Jennifer Fergesen
Certain images are inevitable in media about Svalbard. Glaciers calve into yawning fjords; permafrost sinks and heaves; northern lights scintillate in the dark sky. In the foreground, polar bears and Arctic foxes wander across their melting landscape. There is nothing inauthentic about these scenes — they are the backdrop of life in the Arctic, and often what first grasp the attention of Longyearbyen’s rotating cast of writers and artists.
But we need other, more granular images to understand the complex reality of this place. A hibernating fly awakened too soon by a winter fire. The thin red line of a GPS display in a whiteout. A ptarmigan skittering across a dark street. A satellite phone in a big glove, holding a carefully composed reply.
Polarlit’s writers and artists capture these images and many others in our second annual volume, which is more than twice the length of our first. For that volume, I begged for contributions from everyone I happened to sit next to (at bars, birthday parties, Euro Cup screenings) and happily printed everything I received. This time my fellow editors, Paula Sankelo and Eirik Bø, and I fielded so many submissions that we encountered the new and not enviable experience of turning some down. The result, I hope, feels like a polyphonic symphony: many voices, distinct yet interwoven, sounding out the textures of life near the poles.
Designer Kamila Gliwa’s cover illustration exemplifies this layered approach. Drawn from her photographs of Spitsbergen, it distills elements of the island’s monumental glaciers and mountains into a sculptural composition. Like the writing in this volume, the image moves between realism and abstraction, reframing Arctic motifs through the lens of personal experience. Other artists who helped illustrate these pages include Kirsty Banks, Rosendo Li, Kanerva Karpo, Anna Dobrowolski, Poppy Bourke, Marieke Ten Berge, Laura Londoño, Ruth Stewart and Claudio Lyk.
In addition to our contributors, we are grateful to the Sons of Norway for a second-year Community Partnership Grant and to our growing body of readers around the world. Wherever this volume finds you, we hope it offers you a window into life and literature on Svalbard. (And if you found it somewhere interesting, send us a photo!)
Jennifer Fergesen is the founding editor of Polarlit.
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