Well hello!
As I sit here I’m having waves of nostalgia for my old blogging days, and feeling excited almost to the point of giddiness to have sort of circled back to where I started.
It’s quite amazing to reflect back over the past 19 years and all that has happened since I launched my first blog, The Iceland Weather Report, on 20 October 2004.
At the time I had been living in Iceland for ten years and was very conscious of my status as a native yet-not-quite. I had left Iceland at the age of five and grown up almost exclusively abroad, then decided to return to my native country at the age of 31, a single mother with a three-year old child.
I had an Icelandic name, an Icelandic passport, and a passable command of the language (even though I was very rusty, and could barely write it) … yet I was very much a foreigner. You see, Icelanders form their social circles very early—as early as preschool—and by the time they’re all grown they have their social life pretty much sewn up. They will belong to maybe a couple of different friend groups, one of which is likely to be the ubiquitous saumaklúbbar, or sewing circles (which incidentally have very little to do with sewing and more to do with hanging out together at each other’s houses and gossiping).
If you come from abroad you will not have any of these social constructs in place, and frankly most Icelanders see no need or reason to invite you into their circle. This makes it super hard for expats. In fact, most non-Icelanders who move here willingly (nb this was before the current influx of refugees and migrants) eventually give up and move away again, unless they have an Icelandic partner who helps them penetrate the insular social fabric.
Anyway, at the time I felt very much like an insider-slash-outsider, someone with one foot in each culture—Icelandic and North American. I had access to the inner workings of Icelandic society by virtue of knowing the language (the Icelandic language is the key to understanding the national character of Iceland), yet I also had the perspective of an outsider, what the Icelanders call gests augað, “the guest’s eye”. Because writing has always been my way of making sense of the world, I began writing about the things I was observing—in English, of course, since that’s the language in which I had been trained to write. In hindsight I believe that this was my way of attempting to integrate the two parts of myself that had always made up my identity, yet were very much separate from one another. In the process I unwittingly became an interpreter of Icelandic society for a non-Icelandic audience—through my blog, my reporting on Icelandic affairs in the foreign media, and through my books.
I stopped updating The Iceland Weather Report in 2010, and turned my attention to writing books. Last summer, I finally decided to take down the IWR archives from the web. I downloaded all my content, and was amazed to see that in the six years from 2004 to 2010 I had written over 780,000 words on that website! Seven hundred and eighty thousand! That is the equivalent of having written 31.5 of my Little Books, or ten novel-length books … in the space of six years.
So in light of the fact that I am, in a way, returning to my roots, I thought it might be fun to READ to you the very first post I ever published on the Internet (because Blogging 2.0 allows me to embed audio in my posts! As well as emojis! 🎉 what a time to be alive …).
This was a post that, incidentally, I didn’t tell anyone about for nearly a month. I was too scared and insecure about my writing to let people know that I was writing a blog until I had been posting almost every day for nearly a month.
Without further ado, I give you:
Help, I can’t see out my window!
(from 20 October 2004)
‘Till next time!
Bless for now.
A
Could I interest you in my books? You can buy them from retailers like Amazon, Apple, Google Play and others, or directly from me via my website.