Nancy Campbell
Nancy Campbell in the Schlachtensee, Berlin. Photo by Markus Wächter for Berliner Zeitung
Can we discuss your background and experience, and what success means to you?
I write about place and environment, and how climate change affects places now. I don’t think you can write about a place without considering transience and mutability, as we are experiencing such fast changes, such uncertainty after all. It also intrigues me to write about places that aren’t widely documented. For instance, early in my career, I spent a winter on Upernavik, Greenland, and wrote about it in my book The Library of Ice. It was fascinating to see how the inhabitants have learnt to survive in this quite harsh environment, and how that affects their language and culture too. Lately, I have been writing about my life in an area of Oxford by the canal known as ‘The Gates of Hell’, which, despite being part of this incredibly famous and influential city, is a sort of underworld, what could be described as a fault line. Another element in my work is interrogating the book form, having trained and worked as a printmaker and a bookbinder. Many of my published books are artist editions that explore fresh ways of presenting words on paper. I often collaborate with visual artists, such as Sarah Bodman in Bristol and Roni Gross in New York, who play with the format of the book. Recently, Edinburgh-based visual artist Julie Johnstone asked me for a poem that she could publish through her imprint, Essence Press. At the time, I was living on Lindisfarne in Northumberland, and I wrote Grass of Parnassus, a poem about this tiny flower that grows there. The poem describes the island from the perspective of this flower, and spreads out to encompass the whole landscape. Julie created a wonderful response evoking the island's horizon line, which was implicit in my poem. Recently, a new poem, Sleepers, has been selected for an anthology of works about silence, edited by Kate McLoughlin: the absence of words can be very powerful, and I strive to find language that is strong enough to counter silence. Sometimes there is the temptation to put more and more words into the world, but silence is something I am more and more interested in. To find that space it’s success to me.
In 2021, you received the Ness Award from the Royal Geographic Society for The Library of Ice. Can you talk more about the book?
The Library of Ice is the work of about seven years of travelling and research. As a young writer, I was extremely curious about solastalgia and questioning the idea of posterity: what will happen to books and other documents in the event of cataclysmic climate change? I also wrote a lot about sea ice and glacial retreat, which the Ness Award recognised. But I see The Library of Ice very much as a book about visual culture, both in terms of how contemporary practitioners respond to the climate emergency, and also the synergy between archives, such as the National Library of Greenland or the Bodleian Library in Oxford, where I spent a lot of time researching for the book, and the voice of the ice itself, as revealed in ice cores and other natural phenomena.
What sort of difficulties have you encountered as a writer?
I grew up in a family where my father was a writer and my mother was a weaver, and money was a source of permanent anxiety, so I have always been frugal and had no expectations of financial gain. I am grateful for that because it has enabled me to live very simply and focus on work. But it’s hard not to have much money, especially if you are faced with life challenges or ill health – this is a common concern for many creative practitioners. I have had to be self-sufficient, and my work has often been driven by the necessity to find somewhere to live. Although my first residency in Greenland was motivated by an interest in polar climate and culture, it was also a way to escape a precarious housing situation in London. In subsequent artists’ residencies, the offer of temporary shelter in exchange for making creative work gave me some security. No doubt this informs my response to place and location. I often think of the composer John Cage. Kathan Brown, the visionary director of Crown Point Press in California, persuaded Cage to visit each year to work on a new sequence of prints. She describes how Cage objected to ‘our problems being a problem’ when encountering technical difficulties in making the work. ‘We must be free of such concerns!’ he would say, and create despite the obstacles. You learn this in a creative career: the difficulties give different insights, and they must become your material and inform the work.
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