Katrina Moinet: Writing Place, Language, and Belonging on Ynys Môn
Katrina Moinet: Writing Place, Language and Belonging on Ynys Môn
I know Katrina Moinet through the landscape she writes about. We swim in the same waters around Ynys Môn, and that shared relationship with place shaped this conversation about language, belonging and community.
“You don’t always appreciate where you grow up until you leave,” Katrina says. Like many who move away from the island, distance brought with it a strong sense of hiraeth, the distinctly Welsh feeling of longing for home. That pull back towards place continues to inform her writing, both thematically and emotionally.
Katrina describes her childhood on Ynys Môn as largely happy, though shaped by extreme poverty and being raised in a single-parent household. “My mum chose Ynys Môn as a place of safety”, she explains. “I always felt very connected to the land. The mountains felt like a kind of shield between me and what was going on in the wider world.” Landscape, for her, is not passive scenery but something that actively shapes identity.
Language was a defining part of that upbringing. Raised bilingually, Katrina grew up immersed in Welsh culture, but her experience of language was not uncomplicated. “I spoke with an English accent, and people would say things like, ‘go back to your own country’ or ‘you don’t belong here.’” Those early experiences of being othered continue to inform her writing. “Language is very much in my roots,” she says, and it remains a lens through which she explores identity, power and belonging.
Although Katrina’s work often centres on feminism, gender and embodied experience, place consistently underpins these themes. “The personal is political,” she says, particularly in communities like Ynys Môn. “Whatever is happening in your community is shaped by how policy is implemented.” She reflects on the tension between Ynys Môn as a place of outstanding natural beauty and its position as one of the poorest parts of the country. “You want to enjoy the landscape, the sea, the outdoors,” she says, “but you can’t ignore the economic reality alongside it.”
Katrina’s poetry also responds to current events and social issues, particularly around gender and safety. She recalls the murder of Sarah Everard and the public outrage that followed. “It was outrageous how long the media defended the Met police,” she says. This, combined with music like Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side, sparked a visceral response that found its way into performance pieces. “It connected for me that women are told to be responsible for their bodies in public spaces and are not given protection by the people who should protect them.” While she does not write angry poetry as a rule, such events can trigger direct and urgent responses in her work.
Collective relationships to place are especially influential in her work. One poem emerged after she attended a solstice gathering at a burial mound on Ynys Môn. “I woke up early and walked down, and you could hear chanting through the hedgerows,” she recalls. “It was completely atmospheric.” What stayed with her was the sense of people coming together around shared ritual. “It was about being together and connecting to nature,” she says. “Seeing other people connected to place like that is really inspiring.”
Katrina’s creative practice sits within a wider contemporary poetry scene that engages directly with land, activism and community. She speaks warmly of working with poet Glyn Edwards, whose writing is deeply rooted in place. Encounters like these, she says, reinforce the importance of paying attention to landscape not just as environment, but as lived and remembered space.
She also highlights the influence of Tiffany Atkinson, whose work around consent and bodily autonomy, had a lasting impact on her own writing. Katrina describes encountering Atkinson’s poetry as a moment that “rang and rang” in her mind, prompting a series of responses rather than a single piece. For Katrina, this is how poetry often works, as a conversation that unfolds over time between writers grappling with similar concerns.
Closer to home, she points to the contemporary Welsh poetry scene as a source of ongoing inspiration. She speaks particularly about Ness, whose collection Naming the Trees was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. The collection documents the Save Penrhos campaign opposing the proposed development of ancient woodland in Holyhead. “That work shows how poetry and activism can come together and help a community,” Katrina says, describing it as an example of writing that actively participates in the protection of place.
Katrina’s own creative process rarely starts with a fixed plan. “Sometimes a word or phrase will just kick everything off,” she explains. Her writing often responds directly to lived experience and current events, particularly where questions of safety, consent and public space intersect. These are not themes she consciously sets out to write about, but ones she finds herself returning to. “As a writer, you have preoccupations,” she says. “You can’t always help that.”
When exploring a place or idea she has not written about before, Katrina describes research as grounded in presence. “You either go there physically, or you go there in your mind,” she says. Drawing on memory and sensory detail allows different places to overlap and inform one another. Once a central idea emerges, there is a sense of momentum. “When you find it, you know it will grow into something else.”
Beyond her own writing, Katrina is deeply committed to sustaining local creative spaces. She speaks about the importance of independent bookshops and community venues, particularly in towns that have experienced economic decline. “That’s how you keep a community alive,” she says, reflecting on the early support she received and the open mic night she now runs in the Blue Sky Café on Bangor High Street.
Katrina does not describe her work as gentle or decorative. “I don’t write the kind of pretty poetry that everyone enjoys,” she says, “but people tell me it’s powerful.” For her, that response is enough. “I just continue writing the things that seem important to me.” In doing so, her work maps the relationships between place, language and lived experience, showing how landscapes are shaped not only by geography, but by the stories people tell about them.