Interview Conducted by Winifred Wong

Winifred: A fellow poet Charles Rhodes told me to ask you about your Greek lemon soup poem, called ‘Avgolemeno’. It opens the book ‘In the Meat Years’, which you mention in another interview as your most personal collection. I really enjoyed how tender and intimate this poem was, and how the careful stirring of broth into the egg mimicked the stirring of memory and nostalgia.

Could you tell me a little bit about how you came up with this poem?

Kindra: He probably specifically mentioned it because I served that soup at my class! It was an important shared experience I had with my mom. Then I married a Greek man, whose mother is amazing and who makes the soup all the time. I feel this poem probably came from an idea of what do you long for in the winter, and I’m always thinking about lemons, and associating the lemons with the avgolemeno. 

Winifred: In In the Meat Years, there is a very deliberate through line that I noticed, a baton that’s being passed on from poem to poem, kind of like a sonnet crown. It reminded me of a lotus root, the way the interconnecting strands hold the whole collection together. Could you tell me a little bit about how you order the poems in your books?

Kindra: I usually put all the poems on the floor and order them that way. For In The Meat Years I was trying to organize it by theme. But then I felt it was all food, food, food, and then flower, flower, flower. So, it really took many different rearrangements before the calendar year revealed itself. Once I saw it seasonally, it made so much sense to me. I tend to write seasonally too, and fall is the time where I hunker down and I can really write. So I started shaping it through a calendar year.

Winifred: The title of In The Meat Years seems to derive from the poem ‘Carnivore’. I loved the comparison of the abstinence of meat mirroring the abstinence from an ex-spouse, and how meat was used as a metaphor for a relationship that’s carved and manipulated and processed and marinated and massaged. So many things are being done to this meat, and in the end, it’s carved off the bone. And of course, the next poem is called Bones. There’s a through-line. Did you really go vegetarian? How was that experience?

Kindra: I experimented with vegetarianism starting in high school, when I read the book Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. Even as a kid, I can remember pizza and I would be like, I don’t want the red cheese, meaning pepperoni. Then I had what I lovingly refer to as my amateur marriage. I got married at 19. I think back to that time, and I just didn’t recognize who I was during that time, even down to what I ate for dinner every night. There was meat and potatoes constantly, pork loin, and I’ve never even had pork in my diet. After that period, the first thing that I did was just go back to what appealed to me, which was the way that I nurtured my body – through fresh things, and vegetables. Even today I’m almost entirely pescatarian.

Winifred: I really enjoyed how you use nature and also food as lenses through which you interrogate more personal and tender moments. Was nature always a starting point or was there a more pivotal moment for you, in your journey as a poet?

Kindra: My grandmother is deceased now, but I was really lucky that I got to spend a lot of time with her. The first poem I ever wrote, when I was five or six, was about the robin in the backyard. So my first poem was about nature and about birdsong, and outdoors was always a refuge for me and where I turned to.

Winifred: In another interview, you mentioned that she recited poetry, even though she had dementia.

Kindra: That was my great grandmother. So this is the coolest thing. My grandma and grandpa lived next door to my great grandparents. They bought the house next door. So I would spend my summers with my grandparents and go next door to my great grandparents. I have very clear memories of my great grandparents. My great grandmother, “Gertie,” Gertrude, was a poet and everybody in my family says that must be where I got it from, because she wouldn’t remember me from minute to minute as a child, but she would just recite Longfellow or Whitman and it was amazing.

Winifred: That sounds really idyllic, this summer and you have these generations and generations of people that care for you and this whole community. In a sense, it must have been very comforting.

Kindra: Does that even happen now? I feel my family’s very spread out. We’re all in different states and it’s hard to get together. So I feel very grateful for that time.

Winifred: You often use negative space and enjambment in place of punctuation and it gives a very restless quality to your poetry and also an absence of finality in some poems. What would you say is your relationship with punctuation?

Kindra: I’ve had editors be like, “Choose a punctuation and stick with it.” I intentionally use enjambment because visually I don’t like end-stopped lines. I love reading my poetry aloud and I have a real love for spoken word poets. When I read, I try to have that restless quality and musicality to my reading, and I would like that to appear on the page as well. If I’m adding a period, I do try to have that in the middle of the line. I joke that I chose poetry so that I didn’t have very strict grammar rules with punctuation.

Winifred: You mentioned in another interview that you get inspiration from daily walks. Have you ever jotted something down in a notebook when you’re waiting in a marsh or in a very adventurous place?

Kindra: Absolutely. Back when I was a park ranger, I would have to put on waders every day. One of our studies was a chicken turtle study and there were turtle traps everywhere and I would get out of my waders at the end of the day and I would have little bits of things that had notes on them and they wouldn’t be the scientific notes on what kind, how many turtles, how many painted turtles I saw. They would be about the way that the light was coming through or the way this particular type of mushroom looked. During COVID I would find a disposable mask to write on. I feel the biggest torture for me would be to not be able to write.

