The photo-poetry collection meditations on salt was publicly launched in the Faroe Islands in Nólsoy’s convocation center, Royndarhús, on the evening of 12. October, 2007. After welcoming my guests and introducing myself, I gave the following talk:
 
“First and foremost, I’d like to thank the village of Nólsoy for all that it has given me throughout these past years; it has been a home and inspiration to me, and you’ve all been remarkably patient and generous with your time.
 
I remember one day this past January when I was norð í Stong taking pictures. I was lying on the ground in the snow trying to get the right angle on some fence posts just as the sun was setting and shadows were falling across the field. I looked up on the path and saw a man standing and staring at me from a distance and knew that he was wondering what in the world I was doing! Regardless of what you all may have heard, I was working on the photographs that you see today. All of the photographs in meditations on salt were taken in Nólsoy during the first days of January 2007, and all of the poems in the collection were written between August 2004 and September 2007.
 
As you all know, I’ve spent these last two years working with Mrs. Olevina Joensen to write her life history, and I visited her frequently. She’s one of the best friends I’ve had here in the Faroes, and her remarkable grace and perseverance helped inspire me to work through some dauntingly difficult times in my life. The cover photo of meditations on salt was taken just outside her home á Bátatúgvuni one afternoon this past January. I went inside her kitchen to warm my hands and change the film in my camera but, as usual, we ended up drinking tea together and spent a while talking about everything between heaven and earth.
 
When I left Vina’s house that particular day, I was awestruck by the patterns of footprints on the road just below the kitchen window where she spends most of her days sitting. The footprints were so poignant to me at that moment, because I’d just been listening to a wise and wonderful person tell me about the paths she’d walked down throughout her life, and then there I was surrounded by all of these intersecting footpaths in the icy snow. Standing, admiring the haunting beauty of the footprints á Bátatúgvuni, I realized that you’re never so painfully aware of where you’re walking as when you see so clearly where others have walked before you… or away from you…
 
The fence photography in meditations on salt is also my way of critically engaging my audience to become more conscious of the boundaries that mark the landscapes of our everyday lives. It is my way of problematizing the fences that people have used to try confine and neutralize me while I’ve been living in the Faroe Islands, and I know that I’m not the only one who has gotten scratched up climbing out of my proverbial pen. The subtle shades and degrees of social violence in Faroese society can be relentless and stultifying; through the images and voices in meditations on salt, I’ve tried to open windows into how individuals internalize and experience this violence in all of its complexity.
 
As we have seen all too often in this world, boundaries become rigid at the hands of human beings when dialogues stop. As a protest against and testament to the oppressive silences in Faroese society, I have chosen to color meditations on salt a warm grey. For in the Faroe Islands, insulation takes on a whole new meaning when your neighbors begin ostracizing you…disappearing one-by-one, and the very turbulence of the atmosphere and the weather’s bleakness magnify the tension and turmoil that is so visceral yet nearly impossible to name. The greyness of meditations on salt is both a symptom and a critique, a means of comprehending and deconstructing the boundaries and borderlands where our jumbled personal/collective identities, histories, heteroglossia, and meanings are all at once constructed, ascribed, negotiated, embodied, performed, contested, and affirmed (1).
 
In addition to introducing warm grey as the collection’s unifying color, salt is superimposed on the pages and inside covers of the book. This emphasizes one of the most important metaphors and themes in meditations on salt’s overall composition. In salt, seemingly unassociated entities interrelate in unexpected ways, and their properties and effects are transformed as a result; for this reason, salt signifies constant change, mediates holistic interactions, and is an integral part of the dynamic processes that are the source and fate of everything on earth. In the Faroe Islands, salt is a pervasive and manifold element. Meditating on this salt is my anthropo-literary method of contextualizing and fleshing out the many forms and faces of the human condition as it is conditioned… of conveying the universal in the local, and the local in the universal.
 
Rooting meditations on salt in the metaphor of salt and the village of Nólsoy is an attempt at foregrounding many different kinds of dialectic relationships and their implications in situ via local landscapes, architecture, and the metaphorical space opened up within the juxtaposition of poems, photographs, and the book’s design. The collection’s coloring/graphics and progression of themes serve as a multi-dimensional plane of narratives, languages, images, symbols, lyric forms, and associations that illuminate how a local poetics is and continues to become a coextension of ever more comprehensive stories. I guess what I’m trying to say is that meditations on salt is a highly innovative work because of how it integrates so many different media and devices for the purpose of expanding hermeneutical possibilities in literature and the visual arts.
 
