a dominant idea about what a text should look like and again, these texts weren’t poems.

Luckily, I went to the US and met Arnold Stadler who introduced me to a completely new way of thinking about one’s own writing. He also wrote the afterword for my first collection of poetry that was published in 2004, when I was 24 years old.

Was this your poetry collection Aufbrüche?

Yes!

What happened after your first collection of poetry was published?

Well, I moved to Berlin and started doing odd jobs there. One evening, I gave a reading at a small Literature House in Kreuzberg and three women were sitting in the front row: Monika Rinck, Ann Cotten and Sabine Scho. Today, they are three very famous German poets, and back then, they were already quite well-known. Sometime later, one of them, though I do not remember who, introduced me to “Forum der 13” (a platform for contemporary German literature) and I started publishing online.

Somehow, things took on a life of their own and a couple of years later this weird shift happened where I suddenly realized I was not a novice anymore.

Right now, I am working on my first novel and I feel like a novice again.

Could you tell us something about your upcoming novel?

Well, one of my friends termed it “feminist science-fiction” but I always remember this quote by Margaret Atwood where she once reduced the term to “talking squids in outer space”. She termed her own work “speculative fiction” if I remember correctly, and this is probably what I am going for as well.

Writing a novel feels like I am starting over. I wrote quite a bit up until last Christmas, approximately 180 pages. However, I am still not sure if I can actually finish the book. Well, I will probably need to finish it because I have already told everyone about it.

I also started reading Ursula K. Le Guin again, she is an amazing writer. It pissed me off last year when she was described as the “female Tolkien” in an obituary in a German newspaper. What an insult. No one would refer to a male writer as the “male Atwood” in an obituary. What I like about Ursula K. Le Guin is the fact that she just goes for the weird stuff unapologetically. You don’t even realize the extent of it because she manages to suck you into the story right away. So if you don’t get the what and where and how immediately, well, then you don’t, but you keep reading anyway and the whole thing comes together sooner or later.

How do you write? Where do you write?

I often write my poems by hand, because they tend to happen when I am without my laptop. When I work on my novel, I have to work on my laptop because I have to write very fast.

When I write my poems, I usually write them straight down and I don’t change too much. Sometimes I notice that the rhythm isn’t quite right and then I would change that, or I might come up with a different term within a line because there is assonance or alliteration that would fit better with the flow but I didn’t hear it before.

In contrast, when I am working on the novel, I do a lot more revisions and I always have to make sure the plot is proceeding, and I have to think strategically to some extent. It’s exhausting.

I love how you describe your approach to writing. In fact, this is my first interview with a writer. I usually interview politicians and lobbyists. I was scared that you would wonder why I am asking these questions and tell me that the texts speak for themselves.

Yes, that happens. Especially with the type of writer who “has a plan”. But it is a valid response if you feel you have already said everything and why should you say it again and maybe it would amount to less? Apparently, though, I like to talk a lot and share details while still working on something. Also, my novel is a monster that is still evolving.

Can I ask about your time before your first collection of poetry was published? You mentioned that you went to St. Louis. What made you choose St. Louis?

Actually, it was a coincidence. I originally wanted to go to Aix-En-Provence in France. I spontaneously decided to go to St. Louis instead because there was a research fellowship offer that sounded really interesting. I started writing Aufbrüche in the US and when I came back from St. Louis, I didn’t want to stay in Hildesheim so I moved to Bologna a year later.

Please tell me about your time in Bologna.

It was a lot of fun. I finished the book there and had a lot of time to write. I lived in a shared flat with five Italian guys. Bologna is a beautiful city and we lived in the old part of the city, in a street called “Via Delle Belle Arti”. Our landlady lived one floor down and she always complained when her washing machine didn’t work because we were sucking up all the electricity by using six laptops at once. Three of my five Italian roommates played in an experimental rock band called “Elton Junk” (laughs) and all of them were into music and art as well as graphic novels. I had an amazing time.

Do you also write in English or Italian?

My Italian is not good enough to do that. But for VERSeFEST in Ottawa, I translated my poems from German to English which, surprisingly, worked out quite well. I also work and read a lot in English. While rewriting my own poems in English, I realized it may become a second literary language for me.

