Very few writers – indeed very few people – have been to the Antarctic - one of the most remote and unforgiving places on the planet. Jean McNeill has. Here, she discusses her 2005 visit with Rosamund Derry, stressing the importance of such primary research for writers.

In 2005, Jean became Writer-in-Residence in the Antarctic, the Artists and Writers in Antarctica fellowship jointly operated by the Arts Council and the British Antarctic Survey. This allows an artist, literary or visual, to spend three months in the Antarctic summer. She described the competition as ‘fierce’; the application involves peer review and a detailed proposal, which she says is not easy for a novelist, and is ‘at best guesswork’. She was, however, successful and became one of only a handful of people to achieve this, joining writers and artists such as Craig Vear, Anne Brodie and Chris Drury who have also taken up the fellowship.

The journey
Jeans’s proposal was to write a literary novel set in the region. This has become Wintering, a novel in progress. But her journey also gave rise to Ice Diaries, a journal of the time and her experiences and a volume of poetry, The Antarctic Convergence. The experience was so intense that Jean found she wrote to deal with it. Emotions amongst people confined to so small, and so treacherously remote an area became uncomfortable, but honest. To improve as a writer though, Jean firmly believes you have to go through difficult and uncomfortable experiences and emotions. Novelists will write about things that are painful.
The overwhelming majority of people who live and work in the region are scientists. While she was there, Jean taught creative writing classes and was also expected to become part of everyday life at the base. This meant undertaking a lot of hard physical work such as loading supplies. It also meant riding on skidoos, climbing down crevasses in the ice and photographing leopard seals; a creature which despite its deceptively friendly face is a dangerous killer.

The research
As a writer, you rely on your reactions and your responses to people, places, emotions. Primary research - being there and doing is therefore hugely important. Of course, you can write without it, for instance, you could set a story in Switzerland based on guide book accounts, photos and internet searches, but something would be lacking.
Jean McNeil believes that the primary research of going to a place and living there for some time gains you authenticity. You can write about how the place makes you feel, what your senses experience, how people live there. Her time in the Antarctic, known colloquially as The Ice, gave her a new language – a naval, scientific and anthropological language. She learned the science of oceanography and geophysics and found beauty and mystery in phenomena such as sundogs (haloes around the sun) and the language of glaciology with terms such as ‘scrying through ice’.
The landscape too became part of her writing, and Jean described the feelings she had when the last planes left for the summer and she realised there was no other way to leave the base. Entertainment in the evenings usually involved walking to look at glaciers. There was also a powerful sense of who had gone before which Jean described to us in the details of the history of Antarctica: explorer tents have not changed in their basic designs since Edwardian times; at the base are preserved tins from the 1950s; and four huts built by Ernest Shackleton remain in the Ross Sea region.