I will be away until the end of the year on a fellowship at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland. Hawthornden was the birthplace and home of the seventeenth-century poet William Drummond, and since then it has served as retreat to innumerable writers, giving them space to finish old projects and begin new ones.
I will be completing a collection of poems about the Arctic and working on a new song cycle Quujaavaarssuq and the Queen of the Sea. The latter is based on the legendary journey of the Greenlandic hero Quujaavaarssuq to beg forgiveness from the Queen of the Sea, who destroyed the ice as an act of revenge on the humans who pollute her waters.
There is no internet access at Hawthornden, but I will resume posting in January 2014. The new year holds some exciting new projects, including two book publications and the unveiling of Vantar | Missing, an fictional history of avalanches in Iceland.
