Seeing Iceland: An Interview with Gabrielle Motola

The Land of Always Winter

Wind wakes me in the night. The weather here is a wild thing, coursing of its own volition, ever changing — hail…

An Icelandic Forest

Boughs, laden with snow, stoop low as if straining to unite heaven and earth, and when the wind comes they tremble away a portion of their load. I stand amid spruce and birch in a world of green needles. The trail, both ahead and behind, is barely discernable: it is defined by absence rather…

A Reykjavík Valentine

The mural in a small alleyway in Reykjavík is of a girl, arm outstretched, holding aloft a pink balloon. The balloon is…

Wildwind

When the storm hit, doors and windows clattered shut. Billowing clouds descended upon the city. Amidst the din, it seemed the very sky would crack.

Surfaces dissolved, and buildings bled into haze bled into nothingness. All the world was noise, a wordless howling no voice could breach…

Raven-Lair

I have found the place the ravens love. It is down by the ice-clogged river, among the trees. They congress in the branches, lurching to and fro, until issuing their decrees with a great croak and a fanning of feathers. The words have been spoken, the pacts sealed. Then they wing off, in pairs, to other…

The Buried Bike

I was walking down the street the other day, mesmerized by looming mountains armored in ice, when I noticed something strange…

The Smell of the Sea

It is the last day of February. All the snow has melted. On days such as these, the smell of the sea wafts inland. As soon…

Dilation

From a crack in the clouds, white light suffuses the earth. Distant peaks, snipped by a seam of fog, float just above the horizon. They have unhinged themselves. They exist in their own dimension. The foreground is unsuspecting, scrubbed with bushes and small trees, diminutive amid the amplitude of the…

In Mosfellsbær

Amid the sleepy streets, there is movement overhead: plugs of melting ice crawl down the gutter until they hang over thin air…