Interview: Football & Sneezes in Arctic Skies

So here's our second Polar Poets Interview. Today, Susan gets to quiz Siobhan about her trip to Tromso in Norway, a place known as the 'Gateway to the Arctic'.

Q. When and why did you first become fascinated by the Northern Lights?

I first came across the Northern Lights in a favourite childhood story, The Snow Queen. They're described by Hans Christian Andersen as lights 'sneezing' in the sky, which is wonderful. But my imagination was taken with the whole arctic landscape of those stories, the reindeer flying with Gerda over frozen wastes. But the poetry started back in December 2005 when someone asked me to write about legends of the Northern Lights.

Q. You write, in Firebridge to Skyshore, of the many myths and indigenous stories about the Northern Lights that exist throughout the Arctic. What is your favourite story and why?

I discovered a whole treasure trove of stories and became very interested in the indigenous peoples around the arctic circle – the Inuits, Saamis, Siberian tribes and so on. Probably my favourite is a story shared by the Inuits and Native Americans – that the lights are the spirits of ancestors playing football in the sky with a walrus skull. That's just so playful and surprising. But I also love that idea of the aurora as a 'pathway' into another dimension, the spirit world of 'sky-dwellers'.

Q. How does science feature in your poetry of the aurora?

Right from the start, this project was bound up with the Physics & Astronomy department of Leicester University. My poems were for Jackie Stanley, a digital artist planning an exhibition for their building. Then later, I got sponsorship from a group of auroral scientists, the Radio & Space Plasma Physics Group, to visit an auroral site in Norway. This included a tour of the EISCAT research facility out there. So the scientific narrative was always blended with the mythic for me – the story of how 'sun-dust' creates the aurora is a fabulous tale in itself.

Q. If you could pick just three words to sum up your experiences of arctic Norway, what would they be?

That kind of economy is beyond me for such an awesome experience. But 3 moments: flying over the glacial mountains of Norway with those frozen-sheet lakes and white plateaux; becoming a 'sky-watcher', catching the shifting light and colours of Polar Night; spending a morning in a Saami tent or 'laavu' with a reindeer herder. Actually it was my own version of Gerda's arctic journey ...

Q. One of the prose sections in your book is titled 'The North in Flux' What evidence of 'flux' did you see on your arctic journey?

Well, the first thing was getting there. In December 2007, we were on one of the first direct flights – 3 hours from Stansted to Tromso in the Arctic . Tourism is opening up the region – also cruises to Antarctica – which has to change this wilderness. Then we landed in heavy rains that lasted for weeks. The snow had melted with close to summer temperatures. It was very disturbing to experience climate change so sharply. Saami herders were having to buy in hay for migrating reindeer that couldn't get to eat their ground lichen. Clearly, both arctic creatures and indigenous peoples are going to struggle.

Q. When you got to see the Northern Lights for the first time, how did you react? And having finally achieved your ambition to see them, what's next? Do you have any plans for further arctic travels?

Like a giddy child, shouting out, laughing, pointing at them in amazement. Lost in wonder even as the stories and the science came together to inform what I was seeing. We were out on a ship in a fjord on a freezing October night in 2008 – the stars were so vivid and shone through these auroral curtains of light that just kept shifting into new shapes. And they so seemed to have a will of their own as they danced and flashed. Of course, I'm totally hooked and already planning a trip to Iceland this spring.

pictures: Siobhan Logan