How did I come to write about 19th-century Arctic exploration? It started with a song, as I explain in my essay “The Idea of North.” One thing led to another, and I was off on a tangent of research & reading, trying to make sense of such a diverse body of findings.
Surely, some might think, she’s not going to be able to fit Virginia Woolf into this one! But my work has a strong literary component, and Woolf belongs by virtue of my quest starting while I was staying in her home village and by a not-surprising-when-you-think-about-it connection in A Room of One’s Own.
The result was this piece, just published in The Baltimore Review, but my fascination with the subject continues, and I continue to read about polar ice and cold and the people who pursue it from the safety of sunny San Diego. Read “The Idea of North” here.
Alice Lowe -- still writing 
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Reblogged this on Tayoulevy’s Weblog.
I so enjoyed your essay, ‘The Idea of North’. When I was in Tasmania, preparing to stay on one of its small islands, I discovered a number of people there who are involved in and fascinated by the deep south region of Antarctica. You captured the same sort of allure and mystery, at the other pole.