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by Jeannie Carlson (Author)
"...fragmentary, puzzle-like with edges..."
Aland A Land is an investigative poetics project two millennia in the making. Jeannie Carlson, author, poet, journalist, educator and opera singer merges a luminous mélange of poetry, prose, digital art, and photos spanning over a century to capture her legacy as a daughter of the Aland Islands. At the time of Christ, when the author's ancestors first walked the 25 miles across the frozen Baltic from what is now Stockholm to the Aland Islands, their particular heritage began to flourish.
The first step of her journey began with her great-grandfather, Carl M. Carlson's (1869-1941) journal that was translated from Swedish-English and published in 1992 by Carl's grandson, Richard Gingrich, son of Carl's daughter, Helen. The next leg of her voyage was on a family roots trip organized by her uncle, The Rev. Dr. Robert Carlson, to Scandinavia in 2007 along with the other descendants of Carl's son, Arthur, where she met her Aland cousins. These pivotal experiences led to her pursuit of researching her connection to Aland, transforming her essence as historical bard, conceptionalizing her connection to place - these quasi-mythological islands crowning the Baltic Sea.
