Berlin-based writer and poet Nina Hanz spoke with us about her life, work, and what it means to be a reader. Nina is originally from the North American South. In 2020, she earned a master’s degree in Writing from the Royal College of Art. Before that, she graduated with honors in 2018 from University College Maastricht, where she studied Liberal Arts and Sciences, with a focus on Philosophy and Literature and Art Theory. During her undergraduate studies, she spent a semester at the University of Exeter’s Department of English in Falmouth, Cornwall, as part of the Erasmus program.
She has given performances and lectures at the National Poetry Library, London; Floating University, Berlin; Bauhaus University, Weimar and Assembly House, Norwich, among others. Her first poetry pamphlet, Placeholders, was published by Bottlecap Press in February 2022, and her second pamphlet, Mycoglossia, co-written with Fiona Glen, was published by Haverthorn Press in December 2022. From 2020 to 2022, she served as an editor at the Journal of Art Writing by Students (JAWS), published by Intellect Books in London. In 2019, she was an editorial intern at Grazia UK in London.
Can you tell us about Nina?
I’ve been based in Berlin for about five years now, where I work in communications and pursue writing as a creative practice. I was born in the North American South, where I spent most of my childhood. I think it really informed my way of writing, not just in terms of my own memories but the particular culture of storytelling there. The South is a region in the USA where the history still feels very palpable – in the culture, the wetlands, the extreme weather and more generally the economies of everyday life. There is a lingering darkness there, and a great deal of pain that for many has not been fully reckoned with. I often feel that in Berlin too.
Berlin is a city shaped by so much upheaval, situated in a country that both endured and perpetrated the injustices of dictatorship only a few generations before my own. Not all of those connections have yet been severed. Their lingering presence has, at times, pulled the country so far off course that the political class can no longer even see the line they thought they were following.
History feels unusually present here. It lives in the architecture, in the memorials, and even in the way people dress, celebrate, and move through public life. The weight of the past infuses everyday experience with an intensity that is difficult to ignore.
I feel that to live in Berlin is to be in constant negotiation with history. You are always positioning yourself in relation to it. You are forced to confront it, to ask where these forces still persist, and to recognize how they continue to surface within the present moment.
One motif that often comes up in my own writing is the swamp as this haunting, fluid space, always going through entropy and change. Something that stuck with me in Kirsty Bell’s Undercurrents was that Berlin (stemming from berl-, meaning marsh) was built on swamplands, which might be another reason why I feel so at home here like I did back in the South, where a swamp reconfigured the boundaries of my backyard from day to day. In her book, Bell proposes that the stagnant water and marshy conditions on which Berlin was built contribute to the energy that you can feel in the city – why things just linger here. Maybe that also contributes to the way the past feels so present here. In general, I think I am a person who is really sensitive to atmospheres, so it bubbles up naturally in my writing.
Can you tell us more about your writing?
My writing is very connected to nature, with a strong affinity for both art and science. I love how language allows for something entirely unique and novel to be formed, and for me, there is something particularly exciting about blending genres, disciplines and topics. It makes me think about ecotones, the zones where different ecosystems meet to create hybrid communities of plants and animals. Nature thrives in these boundaries.
At a very formative time in my life, I read Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain and I interpreted it equally as a kind of scripted performance and as literature. It contains such beautiful prose. This approach to nature writing was so radical to me, and I think I have been chasing this multiplicity in my practice ever since. How a text feels is just as important for me as what it might be arguing or trying to articulate. This results in a practice where I move between prose and poetry within larger (eco)feminist inquiries. I am often told my writing is ‘landscapey’ and ‘atmospheric’, which can sometimes feel a bit like a barrier for me as I continue to experiment more with fiction, but those are also the things I pay the most attention to.
What are you working on right now?
I am writing this as I come back from a beautiful hiking trip through Norway, so currently, I am sifting through notes on my phone from all my observations. I have been writing a lot of prose in the last months, but as soon as I step back and reconnect with myself, I fall back into poetry. So I think those notes I made will inform my next poems, which I plan to share in some upcoming readings in Berlin.
This Fall is extra exciting because Fiona Glen, a dear collaborator, and I will be launching a new project expanding from a poetry chapbook we published with HVTN Press at the end of 2022. Mycoglossia means ‘mushroom tongues’ or ‘fungal languages’, and we originally wrote it as an attempt to break conventions in poetic form – enticing non-human voices onto the page as we imagined how fungi themselves might speak. . It is the project that has been the most fruitful for me as a young writer. I learned so much from the process and it still shapes how I approach writing today. With Tarun Nayar (aka Modern Biology), we have reshaped the poems into a poetry album with improv musicians and real-time music made from the bioelectricity of mushrooms. It has been such a joy to have the project continue to open itself up to further collaboration in such experimental ways. I am excited to share it with the world.
