Interview: Penguin Letters

Our Polar Poets launch has given us the chance to interview each other for this blog. Today, I get to pose 6 questions to Susan. (On Thursday, she returns the favour.) Fascinated by her travels round Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland, I wanted to know more about that journey.

Q. What first got you interested in visiting the Arctic/sub-Arctic? How did you get there?

I was teaching a course called Intrepid Women Travellers at Cardiff University when I first came across a reference to a tenth/eleventh century female Viking called Gudrid. I quickly became fascinated by her. Later, I was lucky enough to get funding (a Churchill Memorial Travel Fellowship) to follow in Gudrid’s footsteps and to write a book both about her journeys, and my own. I travelled through the sub-Arctic/Arctic in various ways – by plane, bus, boat, plus I also sailed on a replica Viking boat.

Q. Tell us about these Viking women. Were you able to visit places they lived in?

Gudrid is in my opinion, one of the most intrepid women in world history! I spent several weeks in her birthplace on the Snaefelsnes Peninsula in Iceland, explored the area she farmed in Greenland and also visited the Norse ruins on the north-western tip of Newfoundland which are believed by many to be the settlement she co-founded with her husband, Karlsefni.



Q. What is it with you and penguins? (They feature heavily in the poems.) Did you get to see penguins - or any arctic wildlife?

Penguins don't live in the Arctic - though I saw caribou, moose, a variety of whales and dolphins, sea birds galore and black bears in Newfoundland. However when reading polar explorers’ narratives, I started to have a series of very bizarre dreams in which penguins prominently featured. In one recurring dream, for example, a large penguin kept being delivered through my letterbox. And in another, I was actually metamorphosising, night-by-night, into an Emperor Penguin! So it was only a matter of time before penguins began waddling their way into my poems as well as into my dreams.

Q. Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland. What was your most striking impression of each place?

Iceland – the landscape, especially the area around Gudrid’s birthplace, located on a wild and windswept peninsula at the foot of a now dormant volcano, topped by a cap of ice.
Greenland – the weather. I was in the southwest fjord region where Gudrid lived, during the summer, but I hadn’t expected the weather to be so stable or so warm (up to 20 degrees on some days). And the mosquitoes – I’d come across on a previous Arctic journey, to Finnish Lapland, but the Greenland mosquitoes were particularly persistent.
Newfoundland – the warmth and hospitality of the people and the fact that conversations I expected to last for twenty minutes would often still be going strong four hours later!

Q. What was it like to be in the middle of all that ice? Was it melting? What was the light like?

I was often on the fringes, rather than in the middle, of the ice, but I saw, and heard talk of, lots of evidence of rapid melt, which was very alarming from an environmental point of view. Some of the icebergs I saw were exquisite in terms of their shapes and colour – often the most brilliant shade of blue.

Q. Your last sequence of poems went south, to revisit the story of Scott and his men in Antarctica. What was the appeal of this story? Any chance of following in their footsteps?

I have always wanted to go to Antarctica – and have been fascinated by the Scott story and the debate as to whether he was a polar hero or an incompetent fool since I was a child. However, I’ve become increasingly mindful of the impact of global travel on climate change so regretfully, I don’t think I’ll be going south in the near future.




PS many thanks again to Paul Lomatschinsky for these gorgeous aerial photos of Greenland - spectacular!