Winter Light
Dispatch from Writing with the Seasons - January 2024
Welcome to this short dispatch from ‘Writing with the Seasons’. If you’re not already a premium subscriber, you can sign up here to enjoy our essays and audio courses as they unfold season by season.
Poet and printmaker Nancy Campbell spent a winter as artist-in-residence at Upernavik Museum on a tiny, rocky island in northwestern Greenland. A moat of ice surrounds the town, from November to January the town is in darkness. “The most eagerly anticipated event was the return of the sun,” she writes of her experience.
Where I was in the north, we watched TV reports from lower latitudes, as the days passed and light crept closer to us. Then came the day when our own community climbed to the highest point of the island for a view of the golden orb rising over the sea ice. We were led by schoolchildren who wore suns cut from yellow paper on their snowsuits and sang a song of welcome. The sun’s return offers a moment of hope, no matter how precarious life in the region has become.
Campbell writes beautifully on cold landscapes and finding joy in the darkest winter months. Her book, The Library of Ice, is a perfect wintertime companion. It explores ice, wildness, how we might appreciate intimate changes in light and dark.
In winter, as the days gently lengthen here in the UK, there’s light to be found.
Alongside gloomy, muted days, we have sudden cold blue sky mornings, vivid sunsets. I love the pale gold ferns, bright green moss on fence posts. Plus tiny signs of growth: snowdrops and wild yellow dandelions, the red of a robin’s breast.
Frost too brings another kind of light in the darkness. Dark skies offer so many stars, the moon, Jupiter shining brightly and meteors filling the sky with fire.
Writing prompt: Take fifteen minutes to write about all the moments of darkness, and then all the moments of light and colour you’ve noticed this month. Focus on specific descriptions of the external, physical world. Use all your senses, and try to include things that are unexpected, unpleasant or surprising!
We highly recommend Nancy Campbell’s The Library of Ice! Writing with the Seasons is brought to you by Write & Shine. Our winter programme of writing workshops is inspired by the season's gentle rhythms and slow, steady arrival of the light. Events are virtual, so you can join us wherever you’re based.
Winter artwork by Essi Kimpimäki.