New Lit Mag From Iceland Offers Invigorating Mix of Writing
Volume 2 of Iceview is eye-catching. The title, black over a mint green background, drops vertically, sideways, overlapping the spine. Immediately, the eye is drawn to a split between Icelandic and English, the former favored. A small photograph, a teaser of what’s to come, sits in the upper third of the cover; it features a woman standing smiling before glaciers. The cover is cool, evokes coolness, is the ideal entry to the issue.
In her editorial, KT Browne refers to Iceview as a “travel-themed literary and art magazine.” Drawing on a quote from Thomas Swick, she questions the way travelers frame their adventures, describing ecstasy and revelation, raising expectations to such a height that they can never be met by those who follow. Browne questions whether the tribulations of a journey—trouble navigating the subway or loneliness—teach the traveler just as much as the highlights. Browne concludes her note with a set of questions. “What is it that keeps us in a place? What is it that pulls us away?” Each needs constant answering.
The issue begins with an international lineup of artists. Stocked mostly with minimalist photography, the work sets an irresistible mood with understated hipness, turning frigid water into a source of comfort. The cover image, “The Girl and the Glacier” by Eglė Duleckytė—an analogue photographer based in Berlin—is presented in its full glory, the cool blues of ice and a winter coat set against a soft pink dress. Two images from Sarah Flynn’s photo series, “Útlendingur,” an outsider’s critique of an idealized, mythic Iceland, find gorgeousness in the banal. Several images later, Katie Craney’s “You Are a Tender History of Ice, #37,” a photograph enhanced with silver leaf and encaustic on found metal, manages to reinvigorate the mythic. Finally, a grayscale image from Matthew Broadhead’s series “Heimr” depicts an ocean-side rock sculpted by the waves, twisted like a dancer in mid-whirl. It’s touching to see art treated with such reverence by Iceview. All too often, literary journals treat the visual realm like an afterthought. Here, it is front and center.
The sole piece of fiction in the issue is “The Lighthouse” by Hildur Knútsdóttir, who uses a bare bones prose style to tell a story that is part magical realism, part horror. In the story, a new, small-town lighthouse has disappeared over night, and none of the grownups seem to remember it existed. The old lighthouse, suddenly appealing, summons the adults of the town, who begin decorating it with abstract patterns. The story’s protagonists, kids named Emma and Alexander, spot an ethereal light emanating from the old lighthouse at night and investigate, discovering something entirely unexpected in the process.
The one notable weak spot in the issue is nonfiction. The first piece, “A Laundry List” by Emma Gibson, reads like a traveler’s humble-brag. It turns out Gibson has done laundry in Canberra, Cadiz, Biella, Manchester, the Moroccan desert, Bucharest, and Iceland. She devotes a paragraph to each locale, remembering laundry lines and washing machines of the past, but fails to bring anything larger to the piece than the meek observation that, “The smallest adventures are the most important; life is found within them.” The second piece of nonfiction, an essay on artist residencies in Iceland and “the importance of the periphery” is dense, drawing on Derrida, Foucault, and T.S. Eliot to argue for human connection and development outside of urban centers. This kind of academic writing has always felt out of place in literary journals, a foreign object claiming the rightful place of creative nonfiction. Readers seek out and fall for stories, not theses. Here, Iceview misses the mark.
The volume rebounds quickly with poetry. In his three poems, John Sibley Williams explores the concept of home, from micro to macro, from body to country to the larger world. He writes:
To have made it this far yet still
stare vacantly at our own hands
like exorcised ghosts. To repeat
into belief: I have no home, then
to take it with us wherever we
go.
Following the poetry section is Snowflake, or Snjókorn, a section devoted to artists and writers under the age of eighteen. This issue’s snowflake, “The Tree” by Laufey Lind Ingibergsdóttir, is a lovely exploration of family by a sixteen-year-old Icelandic writer. The section is a risk, but undoubtedly a source of inspiration and pride for other young writers who will make their own literary contributions one day.
The final item of Volume 2, an interview with the photographer Stuart Klipper, tilts to the other end of the age spectrum. Klipper, who has traveled to both poles, all fifty U.S. states, and Iceland, among many other locales, is an interesting and entertaining subject, responding to editor KT Browne’s questions with palpable mirth. Asked whether travel has changed his perception of “home,” Klipper replies that, “traveling is a bit like pushing a little switch and walking out your front door to find that your front yard is suddenly different from the front yard you’ve always known.”
While the volume is small—123 pages of content split between Icelandic and English—Iceview is an invigorating mix of images and writing, a view of Iceland from within and without, but also a call to explore, to get out into the world and experience the strange and the new. Swick hit upon a fundamental truth when he wrote that, “It is only when something happens on our journeys—which is, frequently, something going wrong—that we are able to break through the surface of a place,” and Browne does well to share his words. Human beings exist to move and be moved. Iceview is an invitation to do the former, and an opportunity to experience the latter.
