Roaming and Reading: Lofoten
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This week for Roaming & Reading, we head to the far north.
When Rebecca Dinerstein arrived in Lofoten, she was on top of the world, or closer to it than most people ever get. Lofoten is a Norwegian archipelago, 95 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
"It's some of the last land you can live on, way up there," Dinerstein said. She arrived on the islands "by magic," a magic of connections through a professor's acquaintances. In her first days there, "the sun was never setting, it was 24 hours of broad daylight."
A poet and a novelist, Dinerstein had traveled to the islands to write. The fractured landscape and the isolation inspired her newest book, "The Sunlit Night."
The lack of night on the islands "completely reverses any sense of normalcy you might have," she said. "All the rules have gone out the window. You're just alone in this brightness that completely transforms any sense of time, order or sequence."
Dinerstein joined MPR News' Kerri Miller to discuss her time in Lofoten and how strangeness is essential to writing.
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