In 2013, you published an essay about the idea of money. You write that you understand why someone would be obsessed with money, that these processes develop their own kind of obsessive beauty and also waste a lot of time. What does money mean to you personally?

Well, I was asked to write about money because people assumed I had a special relationship with money due to my job as an administrator… but I actually used to have anxiety dealing with numbers, until I worked as an intern at Boston Consulting in my 20s where I was able to get rid of that. Later I had to deal with money matters when my father died in 2010. He had invested in stocks and I had to manage our insurance and his portfolio and free up some money, but the market was still down. At some point after that, I realized I knew more about money than most of my friends.

I sense the influence of administrative thinking in the poem ‘Nullsummenbien’. How do you find inspiration through your work in administration?

I have been the Managing Director of the School of Analytical Sciences Adlershof since 2012. I think one of the things that inspires me about this type of work is the language we use – especially the scientific terms, which can be very beautiful in their own right.

I also think that the type of creative thinking you might employ in a lab may be similar to what I do when I’m writing. I discussed this with our spokesperson who works in spectroscopy, and we found out we share quite a similar approach when it comes to the creative process of our work. For instance, when scientists are doing measurements in the lab, they might not necessarily focus on technique – or it might be very important to do so. While I write, I also do not think about my technique, but it can be vital to do so when analyzing your draft afterwards. You cannot think about your fingering while you are playing the piano, this needs to happen organically. But you can analyze where you go wrong every time you play.

For me as a piano player, this is very insightful!

Yes! There is also the parable of the centipede that cannot walk any more after someone inquires about how, exactly, it sets its feet while walking. It can be dangerous to overanalyze, and you need to be sure of what you are doing when you take this sober approach to the result of your own creative work.

In 2019, you received the Basler Lyrikpreis. The jury wrote in their explanatory remarks that you uncover new realms of knowledge with your use of language. Is this what you want to achieve with your writing – uncovering new epistemic realms?

I would love to accomplish that with my writing (laughs)! I think what I and other writers want to achieve are different approaches to knowledge via different types of perceptions. I tend to think in patterns, in rhythms, sounds and flow.

Maybe it is also about recognizing things and rendering them perceptible with language. In particular, aspects that are hard to grasp. Like when you see something out of the corner of your eye, on the edge of your vision, but if you turn towards it, it is just gone.

Coming back to the poets you mentioned before, do you have any literary role models? Or was there a specific body of work that inspired you?

There was not one text that inspired me to write. I always read a lot. I started volunteering at a library when I was nine years old … mainly to get access to all the fantastic books in the grown-up section.

When I read, I often read one author excessively. For two weeks, everything by Thomas Bernhard. Or, all of Marina Tsvetaeva in three weekends, including the letters and the biographies. All of Le Guin while in the Canadian woods without wifi…. If you read a third or a fourth book by a person, you might recognize a pattern or structure. This is what I am interested in.

Do you have a favourite Canadian author?

Margaret Atwood, of course. And Leonard Cohen! He is an amazing poet.

How did your participation in VERSeFEST 2019 come about?

It was a coincidence, the organizer found me on Facebook. I think someone must have recommended me to him. It all came together by chance because I deactivated my Facebook account shortly afterwards.

What do you think about social media in general? I am asking this question, because there are emerging poets and writers like Rupi Kaur whose poetry became famous because of Instagram, Twitter and other social networks.

Well, without social media I would probably not be sitting here right now, so there’s that… For me, social media was just not working out. It was very exhausting. Drama everywhere, all that energy going to waste in all those pointless discussions. I was never on Instagram or Twitter, but I used Facebook extensively for a while. Less after I stopped using a smartphone in 2015, I had only had one for two years. And as I said, my Facebook account is deactivated and I recently put in the request for deletion.

I don’t think we actually really need those devices and apps, at least not in our private lives. People just submit to them. Smartphones, in many instances, create a type of urgency that doesn’t actually exist. Yes, there are some great and life-saving applications especially in countries without reliable stationary internet and phone systems. But at least in Europe, I think we would be fine without smartphones, at least for private use. And yes, I do realize that in 2019, this sounds crazy.

Thank you, Katharina, for your time and this interview!

Thank you very much, as well.

This interview was paraphrased from German to English.