Rime and the Resident Writer

This world is ice.

It is called the Land of Fire and Ice, but this town in the web between two northern fingers of Iceland is all ice, one slick sheet that begins at the foot of the stairs and extends everywhere I go. I walk like a penguin, waddle my body side to side, mince my way.

I slide.

Usually sideways, as if to soft-shoe. My hands swing up in counterpoint, to counterbalance my sudden downward motion and the move keeps me upright; I catch myself. But not before bracing for the worst. I see my bundled form swoop up and crash down, cartoon-like, on my fanny, an impact poof exploding behind me.

A wave of panic ripples through my body; slowly enough to track the heat from gut to butt and heart to brow, but so quickly that I realize I am safe before the radiation fades and chuckle at the foolish thought that I was ever in danger of falling.

I am in Ólafsfjörður, in the far north of Iceland, 42 miles south of the Arctic Circle, for the winter’s darkest days — skammdegi in Icelandic: literally, “short days.” They are also dark days, days when we have sunlight but cannot see the sun, and that for only five hours (give or take) out of 24.

Ólafsfjörður is surrounded on three sides by mountains — stunning, snow-covered mountains that feel taller than their 3,000 feet — mountains that block the sun, so that Helios makes his journey offstage, and dawn swells then fades to dusk over the space of just a few hours.

Does it look or sound like living in darkness has driven me into the dark?

Despite the fears of a few friends and acquaintances, so far the darkness has not overtaken me. I see the long, sunless nights, the cold climate, and the unsure footing this arctic winter brings as a metaphor for my writer-artist journey: a slick runway that threatens to level anyone who ventures out on it. A long, dark night in the mind.

I want to be afire.

I came here specifically to study the dark, to investigate how I might mine it for creative input, to consider darkness as a visual silence, a blank canvas for thought.

From the moment I applied for this artist residency, I approached the skammdegi with curiosity about how the lack of light, the inky days that run together with but a slight delineation between them might affect me, and I accepted that such conditions might lay me low. But so far, 30 days in, I have not fallen. I have slept longer than I imagined; I have spent more time on Facebook than I intended; and I have written less than I planned. But I continue to make my way across any treacherous expanse that lays outside my door or inside my mind.

There is a moment between struggling to create and feeling it all come together when it feels like I am about to take a terrible fall and crack my head. But it never happens that way. Who can really say, but I think I am more likely to fall on the ice than to be felled by the darkness.