Cal Flyn and the Reykjanes peninsula

Cal Flyn's new book is out soon and I'm very much looking forward to reading it.

Cal was one of the people who very kindly contributed to my GA Conference in 2022, speaking about her previous book 'Islands of Abandonment'.

On a recent Instagram post, she said:

I’d been writing about sublimity and the landscape - natural phenomena of enormous force (tempests, waterfalls, hurricanes) or grand spectacles (stampedes, vast unbounded plains, the billowing of the Milky Way), when Iceland’s Reykjanes eruptions exploded once more into life. It seemed too good an opportunity to miss – a gift! A chance to have a true sublime experience all my own. And so I rushed there - first, viewing the eruption from the relatively safe vantage point of a helicopter - and again, later, alone and on foot, ducking into the exclusion zone and hiking to where the trail had been claimed by lava, and from scrambling to the closest vantage point that wasn’t under volcanic flows.

This close encounter with the crater was overwhelming, even terrifying. I found it, as I wrote in The Savage Landscape, “a lake of fire, contained in a goblet of black rock, spitting globules of flickering orange into the air, which spun and revolved as if in slow motion, dashed against the blackened rim and dissolved into darkness… I could not look it in the face…”

I shall be getting this book.