Mariam Gouverneur Mckeown is a writer currently living in Suffolk, United Kingdom. She writes poems, essays and stories (in that order) about the things she sees and feels.

***

For me, one of the most difficult things about being a creative person is coming to terms with it. How silly it sounds sometimes to hear myself saying “I write,” in a world on fire. I feel an intense pressure (internal? external?) to explain and to justify the constant, near pathological urge to respond to this chaos (internal? external?) with the simple act of making. 

It was in this angsty state that I arrived in Iceland with no big project in mind and the vague worry that perhaps I wouldn’t manage to write anything at all. Within a day, the words were pouring out of me with a simplicity and easy pleasure that I hadn’t experienced in years. Maybe ever. Cheesy, perhaps, but true. 

We quickly settled into a vaguely cultish kinship. We shared skills and freshly baked bread and stories and everything else. We went on hikes and day-trips with the ever-generous Kris, went to a concert even, drank coffee with Lucas, painted easter eggs with the village kids, laid down flat in the middle of the street at 1am alone and watched the aurora dancing. We made ceramics and cyanotypes and spoons and wrote poems about each other. We laughed a lot and cried a lot and, above all else I think, we trusted one another and the place itself in a way that is very rare and even more special. 

Through all this, I made a wonderful discovery: all these not-writing things were helping me to write. I had heard this before, of course, but never experienced it for real until then. The cyanotypes I made clarified and expressed my feelings and thoughts around prayer in a way that words couldn’t have. Whittling encouraged an empty-mindedness that writing seldom does. And Stodvarfjordur is full of beauty. Freed from the strain of being my creative everything, and fed by so much wonder, my writing seemed to recall its own direction and clarity. 

Over April, I produced a collection of poems and essays (as yet untitled) all specific to and written during my time in Stodvarfjordur, which I hope to publish soon enough. The poem included here is part of that collection. The immediacy and simplicity of the landscape in particular encouraged a new playfulness in my work. The collection deals with loneliness, wonder, fear, prayer, hope, lunatic happiness, etc. 

I am proud of the work that I produced in Iceland, but more than proud I am really just grateful beyond words. The Fish Factory is the safest, kindest creative space I have encountered. At the Fish Factory, in Kris and Lucas’s boundless patience and generosity, in the locals’ welcoming attitude, and in the profound closeness and simple joy we shared as a cohort, I found a community that expanded the limits of what I thought that term could mean. I learnt to make and to talk about making, both my own and others, with a comfort and a thoughtfulness that I have not before. I was reminded of the real worth of it all. I grew up, really. 

Thank you, Fish Factory! Thank you fellow fishies! I love you! 

SOMETIMES (ALWAYS) 

sometimes the whole world just sets you on fire 

sometimes you’re just walking down the street and your knees go weak with it 

mountain swallowed red 

mountain exhaled black and white 

sometimes you wake up 

and the sun is taking 

one fantastic, double jointed 

wide armed stretch 

against your bedroom wall 

and even spellbound disbelief 

would be a blasphemy 

sometimes life is so good you can’t help but believe it