Arctic Circle Diaries

Next stop, North Pole (almost)

Greetings from 85 degree LA, where I’m packing winter clothes for a writing residency in the Arctic Circle. 

In one week, I will join about 100 artists on a two-week expedition to circumnavigate the Spitsbergen Archipelago, trying to get as close to the pack ice as possible. We’ll be on a pretty intense looking ship.

This is it:

It evidently has a helicopter pad, for…just in case? As well as the ability to break through one-year sea ice and loose multi-year pack ice. Though of course there is less and less ice these days, and the predicted high temperature in Svalbard tomorrow is an alarming 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

This wild adventure is run by a residency program for artists and scientists called The Arctic Circle. They’ve been doing shipboard residencies around Svalbard since 2009, but this is the first time they’ve ever attempted to circumnavigate the archipelago.

As I learned after being awarded the residency, many (if not most?) of the people on this trip are alumni of the program. Which I figure speaks well of the residency and also means a lot of them have Arctic-related projects already underway.

A random sampling of my shipmates’ planned projects —

• Recording people singing karaoke on the ice. (We were asked to submit potential songs. I proposed “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and “Soak Up the Sun”)

• Making site-specific paper while standing waist-deep in the Arctic Ocean

• Exploring the optical properties of ice by having a lot of people hold up mirrors to the ice on a sunny day

• A photoshoot of absurd, whimsical scenes set against the melting landscape. (I’ve agreed to participate in an ‘influencer pool-party’ themed shot, which will entail getting in the water with a giant blow-up unicorn. Will I regret this once I feel the temperature of the *Arctic* ocean? We’ll find out.)

• Underwater recordings of narwhal sounds

• Building temporary puppets/sculptures on the ice

And me? I have no specific plans. I’m going in search of inspiration.

I found out that I’d been awarded the residency in the spring, and I thought, great! Plenty of time to research the Arctic and prepare. I also set myself the goal of finishing a presentable draft of my novel-in-progress before then, lest I find myself tempted to add an Arctic section to a book that has absolutely no room for that. 

I accomplished one of the two. I just finished a solid draft of a novel that I tore apart and restarted nearly from scratch in February. Because I’d set myself this arbitrary deadline and also because I’m bad at moderation, I’ve spent the past two months in an obsessive writing binge, doing very little else.

Which is how I found myself conducting the following Google searches yesterday: 

Siri, how do you get to the North Pole?

I’m planning to keep a diary of the experience to share sections of it here, though potentially at a delay due to limited shipboard internet.

I leave for Norway this weekend. I’ll spend a few days in Bergen (please send recs!) getting over jetlag and exploring, and then next Wednesday, I fly to Svalbard, the departure point for our expedition.

Where is Svalbard?

Prior to…five months/minutes ago, my knowledge of Svalbard came almost exclusively from Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass books and the social media accounts of Cecilia from Svalbard.

What I know now: Svalbard is about midway between Norway and the North Pole and one of the northernmost occupied places in the world. It’s a three hour flight from Oslo, home to a population of about 2,000 people and an intimidating number of polar bears. If you venture off the town’s main road, you have to carry a rifle in case of polar bear encounters. The Svalbard grocery store has a locker room for rifle storage, so you can do your produce shopping firearm-free.

Casual morning visit from a neighboring Svalbard family.

It’s Arctic summer there now, meaning it’s light 24 hours a day. The sun will set for the first time since spring towards the end of my trip.

The program provided us with a packing list, and I dutifully ordered the recommended items. Only once I was unboxing my new headlamp did I realize this must be an all-seasons packing list because….headlamp? When it never gets dark?

Anyway! I am now in possession of a headlamp and thick gloves and insulated waterproof pants and merino wool everything and extra camera batteries and binoculars (thanks, Dad) and more than the recommended 3 pairs of socks because 3 seems a little low for 14 days on a ship with no laundry?

I’m currently reading a fascinating memoir from the 1930s called A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter, a painter who spent a year living with her husband in a small hut on Svalbard. Also in the queue is a nonfiction book about shipboard newspapers on polar expeditions, The News at the Ends of the Earth. And I just read Kaliane Bradley’s novel, The Ministry of Time, which was a delightful romp with a polar exploration storyline. If you’ve read or seen anything great and Arctic-related, please reply or comment!

More to come! Now, back to shoving bulky clothes into a small suitcase…