The Arctic Diaries

GPLD Creative Champion Melissa Davies has just launched her first published book, The Arctic Dairies. Melissa is an insightful poet who writes about both the Norwegian and Lakeland landscapes – asking who gets to speak for them, and why? As well as her own creative practice, Melissa works with local communities to create collage poems which have been displayed in woodlands, high street restaurants and shopping centres and recently animated the window of Comida in Kendal with her words as part of the GPLD Watch this Space project during the Covid pandemic.

In The Arctic Diaries Melissa charts generations of the characters, myths and misremembered details that make up the oral traditions of a windswept archipelago in Norway’s far north. Created over a single winter when Melissa lived in the local community in Fleinvaer, this collection of poems is part history, part field notes, exploring the role the outsider plays in preserving the experience of another.

“With a complete lack of young people, the folk and environmental knowledge of Fleinvaer will be lost in a matter of years. By writing the Arctic Diaries, I hope to give some of their stories permanence and a life of their own” said Melissa.

A beautiful and often haunting read, we highly recommend it, available to buy from Arachne Press.