Capturing Textures

A postcard from Norway.

My online shop is back from summer break // DIVE seasonal writing group kicks off for another session in October—sign up and make fall a season of writing.

Hello friends,

I came back home on Monday after three weeks away, and the first thing I noticed was how different the light was. A hazy wildfire hue, certainly, but also the light of a late summer that’s inching towards fall. The sun is softer, yellower, more golden. She rises a little later and sets a little earlier. Darker mornings seem to have crept up on me as well.

I spent August away from the newsletter, a break to devote creative attentions elsewhere. I was in Norway leading a creative retreat and then spending a week doing my own self-imposed residency working on my book.

In the time I was away, this newsletter managed to go over the 20,000 subscriber mark (!!). This is exciting and also a bit mind boggling, since it’s hard for my brain to even visualize what that amount of people looks like. Anyway, hello to all you new readers, I am very happy that you’ve found your way here.

In these past few weeks I’ve felt a strong shift within me. I don’t want to scroll on a phone or look at a screen more than I have to. The tactile, physical world right in front of me feels more important than ever right now. If I could, I would rather send you all a postcard in the mail. Something to hold in your hand, run your finger over the stamp. But instead, today I am sending you a bit of a virtual postcard.

For the last four years, I’ve spent a chunk of late summer at Singla, a historic property in northern Norway, above the Arctic circle. Four years is enough to make it a ritual of sorts. I know what coffee cups are in the cupboard, what the views look like out of each window. Some of the newness that the place held the first time I went has worn off, replaced by a feeling that’s more like reconnecting with a friend. I looked forward to wandering the beach and finding the red urchin shells and the rocks that are flat enough to use as serving platters.

There are certain colors, textures, and forms that always serve as good creative inspiration for me. Lichen on rocks, dark mustard yellow kelp that looks like strands of hair, the slate grey of a cloudy Arctic sky.

During the retreat, Hannah and I would get up at 6am to start preparing breakfast and ensure that there was coffee on the kitchen table for anyone who was up early. We’d sneak off to bed at 9pm after a day of workshops and wandering, and I’d fall asleep to the sound of people in the living room downstairs staying up to sneak in one last conversation.

The day after the retreat ended, I moved out of what we call the “camp counselor” room (basically a small bunk) and into the room I stayed in the first time I came and visited. Here, there’s a view over the lighthouse. The bed sits right next to the window, you can place a mug of tea on the windowsill. During the week that things were quieter and the pressures of running a retreat were off, I let myself stay in bed for a bit in the morning and read before getting up.

Someone had brought The Place of Tides, a story of a season with a Norwegian woman in the Vega archipelago tending eider ducks, maintaining a way of life that has endured through centuries (even garnering it UNESCO status). Several retreat participants kept insisting we read it.

The book was officially a “house copy,” which meant that we should finish it before leaving. There were three of us in the house at this point, and we all read it at the same time, calculating how many pages we would need to read before we left, and marking each page with a neon post-it note. We’d ask what we all thought of it as we read, talking about it over breakfast. Like a book club in real time.

We kept an eye out for the eider ducks out the window.

It was cold and rainy most of the time that I was there, which meant that stunning views and vistas were largely obscured by clouds, mist, and fog, but the call of terns and gulls would pierce through. The gray was contrasted by dark black silhouettes of cormorants, sitting on the pier that is slowly washing away into the sea.

I marveled at all the colors the rain brought out of the rocks.

One afternoon during the retreat, we donned rain jackets and went to pick blueberries. We all spread out, each person in their own little world for a bit, focused on placing berries in an old honey tin. One by one until it was full. I thought of my Swedish grandparents who loved to spend time in the fall forest picking lingonberries.

How often do we honor the world in front of us with this kind of slow attention?

On the last day of the retreat the sun came out, and we hiked up the hill behind the house to get a good view. We found chanterelles along the way. I brought a thermos of tea and snacks, took out my sketchbook as we took a break and did a watercolor sketch. I’ve been out of the habit of doing these kinds of sketches this year, and I felt very out of practice. I laughed at how bad it was.

I opened up the page the other day to look at it and noticed that my immediate thought had nothing to do with the quality of the work. I was thinking about the feeling of sitting there, the wind on my face, running my hands through the heather and crowberry plants that cover the ground.

When the retreat was over, I stayed on. I had asked Hannah if it would be ok to spend a week working on my own creative projects. I needed a writing residency to do some devoted, undistracted work. To write, but also to think. I stayed in my wool sweater most of the time, putting it on straight after a morning swim and keeping it on while I typed on my computer in the old barn.

I am better at my own boundaries of digital consumption when I am away from home. It’s as if I know that I am elsewhere, and therefore need to commit to being in that place. But the real question is: why can’t I do a better job of putting these boundaries in place when I am at my regular desk?

I’m trying to do that right now, if only because I’ve been feeling for the past few months (years?) a kind of underlying anxiety and distracted energy that seeps its way into creative work and life in general. Deeper, more focused work feels essential right now—a kind of antidote to the fragmented, destructive world we’re living in.

I keep thinking about the social media-fication of what we create. That everything needs to have a takeaway, a lesson, a hint of wisdom. Thinking about how someone will react to something rather than thinking about how to push yourself to make your best and most interesting work. And how fast most of that is all consumed. Everyone already on the the next thing.

I returned to my studio, with a to-do list in hand. On a tight timeline to finish my calendar, but also craving doing something different than before. I went outside and picked the dried stem of a bracken fern, dipped it into a jar of black ink, inspired by the thistle stem I had been using during the retreat and after.

When I first bought an iPad many years ago and was planning on using it to do some digital drawing, I bought a screen cover that would help to make it feel more like paper when I pulled the digital pen across the glass. I thought of this as I was pulling that bracken fern stem across the paper.

There was a scratchiness to the stem on the paper, a resistance that reminded me I wasn’t totally in charge. I love that feeling. The screen cover doesn’t even get close.

Before I left back at the beginning of August, I came across a video of an artist using a kneadable rubber stamp to take impressions of objects and then use a stamp pad to make a small print. In the art store in Tromsø I bought one so that I could try it out myself.

Hannah and I took out the eraser and stamp pad as we waited for a ferry, attempting to take imprints of the wood grain in the bench, the dots on the fragile shell of an urchin.

The method didn’t always work well, but as I look back at all those black blotches in my notebook it’s clear to me that I’m trying to capture the texture of a place. That I am craving the tactile, the physical world.

Paper, ink-stained fingers, the sound of a pen scribbling across a page.

-Anna

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