You hit a lot of dead ends in the research. How do you sit with that? Do you write into the gap or around it?
When I am writing a text, it feels more like I am stepping inside of something and wandering around. In particular, I find myself drawn to nonhuman voices and speculative perspectives in the landscapes I explore in my writing. It is important for me to get a sense of the land, the ground, the grit under our finger nails, even the enamel of our teeth. All of these details build reality, and giving up into the unknowable makes this experimentation exciting for me. Therefore, there is always an element of guess-work I am doing. I don’t really know what it is like to converse with the mycelial networks underneath our feet, but the connection still exists and is worth drawing out. I also don’t know what it’s like for a grunion to jump out of the water for the first time, but this not-knowingness is where I often find myself and what has attracted me towards fiction writing.
When I do experience a block, if it is in the research phase or the writing, it usually helps me to look at other fields connected to the topic. I will often work with a dictionary or an encyclopedia next to me. I find scientific jargon really interesting and often sneak it into a text. Cross-pollinating like that with other disciplines is often what helps move my ideas forward. And across the genres I write – poetry, fiction, the essay – I like that there is the discovery process for both me, the writer, and, hopefully, also the reader.
Fiona Glen, who co-wrote Mycoglossia with me, gifted my the book On Not Knowing by Emily Ogden a few years ago, and while Odgen is writing mainly about her transition into motherhood during the Pandemic, I keep returning to this book because there are so many beautiful reminders for me to give myself up to the writing, to let the essay or story wash over me, to step into something unknown. In this process, I think there is such a strong potential for (re)discovering things otherwise forgotten or unnoticed. So, I guess I have trained my mind to be active in filling the uncertainties. So, I am not even sure if ends are ever really dead for a poet.
Oh, and my tuxedo cat Bingo is also a huge help. Pets have always been a reminder for me to view things from different heights or to imagine the world through other senses. I think it is important to have a reminder that we are all cohabitating with each other and that comes with certain responsibilities, whether it is just in your own home or outside of it. Plus, Bingo is a very agreeable audience for me to share my writing with.
What do you want the reader to carry with them after spending time in your work?
I love this question. For me, writing is about craft. I do it because I love literature. First and foremost, I write for myself, but the audience is always on my mind, reading over my shoulder.
I think my texts often ask to be read differently, maybe out loud or at varying paces. They are not static, even if they are there on the page in front of you. So I hope the reader takes curiosity with them after reading my work. To be able to leave their body and slip into a new landscape, to have them feel around on their hands and knees to orient themselves in my texts – that is what I would really love for my readers. I want them to feel connected to a landscape or the story or a moment I am articulating. That’s all I can hope for, because I also want to keep the work open enough for people to draw their own conclusions or affinities from.
Do you consider yourself a keen reader? Which writers do you find yourself coming back to?
Yes! I can absolutely devour a work of good fiction, for example. I think I have by now read every book and short story by Lauren Groff. I recommend ‘What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?’ to almost everyone because it exposes the dark and ugly sides of power and how gender plays a role in its abuse. Matrix is also a breathtaking work. Reading it the first time, I was so absorbed in its proximity to nature that I almost missed that the book is almost entirely devoid of men, and yet, at the same time asks similar questions about power and control. We are all seeing now so clearly how human actions force environmental damage and how that in turn affects communities across the globe. I seek out literature that addresses these imbalances.
When I am reading, I also tend to get really absorbed in the books. I almost need to be careful of where and when I read because the switch back into my own reality can feel so harsh. It is like a double uroboros: I am consuming the book but at the same time I get fully engrossed too. Recently, though, I’ve been really leaning into this and actively writing more short stories because I love the world-building aspects. It is a genre I feel I am still figuring out for myself as a writer, so returning to my favorite authors has been important for my writing. It’s hard to keep track of such a long list of authors who have influenced how I see writing and how I write, but among them are certainly Jamaica Kincaid, Elizabeth Hardwick, Hanya Yanagihara, Annie Dillard, Sylvia Legris, Lisa Robertson, Han Kang, Virginia Woolf, and Daphne du Maurier. Most recently, the books Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman and What Am I, a Deer? by Polly Barton have both got me thinking very differently about form. Reading these two alongside Mary Ruefle’s lectures in Madness, Rack, and Honey got me really excited to write. I know a book is good when it makes me want to write.
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