The collection is also innovative because its calculated composition has highly experiential components; its uncompromising nature demands that we participate in how it means what it means… that we become conscious of how its unyielding poetic and visual flux constitutes an intense intercourse of elements that simulate how meanings, in all of their mutability, assume form and are constantly resignified in lives as they are being lived (2). Even the punctuation of the collection reflects a grammar of lived experience in its combination of convention alongside the unconventional: it’s important to consider how relative the rules of form and grammar are and how important their variations may be to learning new ways of reading and understanding the hybrid identities of words and their arrangements in meaning.
 
And it is this intensity of our lives here, the subtle diversity, stark proximity, and transparency of our lives, that I think meditations on salt so accurately conveys. The Faroe Islands can simultaneously be claustrophobic yet mercilessly isolating, and I’ve seen and felt how our histories, shared experiences, and roles not only keep us inextricably tied to one another but can actually end up alienating us from others and ourselves. It’s nearly impossible not to feel suffocated when the emotional, social, and geographical landscapes on which our identities hinge so unsparingly pit us against ourselves and others. The tense silences and aching resignation escalate into desperation as we feel ourselves breaking down and scramble to keep our humanity intact. At times the anguish becomes torturously ingrown and tangles with other haunts and hurts. Rejection, disappointment, abandonment, and betrayal blossom into anger. It’s as though the horizons on every side are swallowed by sea spray and darkness. The winds bear down and our houses quake.
 
And yet, even in those bleak moments when poetry seems to die and life feels unbearable, there’s hope so long as we retain the capacity to observe that something is always happening in our solitude… that life hasn’t forgotten us (3). There’s an almost paradoxical solace and strength to be rediscovered in solitude, though it too takes its toll and has unexpected repercussions. Quintessentially, reading meditations on salt is itself a part of this process : the collection is about struggle, transition, striving to transform the self, and learning to have the patience and courage to live the loneliness, griefs, and questions that riddle our lives all the while recognizing and using what they are accomplishing within us to bring our inner and outer worlds into a sustainable dialogue.
 
meditations on salt culminates in its life-affirming reflections on salt, reflections on the existence and communion of all forms as they violently but beautifully change. And so here I am tonight, just a few days before my departure, giving this book to the Faroese people with all of my affection, devotion, and hope for the future of this most fascinating land. I’ve never sacrificed, suffered, or worked so much for the people and things that I believe in, as I’ve had to do while I’ve been living here, but I thank you for the opportunity and invitation to struggle, learn, grow, and become.”
 
(1)
As in anthropology, I believe that poetry should not lead us to confirm our assumptions but, rather, to reflexively and holistically investigate context-specific relations of power, the hybridity and complexity of social identities (as geographically and temporally contextualized), and the possibilities that people have for re-reading their pasts and mobilizing themselves to claim a different vision of the future (Crapanzano, 1980: xiv), (Benedict, 1948).
 
(2)
As anthropologists must refrain from collapsing the conceptualization and phenomenology of experience in order to avoid distorting how people tell about the experiences they have of their lives and how these stories are metaphors for truth (not identical with it), writers should also try to refrain from collapsing the coexistent discursive dimensions (and signifying extensions) that socially construct society and individuals in their re-presentations of how people’s stories situationally and narratively unfold in time (Crapanzano, 1980: 126/130). This is the only way that writing, particularly anthropological writing, can do justice to how our lives’ constant, temporal immersion in interpenetrating social forms and meanings allow the processes and relations which produce these forms and meanings to dialogically surface in the act of employing, manipulating and repositioning their metaphoric extensions narratively.
 
(3)
(Rainer Maria Rilke, 2000)
 
Works Cited
Benedict, Ruth. 1948. “Anthropology and the Humanities” in American Anthropologist, V. 50 (# 4).
Crapanzano, Vincent. 1980. Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. 2000. Letters To A Young Poet. New World Library. Navato, CA.

The village life (bygdarlívið) photographs were taken in various villages around the Faroe Islands, and they dispute the romantic discourses that people have often used to characterize the Faroe Islands and its villages as fairy tale settings, places where time stands still and everyone lives harmoniously in utopic seclusion.

