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
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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
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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 winter or through the enchanted lens of
memory.