All posts tagged: Iceland

Loons in Strandir

By JEFFREY WOLF

Hólmavík, Iceland, 2023

 

The Westfjords. Iceland’s necrotic hand. Gnarled fingers reaching for the icy water. This is my interlude. A day between artist residencies, a rental car from Hertz. Just a short detour off my route. I may never have the chance again.

The fjords sit back and cast their spell. They rise from the ocean like the backs of sleeping beasts. For eons, they’ve waited. Layer after layer, gray upon gray, so deep and infinite that I start to feel afraid. Surely this is where the darkness lives.

A short detour isn’t so short. The land wanders, the roads double back. Time warps in the hypnosis. I’ve driven for hours and made no progress. Suddenly I’ve crested a mountain, and I’m staring down like a king. Then I’m low along the beach, small and insignificant. Then the mist rolls in, and it’s anybody’s guess.

Loons in Strandir
Read more...

Upright Members in Good Standing

By A. KENDRA GREENE

 

My boyfriend does not come with me to the penis museum. While I pay the eight hundred Icelandic krona to visit 276 specimens of pickled, salted, or mounted manhood, Dustin is at home packing boxes. His home. He is sweating there in the triple-digit heat of a Texas summer, sweating as he arranges his life into banker’s boxes and carries them out in bulky white waves to stack against the blank walls of the new place, the place we picked out together, the first apartment we will ever share. And while all this packing and inventory and heavy lifting has everything to do with me, with us, with bringing an end to the long-distance phase of our relationship and making a life together, it does not yet occur to him that what he’s doing has anything whatsoever to do with an Icelandic penis museum. He has no idea that by the time he picks me up from the airport a few weeks later, I’ll want him to make a donation. Indeed, at first, I do not know it myself.

 

Upright Members in Good Standing
Read more...

The Female Writer is Political: an Interview with Oddný Eir

MELODY NIXON interviews ODDNY EIR

Oddny Eir

In this month’s interview, Melody Nixon speaks with Icelandic author Oddný Eir about feminism and writing, folklore, and tyranny. Eir’s latest book of auto-fiction, Land of Love and Ruins, is a work of diaristic essay, lyric collage, and rumination. Collaborator Björk describes Eir as “a true pioneer.” Eir appeared this week in New York City’s PEN World Voices Festival on Gender and Power.

The Female Writer is Political: an Interview with Oddný Eir
Read more...