Entry One: Toward the Ice
Wow. I got accepted.
That’s how it begins. A simple email, a few words on a screen, and suddenly the horizon looks different. In July 2026, I will set sail with The Arctic Circle Residency, an expedition that gathers artists, scientists, and storytellers in one of the most fragile and mysterious places on earth. Two weeks on a tall ship, drifting through the Svalbard archipelago, working, watching, and trying to make sense of the world as the ice thins and the silence grows heavier.
Photo by Barbara Putnam (The Arctic Circle)
It feels far away now. A year, almost a lifetime. But I want to start here, early, before the thing itself happens, because the story isn’t just the voyage. It’s the stumbles and the false starts, the failed prototypes, the half-painted sketches, the small victories, the late nights when nothing works and then suddenly, something does. I want to document the whole crooked path that leads to the ship: the errors and the trials, the slow accumulation of meaning, the process as much as the result.
The Arctic Circle program was created for this very reason. To bring together people who work at the intersection of art, science, and exploration. To give us a space, geographic and mental, where ideas can collide in ways they never could at home. It is part laboratory, part community, part reminder that the planet is vanishing even as we try to describe it. You can read more about it here.
So this is the beginning. A marker. The first entry in a story that will unfold over months, a slow drift toward a moment when I will stand on the deck of a ship in the High Arctic. 300 Days to go.
One of my favorite books is Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf. There’s a line that feels like it belongs here, now, as we look at the world we live in:
“The world is as full of brutality as the sea is full of motion. And some men are made sick by the one, and some by the other.”
