Written as a journal – with long periods tellingly absent – we witness her transformation as she relinquishes herself to this place. Often alone for long spells, her mundane chores and her will to survive the extremes uncover marvels, both in the place and her spirit. In the winter of 1933/4 Ritter, an Austrian painter and self-proclaimed “housewife”, makes the radical decision to join her hunter-trapper husband and a Norwegian hunter in Arctic Spitsbergen, living together in a tiny hut. A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter What happens when we listen to the voices which make a place? How might we feel our entanglements with the world to know it as home and treat it as such, even when we are unsure where we belong to? These books, many with a focus on the far north and spanning nearly a century, have inspired how I explore this interplay between place, people, living, thought and the body.ġ. Treading a fine line between insider and outsider, I felt compelled to record what I witnessed and became a part of. We are increasingly aware that the far north is not remote but central – in the regulation of climate, ocean currents, and therefore in all our futures. Amid volcanic eruptions and melting ice sheets, people and place are continuous. Entangled with the story of my marriage to an Icelander, other stories – of people, ravens, storms, the supernatural, life and death – build a weave in cycles of light and dark, into the titular nest. I call it ecological because, in life as on the page, it manifests everything as relational and interdependent. My debut The Raven’s Nest is an ecological memoir set in its otherworldly Westfjords. I still do, whenever I get the chance: it is a place that allows me to think differently. I was lucky enough to spend half a decade in Iceland, leaning into its genius loci. Given the Arctic is such an active protagonist in climate change, it is perhaps surprising that the genre has seldom ventured to the far north. A current fascination with the intelligences of the “‘more-than-human” world is firmly placing nature as protagonist rather than in service to a human plot. The diversification of authors and of the places, cultures, and beings represented are lending vitality to the genre.
While the early nature writing canon leaned towards natural history – often at arm’s length, often written by a man out in a “wild” place – recent forms are bringing the issues of our time closer to home in memoir, making vivid the lives of others – human and not.
With the grave threat posed by the compound climate, ecological and biodiversity crises, a need and longing to repair our connection to the living world is keenly felt by many, and literature is playing a key role. Undisturbed by the hum of road and shipping traffic, birdsong and the buzz of pollinators were amplified in our days’ soundtracks, and whales were recorded for the first time speaking in complex “sentences”. For the fortunate, the pause and hush offered space to witness the seasons unfolding, to hear voices other than our own, and to realise “our” story is deeply entangled with other lives. T he lockdowns of 2020/2021 galvanised and expanded a readership drawn to writing about the natural world.
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