Tomorrow I’m travelling back to Greenland to take part in an ongoing, interdisciplinary project with quaternary science colleagues from Manchester Metropolitan. This is a privilege and an honour. We’ll be taking messages on postcards from Manchester and inviting people to write back.

It is an extension of a poetry-and-science collaboration we began in 2023, examining ‘landscapes of change’. Last time, we were in Narsaq (South Greenland) and I wrote a sequence of poems which were translated into Greenlandic by Katti Frederiksen and Karen F. Grønvold.

A lot of the time while we were in Narsaq, I was thinking about tourism and the privileged-and-problematic position of being an observer, something I tried to touch on in several poems including this one:

Tourist

In the shop, they sell candles, guns
and a picture of the Virgin Mary.
The houses are apricot-and-lemon,
forest green, every blue
suggested by the moods of water.

It will rain tomorrow
and you will gather
all you’ve left undone
walk aimlessly along the shore
harvesting old griefs.

In the turf house, there was a picture
of Marilyn Monroe on the far wall,
the ice-twinkle of her left eye.
By the water, a clump of polystyrene
from the tip at the edge of town

cheerfully mimicking a berg,
all pale spikes and white crowns.
Your heart breaks for it,
so obnoxious, trying so hard
to integrate itself.

When we arrive in the Disko Bay area later this week, it will be very clear what my colleagues are working on: they have sediment samples to collect and analyse, with all the complex set up, execution and processing that involves. It is logistically difficult, expert work with a well-defined objective, investigating climate change (which is not to minimise the mystery and uncertainty and surprise involved).

My role is to meet people, talk to people, listen, invite young people and adults to write if they wish and perhaps to write ‘something’ myself. To find out what? To write what? It would be a mistake to guess in advance. I don’t know exactly what I’ll be doing from one day to the next. It is easy – and appropriate – to get imposter syndrome as a creative writer or artist in these contexts. How am I ‘working’? How appropriate is it to foreground ‘the work’ in each social interaction? What is ‘the work’ even in aid of? What if it has failure stitched into it?

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This got me thinking about the notion of ‘work’ as a writer more generally. It seems a source of anxiety to many of us, much of the time. What is The Work and what are we here for?

We sometimes use that term to indicate a creative output, a book or a sequence of poems. We refer to ‘the work of writer X’ in terms of what they have published. But The Work requires work in the background, foreground, air. It is terrain and element. It is wholly confusing. We also refer to it in therapeutic contexts (‘working on yourself’, ‘doing the work’ etc) and perhaps that’s apt. I found, as I contemplated it, that I didn’t have any concrete answers. But what I did have was a growing sense of what The Work is not, or what it is not for me anyway. So here are a few thoughts on that.

The Work is not the description of The Work (if it could be paraphrased, it wouldn’t need to be done).

The Work is not the promotion of The Work, though that has to happen. It is not the blurb or the advertising, or the stuff that tends to get you paid at the best rate. The Work is more private, might require periods of silence, of reading, of living and processing living.

The Work is not always easy to defend.

The Work is not the reception of The Work. The Work can exist without being shared, but the sharing may be part of it.

The Work is not the mythology of The Work. It is not the writer engaged in the business of creating his own theoretical domain in which others can only walk if they adhere to some unspoken agreement of worship, the worship of the originator of The Work.

The Work is not synonymous with The Writer, even if nobody else could have created / begun The Work in that way.

The Work is not the idea of being someone who does The Work.

The Work is not a means to justify the less desirable elements of The Life (though God knows I’ve used it like that). It is not an excuse to discount the reality of others, or use their suffering as compost.

The Work is not self-torture in the name of The Work, but it may involve self-sacrifice.

The Work is never truly complete-able. Nor is it ever truly put down.

The Work is seldom as endangered as we think or fear it is.

I don’t know if this poem from my last trip to Greenland is The Work, but I think maybe it has something to do with it:

Walrus

Bitter coffee. First frost.
The Professor of Design is telling us the story
of a hunter in Nuuk who stalked a walrus
on the ice. He talks with his hands.

When the creatures breathe in, they can’t hear
so every time she saw its great flank rise
she risked a step. She kept this up for two hours
until she was in killing proximity.

I want my coffee Greenlandic,
three types of whisky, but it’s 11.30am
and the cafe is hushed apart from us
and a semi-feral dog outside.

The Professor has finished. He stirs his cup.
It is not his tale and it is still less mine,
but I like to think we can
approach the truth like that:

on tiptoe, listening to its breath,
accepting it might take our whole lives,
our lives whole, that we might freeze
before we murder it.