Reykjavik
Writing

In January in Reykjavik the sun rises at eleven and sets at four.

Arctic light · The long dark · A city that lives indoors

Reykjavik is the northernmost capital in the world and in winter it operates in a darkness that is not metaphorical but physical and total — four or five hours of grey light in the middle of the day and then black from four in the afternoon until eleven the next morning. This has produced a culture that lives intensely indoors — the café culture, the literary culture, the pub culture — and a literary tradition that is concerned with interiority in the way that places with extreme climates tend to be.

"In Reykjavik in January the darkness comes at four in the afternoon and does not leave until eleven the next morning. Inside the café everyone had books. This was not a coincidence. This was a solution."

Tumbleweed Words — Reykjavik, January

The Reykjavik pieces are the most interior in the Tumbleweed Words city archive — concerned with thought more than action, with what is not said more than what is. The Icelandic sagas are a deep formal influence here, though not in the way that influence usually operates: not as subject matter but as structural logic, the compressed action, the refusal of psychological explanation, the assumption that the reader can supply what is left unsaid.

David — Tumbleweed Words Flash fiction and poetry written on trains, in hostels, and in city streets. Published in Litro, Adelaide Magazine, Cleaver Magazine, and The Dundee Anthology. Pushcart-nominated. Five years on Substack.