Winifred: I think I would stop thinking. Somehow through pen and paper, there’s a thinking there that you can’t rationalize. 

Kindra: Absolutely. 

Winifred: What feeds your writing, and how do you fill your well? 

Kindra: Definitely any time I’m outdoors. I often have to fight the impulse of wanting to write down what I’m experiencing or seeing and just be in the moment, because in this season of my life, I feel I have such little work-life balance that I really need to just be sitting outside listening to birds and not trying to turn it into a poem. 

Winifred: You mentioned in another interview that as the director of the Elizabeth River Trail part of your joy is giving access to water, since large parts are not accessible because of the military presence. I think being by the water is very generative and healing for a lot of people, so I really appreciate that you’re doing this. How do you feel about your current role as the director of the Elizabeth River Trail? How does it feed your writing?

Kindra: I think I’m very lucky. Very few people get to say that they have their dream job, and I do. I’ve actually experienced my dream job twice, as a park ranger and here in this role. I can speak about the [Elizabeth River] Trail all day, because I truly believe that the Trail is at the intersection of public health, equity, quality of life, our environment, and resilience. I mean, we are literally at the front doorstep to the sea level rise. We see it. 

I used to go to the Trail for inspiration and to relax, but it’s now hard for me to be on the Trail and not be working. I didn’t quite realize that I would be a bit of a public figure because of it. So I’ll go to Chesapeake and kind of be incognito with a hat. 

I use this role as a platform to speak towards public health and the environment. I find it important to bring public art to the Trail and poetry to the Trail. I find it almost always showing up in my poems in some way or another.

Winifred: As the director, do you get to go on the Trail much?

Kindra: No, actually. I’m on the computer a lot, writing grants and whatnot. When I do go on the Trail, it’s for programs and events, and I’m like, we need to get the Trail ambassadors over here to clean the graffiti up, and there’s so much litter, and these branches need to be cut. There’s just a checklist constantly, so I don’t get to enjoy it in the same way. But if I’m just sneaking away on a Sunday morning, my routine is to go to Chelsea Bakehouse and grab a pastry and go to Vessel and get a coffee and then go for a walk through the meadow.

Winifred: Being anonymous. I think there’s something to be said for being the observer instead of the observed. 

Kindra: Yeah.

Winifred: You’re a teacher at The Muse Writers Center and various other places. How does teaching help you write?

Kindra: I love teaching so much. I miss it because I haven’t been able to teach as regularly as I used to. This spring, I did a class with a high school in Newport News for their literary festival and taught four back-to-back classes of high school students. I was exhausted but so invigorated. I always get such insight from the students. The class was on voice and how to recognize voices in a poem. I had several different poems, and they had to match the poets together without knowing who the names were. And they were like, I can totally tell that these poems are by the same poet. So just seeing that makes me want to write. If I went in there feeling I hadn’t written anything in three months, I would leave very excited to write again.

The role of the poet is just to bear witness to what is going on, and I think that if I can share that with someone I’m teaching and they take that and observe and record it, it’s like you said, infectious.

Winifred: The good thing is, it always seems like a great time for poetry.

Kindra: We need it more than ever, every day. I love how the Slowdown podcast has become such a popular podcast. And I start every day with the Slowdown. It’s my routine when I’m doing my hair, putting my makeup on in the morning. And because you can’t read poetry fast, right? I’m so glad people are listening to it.

Winifred: How would you describe your writing community right now? Like, the closest people that you would send work or that you trust to get feedback.

Kindra: My trusted readers at The Muse have been part of my poetry studio for years. For the past 18 years I have been workshopping poems with Bill Ayres, the current vice president of the Southeast region for the Poetry Society of Virginia. I could sift through a stack of poems and pull out Bill’s poem. I know his work and that’s the same way he is with my work. And he will tell me “well, this is falling flat,” or something. I just trust him. And then I have a close friend who is such a sensitive reader and listener and my poems just make her cry. So to me, if I can make Beth cry, I’m like, yes. 

Winifred: It’s a litmus test.

Kindra: Yes, she’s kind of my beta reader. I met her through the Muse. I think we’re so lucky to have such a stellar literary center here in this region. 

Winifred: What is your next project?

Kindra: At the end of 2024, I put together everything that I’ve been compiling for the last year and a half. I ended up with two collections; one is completely finished, it’s called Shoulder Season, and I hope it finds a home. I was under the impression I haven’t been writing, but I have. 

Winifred: It’s harvesting. It’s reaping what you have made.

Kindra: Harvest season. Absolutely.

Winifred: Is there something else we haven’t covered that you’d like to talk about?

Kindra: I think how important this time is for poets. There’s so much that is changing and shifting in our physical world and our environmental changes. I think it’s really incumbent upon us to just be observing and capturing it with our words. That’s what we need to be doing.