Join me for a reading in Seattle from The Palace of the Snow Queen at Third Place Books in Ravenna. November 15, 7 pm. RSVPs requested. Would love to see you there!
Just a week ago, The Palace of the Snow Queen: Winter Travels in Lapland and Sápmi was released in a new edition by the University of Minnesota Press. I had a chance to promote the book before its official pub date when I was in the Midwest in October, doing talks about my other recent book, From Lapland to Sápmi. But only now, as I'm about to do a reading next week for Snow Queen, has it fully sunk in that this travel memoir, which has meant so much to me, is now out in the world and available again.
The book was originally published by Counterpoint in 2007 and very well published, I might add. But time passes and books disappear from the shelves of bookstores, replaced by newer titles. A couple of years ago Counterpoint graciously returned the rights to me, and the University of Minnesota Press, which has published other books of mine on Sápmi and Scandinavia, bought the rights and set the wheels in motion for a fresh new edition. I was pleased when they scheduled the book for the same year that From Lapland to Sápmi was to be published. In many ways the two titles are bookends for my interests in the high North of Scandinavia.
Snow Queen tells the story of three winters spent mostly above the Arctic Circle in Norway, Sweden, and Finland. The first trip, from November 2001 through most of February, 2022 was the most extensive. I traveled by train, bus, plane, and coastal steamer from Stockholm to Kiruna in Sweden to Honningsvåg near the North Cape, back down to Alta and Tromsø, over to Kautokeino and Karasjok on the Finnmark Plateau, and then to Inari, Finland. After going south to Rovaniemi and Kiruna again, I headed to Helsinki, and then back up to Inari. My second trip in 2004 took me from late January through early March back to the Kiruna area and Jokkmokk, and my third trip, in April, 2005 (it was still winter up there!) brought me back to Kiruna. One of the most fascinating things was to track the construction of the Icehotel from piles of snow around tunnel-forms through its melting under the April sunshine back into the Torne River.
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| Building an Ice Wall, 2004 |
I loved just about every minute of it (the dogsledding trip not so much), and I learned a massive amount from reading and talking to people: journalists, tour guides, writers, artists, reindeer herders, and lots of Sámi and Nordic folks. It was one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life and led me to write a number of travel articles and essays, culminating in the travel memoir of 2007. It also led to many more trips to Scandinavia over the next twenty years, some of them back to the high North, others to Copenhagen and Stockholm, where I buried myself in archives much of the time in order to write about the artist and ethnographer, Emilie Demant Hatt. It also led me to a consuming and continued interest in Sápmi, both as a translator and as a journalist-nonfiction narrative writer.
When asked if I’d like to write a new Afterword to the new edition, I answered, “Definitely.” There was much to say about the ways in which the cultural, environmental, and political landscape of Sápmi had changed in the past years. One of the issues I’d discussed in 2007 was the travel trope of “Untouched Lapland,” the phrase travel sites and brochures continually use to lure tourists to what was once the less desirable season of winter in the North. It became apparent fairly early on to me that Sápmi had been inhabited for millennia, and that it was still inhabited by the Sámi, in spite of colonization and natural resource extraction. In my Afterword I brought up the fact that the phrase was still being used. I write there about the grim news that even more of Sápmi’s landscape is under threat from mining companies and giant windfarms on reindeer herding territory. I also write, however, about the waves of activism by the Sámi and their allies, that are resisting these companies and state-owned concerns.
I’ve continued to follow environmental issues in Scandinavia through sites such as Amnesty Sápmi, the High North News, and the Barents Observers, as well as the posts of activists on Twitter/X, and I occasionally post something about them here on the blog.
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| Reindeer Round-up near Gallivare, Sweden, 2004 |
Meanwhile I still cherish the extraordinary opportunities I had back in the day to see the Icehotel being constructed in Jukkasjärvi, to attend the reindeer races in Kiruna, to attend the Sámi and Indigenous film festival in Inari, Finland, and to stroll around the Jokkmokk Winter Market. My appetite for winter and snow has never abated (though it was challenged this past January and February when I struggled with fierce Arctic storms coming off the Atlantic up in Tromsø). For me winter dark and snow is always magical, even when I’m just looking at a snowfall through a window or through the enchanted lens of memory.
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