Natasha Trethewey tries to go beyond Katrina

For Natasha Trethewey, a post-Katrina visit to her hometown of North Gulfport, Mississippi, became the impetus for a powerful multimedia project that combines verse and photography. That project is called “Congregation” and it's the second installment in the Virginia Quarterly Review and Studio 360 collaboration Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Tretheway talks about the project this week at the New Yorker’s book bench:

In writing under these special conditions—the temporal immediacy of your responses, the emotional immediacy of your subjects—did you learn anything that you’ll want to carry forward into your work?

A lot of people remarked about how vulnerable I seemed in those poems, and that’s the most important thing I learned. When I went down there to make this project, I thought it would not be difficult, because I had always been writing about my hometown and the people in it and its history and my family—and I always felt like an insider doing that. But this time, it was after my life had changed dramatically, after having won the Pulitzer, and the kind of attention that brings . . .