HOW TO SURVIVE: GO OUTSIDE

“You can ask the counsellor and you can ask the King and they’ll say the same thing and it’s a funny thing: ‘Should we go outside?‘”—Joanna Newsom

Soon after immigrating to Iceland, it became apparent to me how connected the island is to literature. This goes beyond the history of the sagas and the assignment of Reykjavík as a UNESCO City of Literature. Indeed, books were prized possessions shared within turfhouses over centuries.

In that time before the tourism industry exploded in the early 2010s, a Canadian poet on the island was a rarity. When someone would learn that I was from Canada, they would inevitably ask, “Are you vesturislendingur?” When they learned I was a poet, it was frequent that the person would immediately launch into reciting for me their favourite poem á íslensku. As the years passed and the tourism industry commenced, these reactions shifted to a more generic “How do you like Iceland?”

It was this question—“How do you like Iceland?”—that I used as a writing prompt in the Multilingual Writing Lab, a 3-month course I developed for Reykjavík UNESCO City of Literature in 2015. The course attracted fifteen brilliant writers in the city to experiment with fluency, influence, and dysfluency in creative writing. Many of the participants graduated the course and immediately founded Iceland’s first multilingual writing collective: Ós Pressan. This community-making and -building and -fostering became a life raft for many writers and readers on the margins of Iceland’s literary scene. The country’s DIT punk ethos made such a volunteer venture possible. If we are here, how are we here? How do we long to be in relation here, even if we do not all hold the kind of linguistic, societal, or accessibility fluency to which an established literary scene caters?

The next most common question I have been asked in Iceland is: “Hvaðan ertu?” Where are you from? As someone who is a Third Culture Kid, who comes from settler heritage and who has immigrated as an adult, this generic question gives me instant pause. What does it mean to identify as from a nation-state? How might tying my identity to any large land mass immediately conjure Ideas about who I am in the person who asked the question? Struggling to make our own multinational contexts understood when we first met, my new friend RoJo calmed my “hvaðan ertu” anxiety by introducing me to Taiye Selasi’s alternative question: “Where are you local?” 

Recently, Mette Moestrup, Christian Anderson, and I sat around their Copenhagen kitchen table. We discussed Christian’s work as a survivalist and where his experiences cross over with those of Mette and me; we’re both poets. I inquired, “Could you make a course offering survival tips to poets through deep immersion in a Danish or Icelandic environment?” It’s through this playfully serious and seriously playful encounter that I came to this course’s title: SURVIVAL FOR POETS.

Þetta námskeið býður þér að fara út . Að skrifa, að lesa, að ritstýra, að (v)lesa, að (skrifa) ritstýra.

Allar sex kennslustundirnar í þessu námskeiði eru með eftirfarandi uppbyggingu:

• stutt fyrirlestur til að staðsetja
• FÖRUM LÍFJARÐEÐLILEIKA . Æfingar til að afla sér þekkingar með reynslu.
• (V)LESTUR . Hægt er að skilgreina (v)lestur sem ritun á meðan lestri stendur. Hér finnur þú lestrartillögur með tillögu að því hvernig á að (v)lesa.
• (W)RITE . 
• (G) HLUSTA . Tilvitnanirnar í kennslustundinni eru fengnar úr laginu sem hér er kynnt. Íhugaðu hvernig hvert lag gæti verið systir eða fylgjenda við efni kennslustundarinnar. Einnig er mjög hvatt til dans.