Bygdarlívið problematizes these appropriative discourses while simultaneously making a critical statement about the destructive elements of communities’ social structures and dynamics. Each photograph in the village life exhibition features a metaphorical state of overexposure, decay and neglect, and the architecture of each image is rife with disturbing symbolism: doors that can no longer be opened, broken or sealed windows, severely corroded hinges, abraded walls, and nails and roofs that bleed rust as they struggle to maintain order, form, and function.

In bygdarlívið the colorfully complex and haunting relationships between various kinds of discourses, structures, and deterioration are pervasive, but the only people we see in the framed photographs are the exhibition’s audience… people whose distorted perspectives and visages are reflected back to them for urgent consideration.
 
The village life exhibition was featured in the Main Entrance Hall of the Nordic House in Reykjavík, Iceland from 31. July – 21. August, 2010.

holdfast: \hōl(d),fast\ n.

1a). a structure by which a plant clings to a flat surface
1b). an organ by which a parasitic animal attaches itself to its host
2a). something to which something else may be attached
2b). a restraint that holds something in place

The holdfast photographs I completed during my last weeks in Morgantown, WV in 2008 are a testament to the terrifying struggle to find a place in an oftentimes indifferent world, a world that all too rarely reflects on the socio-economic dynamics and discourses that shape us, our perceptions of ourselves and others, and our opportunities and access to particular resources. All of the photographs in this collection were taken within a one-mile radius of West Virginia University’s downtown campus and juxtapose and problematize enculturated notions of growth, deterioration, and poverty in metaphorical terms that hinge on architecture, flora and graffiti. Simultaneously, holdfast is a tribute to the tenacity and terrifying complexity of the human spirit as well as its ability to turn an austere wall’s crevice into an anchor even in the bleakest of circumstances.

holdfast was also designed to raise awareness of the Appalachian Prison Book Project (APBP), an official student initiative of West Virginia University founded by English professor Katy Ryan and the members of her graduate Prison Literature course in the fall of 2004. Sending free books to the women and men currently incarcerated in Appalachia’s prisons, the APBP is staffed by undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, interns from the Center for Civic Engagement, and Morgantown community members. These volunteers improve prison libraries and nourish the imaginations and intellects of Appalachia’s prisoners through their progressive work and commitment to education. As research conducted by the Federal Bureau of Prisons has shown, access to educational programs significantly reduces rates of recidivism. The APBP also helps build nurturing contacts between inmates and those involved in literacy efforts, prison reform, and violence prevention.

By donating books or volunteering in other ways, you can help give the people in Appalachia’s prisons opportunities to empower themselves and improve their lives before the desperately creeping claspers of their curiosity and humanity get torn out by the roots. Please contact project founder Katy Ryan to learn how you can become an Appalachian Prison Book Project volunteer:

P.O. Box 601
Morgantown, WV 26507
appalachianpbp@gmail.com

West Virginia is the place I’ve always wanted to be able to come home to but never quite could. In November 2007, after seven years living out-of-state and abroad, I found myself back on Rural Route 1 licking my worldly wounds and confronting the clutter of my former life. The garden was overgrown, the fields were scarred with new fence lines, and I’d forgotten how dark the nights get out on Pond Creek.

Within a week, I was two hours northeast of Parkersburg sitting hunched over a table in SO.ZO Café on High Street tearing through the local newspapers in search of an apartment within walking distance of West Virginia University’s downtown campus. I took Falling Run Road to the top of the hill that same day and signed a lease on the first apartment I found. I’d never been to Morgantown before, but it seemed like a flourishing town to make a fresh start in while recovering from years of turmoil and illness.
I felt ready to make myself at home in my home state and invested the last of my savings into the move.

My best friend and I spent that first weekend in Morgantown sitting on the apartment floor assembling furniture with hex keys, and then I began the painstaking task of reopening those heavy, carefully sealed boxes and sorting through the contents and sentiments I’d all but abandoned. It didn’t take long for me to shelve my books and reconcile most of those other amputated items to my new space, but situating myself and my emotional baggage wasn’t as simple. I was struggling just to look at myself in the mirror each morning without becoming nauseous; to me, my face looked completely mutilated, and my eyes saw the world through the pleaching scars that kept hedging me into traumas I wished to move beyond. Readapting to the mercenary work ethic and breakneck pace of American life complicated matters even more.

