New Year’s morning, I was up early. There’d been no babushka at the desk on this floor and nobody in the hallways. Normally there were…
If you’d been traveling to Iceland in 1900 and bought the Handbook to Iceland, you’d have been assured by an advertisement that Thistle Scotch Whiskey…
Can it be so long ago that my mother brought me to Gimli? She had first taken me to see the King and Queen in…
“I’ve got a headache,” my daughter said, except she was three so it was heag-ache. “I fixed.” She held up an empty aspirin bottle. …
In The Fish Can Sing, Halldor Laxness presents through the narrator Álfgrímur, the economics of Björn of Brekkukot and, thus, his own economic philosophy. Björn…
Over my lifetime, I’ve read thousands of poems, as a student, as a teacher and as a reader who loves the well-wrought word. Keats and…
In 1961-62 I lived in Riverton, Manitoba. It was a memorable year. The one thing I didn’t do was meet Guttormur. I regret that.…
This murder mystery, Last Rituals, in spite of its focus on magic and witches, charmed me. It charmed me because of the characterization, particularly that…
I grew up in Gimli, Manitoba. Gimli is regarded as the heart of New Iceland. It is, in many ways, the focal point for…
In 1845, Ida Pfeiffer made a trip to Iceland by herself. There was outrage in some places at the idea of a woman traveling…