The Mystery of the Siberian Ice Maiden: Kim Trainor on Poetry, Death, and Memory

For this episode of The Transmute Tapes, we speak with Kim Trainor — a Canadian poet, teacher, and author based in Vancouver, whose work moves between poetry, ecology, memory, grief, and the ethics of attention. We first connected with Kim through a shared fascination with the Siberian Ice Maiden — the tattooed Iron Age woman unearthed from the frozen Pazyryk burial grounds in Siberia. In Kim Trainor’s book "Ledi", this discovery becomes a poetic investigation shaped by archaeology, intimacy, memory, grief, and the strange persistence with which the dead continue to address the living. For Maison Douce, the Siberian Ice Maiden became the starting point for a different artistic gesture: the flag "Talking to Ghosts", conceived as a portal and trigger — an artwork that invites confession, projection, and the release of buried knowledge. In this conversation, we explore where these approaches meet: how one ancient figure can move across time and enter the present through radically different artistic forms, awakening both poetic language and visual ritual. In this episode, we talk about what it means to be seized by a presence from the distant past, and what allows an unearthed body, image, or fragment of story to still act upon us across centuries. We discuss the ethics of unearthing the past, the responsibilities that come with working artistically with the dead, and the fragile line between revelation and appropriation. Kim also reflects on her writing process, poetry as a form of listening, and her deep connection to the natural world. We touch on her most recent book, Blue thinks itself within me: Lyric poetry, ecology, and lichenous form, and on the way ecology, weather, plant life, and environmental crisis enter her work. This is a conversation about artistic kinship, ancient remains, poetic form, ritual, and the mysterious ways certain figures keep calling to us. **Content note: This episode includes references to death and suicide. Please skip this episode if you prefer not to engage with these themes.**