In the Stacks with Kathryn Savage
During July and August, Minneapolis-based hybrid writer Kathryn Savage took part in a month-long residency at the Gullkistan, Center for Creativity in Laugarvatn, Iceland, where she crafted new work that blends disparate threads—the body, volcanoes, disease, family, and myth. Over the next few months, join Kathryn as she shares work from her time in residence.
My father installed hot tubs and repaired swimming pools. We lived, briefly, in The Hopkins House Motor Hotel. I was six the year he serviced the pool in exchange for a good deal on a room. Once, there was a fire in the motor hotel and we all stood in the dark parking lot, the residents, watching. It had been a small room fire, contained. There was no smoke, no flame, no spectacle. I was worried, anyway, because I didn’t want to move somewhere new, away from the indoor pool.
I went to Iceland in July, two months after my father died.
It was raining as I drove from the Keflavík Airport to Laugarvatn, saw steam rising off geothermal water piped into public pools. Iceland straddles the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and is the largest island on any oceanic ridge. Plate movement, called rifting, pulls the island apart. The island’s large volcanoes—Hekla, Katla, and Eyjafjallajökull—loom. Along the roads are fissures created by plate movement, moss-lined chasms.
His death was sudden.
“I didn’t think he’d die today,” my uncle said, as we sat in the hospital last May.
“I’ll be right back,” I kept saying, as more family arrived throughout the day, gathered in the oncology family room, a serene room with a glass nugget recessed fireplace, vivid blue flame under photographs of water. On a table was a half-finished puzzle, abandoned. I kept returning to him. Late into the night, I checked his pulse as one would check the stove burners before a long trip, anxiously, over and over, thinking there’d been a mistake, I’d missed something, thinking he’d start breathing.
Volcanoes have long been appropriated into human narratives, likened to destruction or desire. During the French Revolution, eruption was a popular metaphor to mobilize revolutionaries. From Middle French, eruption means act of rupture. News reports about sexual harassment and gender violence prefer the word. For a taste, search “#metoo” and “eruption.” This language is not incorrect—more are speaking out about rape culture and heinous acts of sexual violence—but eruption is not a neutral word to describe an unexpected large-scale turning away from silence because eruption is not without connotations of chaos and inherent instability. I fear this language perpetuates the stereotype of the hysterical woman. I fear this language is, itself, a violence.
My father was diagnosed with stomach cancer after a tumor perforated his stomach. How long had it been inside him, waiting to erupt?
I was in Iceland to research volcanoes and Baltic-region mythology about gender violence. I was staying at an artist residency—the Gullkistan, Center for Creativity—in Laugarvatn.
The problem with autobiographical writing, Alexander Chee asserts in his 2016 BuzzFeed essay, “How To Write An Autobiographical Novel,” is a problem of memory and form: “You are like someone left in the woods with only an axe and a clear memory of houses deciding to build a house.”
Everything felt curious, fragmented. I didn’t know how to build across the gap, how to hold the axe. I felt a nameless violence in me and wanted to see a volcano. To stand on an island that was young in geologic time.
Historically, Iceland is home to very few insects. Midges are older insects with respect to the island, able to endure harsh weather conditions.
Culicoides, a genus of biting midges, infested my room. When culicoides woke me, I switched on the light above my bed to see small insects, poppy seeds, falling out of my hair onto the pillow. All over me raw red bites and wing filaments, translucent as the skin of a garlic clove.
In Laugarvatn there was an outdoor geothermal lap pool. I bought a one-month pass to the pool. Swimming was the best way to stop the culicoides’ bites from itching.
Some days, I’d swim with another artist at the residency, Victoria Hannan, a fiction writer, essayist, and photographer based in Melbourne whose gorgeous lyric essays and short stories concern swimming pools. The surface water collected dead midges by the diving stands. We’d push through speckled water, Victoria outpacing me. My stomach and legs going tight with effort.
Does grief fetishize scale, crave an extremity of proportion? Fire and water?
The Seljavallalaug pool, built in 1923, was designed for swimming instruction. Built by Bjorn J. Andrésson, for thirteen years it was Iceland’s largest pool. The waters were slippery with algae in July, when I swam in it. In a corner of the pool a metal pipe leaked hot water. After the Eyjafjallajökull eruption in 2010, the pool was unusable, filled with ash later removed by heavy machinery, loaders, and excavators, powered by kind volunteers.
It was his birthday. My father sat in a recliner and told me what he wanted me to put in the blender: Greek yogurt, half a banana, a few strawberries, and a chocolate Ensure. His balcony faced the apartment complex pool. In summer, when school let out, I’d bring my son to his pool, and my son would enjoy the water, and we, the little balcony overlooking. This was what we talked about in April.
Photos:
Two empty hot pots at a campsite in Eastern Iceland.
Open tension cracks and fissures at the base of Hekla volcano.
From the Encyclopedia of Volcanoes, 1st Edition by Haraldur Sigurdsson, Bruce Houghton, Hazel Rymer, John Stix, and Steve McNutt.
From the Encyclopedia of Volcanoes, 1st Edition by Haraldur Sigurdsson, Bruce Houghton, Hazel Rymer, John Stix, and Steve McNutt.
From the Encyclopedia of Volcanoes, 1st Edition by Haraldur Sigurdsson, Bruce Houghton, Hazel Rymer, John Stix, and Steve McNutt.
Photo taken at The Volcano Museum in Stykkishólmur: http://www.eldfjallasafn.is/v/
From Volcanoes by Christoph Krüger.
From Volcanoes by Christoph Krüger.
Photo of Sundlaug HÍ, Laugarvatn, Iceland.
The walk to the Seljavallalaug pool.
Kathryn Savage is a recipient of the 2018 Academy of American Poets James Wright Prize. A hybrid writer, her work appears or is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, poets.org, the Guardian, Poets & Writers, Ploughshares, the Village Voice, Star Tribune, and The Best Small Fictions of 2015. She currently teaches writing at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD), and at the University of Minnesota, where she is pursuing a second MFA, in poetry. Her work has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, Minnesota State Arts Board, Millay Colony for the Arts, Ucross Foundation, Weisman Art Museum, O’Rourke Travel Fellowship, and Graduate Research Partnership Program Fellowship from the University of Minnesota. Learn more at kathrynsavage.com.
