A Place to Write
By Jessica West, August 2025
A Place to Write
I came to Iceland to write. Though, since thoughts can be scribble on a receipt, dictated into phone while on a train, or noted in the margins of a book, Þingeyri may seem an unnecessarily a long way to come for something as portable as a sentence.
For me, as a city-dwelling, American, professional, woman, & amp; parent, I suspected that I would need to travel far. To migrate toward absence: of calendars, obligations, & routines. And toward presence. Toward a place that could offer both a windswept plain and a breath between thoughts.
In Iceland, I found both this absence and this presence. A small world within a large landscape. Remote, rugged, stark, and liminal. Fjords carved deep into the coastline and boundaries blurred between sea and sky, day and night, solitude and sublimity. A month writing in the Westfjords of Iceland is not for everyone. You have to want the absence, embrace the solitude, delve deeply into self-sufficiency. Here, space is both
rugged terrain and quiet pause. Time sits suspended in the long twilight hours and shifting weather invites a rhythm both contemplative and untethered. This absence of clutter and distraction allows thoughts to stretch, settle, and take form.
In these ways, the terrain itself is a metaphor for the writing process: raw, spacious, and full of possibility. The stretch of sky and the stillness of waiting. It is the duality of both quiet absence and immense presence. In sum, it is a good place to write.
Jessica West, August 2025.