In the midst of personal crisis, and a failing job market and economy in the hollowed out heart of Appalachia, I coped as best I could by retreating into translation work and half-heartedly refashioning vapid CVs and cover letters. I tried not to get discouraged and occasionally sought refuge sipping chai and filching Wi-Fi at SO.ZO. I soon noticed that I wasn’t the only one who regularly happened into the progressive café looking for some empathy and conversation. In addition to the stressed students cramming for exams and guzzling fair-trade coffee before hurrying off to class, SO.ZO welcomed several of Morgantown’s
young homeless; it was there that I met the charismatically manic John P.

John P. was what he called himself, and the redemptive P. he’d adopted as his last name stood for “Phoenix”. He would often come bursting into SO.ZO, sometimes several times a day, gesticulating wildly with his nicotine-stained fingers, loudly doing one of his many self-impersonations in a punctuated, mischievously nasal tone that both playfully pronounced and parodied his intimidating capriciousness. When he showed up in the mornings, occasionally sporting bruises, scrapes, and torn clothes, he would wash up in the restroom then sit with us and launch into hypnotic rants about the turbulent nights he’d spent strung out and philosophizing over empty plastic cups in some of Morgantown’s seediest corners. He’d also tell us about the purring vehicles that
jerked along stalking him up and down the sour sidewalks after the joints had closed and he was alone trying to walk off the cold and find a place to squat for the night.

John P. was markedly gaunt for a man in his early twenties, and the greasy brown of his side-parted, chin-length hair made him look even paler. Behind his whiskery moustache and thin lips, he was missing a couple of his front teeth, and several prominent scars riddled his cheeks and forehead. He never talked about the old scars, but he had a veritable life history bound up in how he’d acquired each of the bulky rings (set with pieces of shell and multicolored stones) that he wore on most of his fingers; John P. also ritually carried a black-ink pen, a spiral-ring notebook full of torn, stabbed pages of drawings, and a few shatters of milky quartz that he said he used to channel the universe’s energy. Many of the drawings in his notebook were fraught with disquieting shapes obsessively superimposed over one another in patterns at times indistinguishable within the violence of their dark lines.

Over the course of the seven months I lived and worked in Morgantown, I often sat admiring John P.’s art and chatting with him as he compulsively drew to the rhythms of his speech. He talked about getting his GED, and I told him that he should, that he had undeniable talents, but he would avert his eyes each time I said this, looking deeper down into the pyramided eyes of his notebook. He tenderly placed one of his crystals on the back of my hand one afternoon and said “You’re a real lady. Would ya’ like to have one’a my drawins?” He gave me an autographed picture of a gnarled tree whose naked branches reached upward imploringly, its roots exposed out of the ground, and its bark veined with ominous shadows. There was a cold, crescent moon in the sky, and the black hollow at the center of the tree’s thick trunk appeared to be yawning ever wider.

Some days after this, while driving downtown, I saw John P. walking across from White Hall near The Den. I waved at him but he didn’t see me; he was walking solemnly beside another man who was dressed entirely in black, and they weren’t talking to one another. I was stopped, waiting for the light to change at the corner of Willey and High Streets, when I saw three young men bolt around the corner shouting, “There he is!” “Get’im!”. In my rear view mirror, I watched them run up behind John P. and tackle him to the ground. John P. curled up on the pavement to protect his face and head while punches, curses, and stomps rained down on him; he did not fight back, and the man dressed in black stood by emotionless, unmoved to intervene or even gather up the notebook of drawings that had fallen out from under John P.’s coat and gotten kicked off the sidewalk.

By the time the light turned green, it was mostly over. The three attackers had backed off enough to allow John P. to get up, but they celebrated their humiliation of him by swooping in to give him an encore of punches in the back and head after he’d turned, retrieved his notebook, and begun to slowly walk away alongside his acquaintance in black. John P. recoiled under the impact of each blow but neglected to shield himself or even look at them, seemingly desensitized to such abuse.  I lost sight of him when I turned the corner that day. In my mind, I can still see him flinching from their last punches: shoulders shrugged, head lowered.

I drove away that day overwhelmed with a sickening, visceral dread, wondering whether John P. would ever be able to heal or find a place where he could settle and reemerge from the ashes of his young life. When his conspicuous absence from SO.ZO stretched into its second week, I asked after him and learned that he’d been arrested and transferred out of Monongalia County to another correctional facility, but I never found out exactly why and never saw or heard from John P. again. His haunting drawing brooded on my bookshelf until the end of May 2008, when I decided not to renew my lease and carefully packed the drawing into a cardboard box containing my journals and a few old photographs of my mother and grandparents.