#extra reading

pot-au-feu

Notes & Further Reading

Thank you for reading! Here are a few links from the too-many tabs I’ve had open for the last several months. If there’s anything else you’d like to know more about, please feel free to message me here or ask on AO3. Otherwise, here are some bits I found interesting. 

I chose to set this story in Europe rather than North America but wanted to maintain Silna’s heritage in a way that felt organic (with a little nod to Nive Nielsen’s background as well). You can read about the different indigenous peoples of the Arctic Circle here and Inuit culture in Greenland here. If you’re interested in the experience of Greenlanders in Denmark, this was a good article. 

For language, I relied on the Oqaasileriffik [Language Secretary of Greenland] which maintains many links to online dictionaries. I specifically used Christian Wilhelm Schultz Lorentzen’s Dictionary of the West Greenland Eskimo Language (1927), an English translation of Den grønlandske ordbog – grønlandsk dansk [The Greenlandic Dictionary – Greenlandic Danish] (1926). It has been transcribed into new and old Greenlandic orthography and the Excel data file can be downloaded directly here. 

Indigenous land management and stewardship is absolutely fascinating and varied across the globe. Two academic articles worth looking at are: Joe McCarter, Michael C. Gavin, Sue Baereleo, and Mark Love, “The challenges of maintaining indigenous ecological knowledge.” Ecology and Society 19, no. 3 (2014) and Paul Nadasdy, “Transcending the debate over the ecologically noble Indian: Indigenous peoples and environmentalism.” Ethnohistory 52, no. 2 (2005): 291-331. 

Kissa is very much based on Fäviken Magasinet in Järpen, Sweden, which closed permanently in December 2019. You can watch chef Magnus Nilsson make Silna’s “porridge filtered through the forest floor” here. His Mind of a Chef episodes on Netflix are also worth seeking out. Trailer here. 

Traditional Estonian smoke saunas are classed as intangible cultural heritage. You can see what they look like and how they’re heated here. 

History of Jews in the Pale of Settlement and later, the Soviet Union. You can read a bit about the Bukharan Jews of Uzbekistan here and here. 

Yes, there usually is. The interview is a two-way conversation between you and your interviewers - don’t underestimate the power you have to shape where it goes. There are three main ways your extra reading can come up: 

1. If you mention it in your personal statement, they can explicitly ask about it.

2. They can ask you a general question about your subject, which you might find relates to something you’ve read, and you can bring in what you’ve learned. They’ll likely follow up with additional questions specifically about the extra material - this is a great way of bringing up extra reading because it often allows you to focus on the bits that you found the most interesting and are the most comfortable with.

3. They may ask you to talk about what you’re interested in at the end of the interview. This happened in my interview - the interviewers were like, “we know you’ve done loads of extra reading/preparation, so let’s chat about that for a while”. 

15/05/17 - day 18/100 

Stadler, Jane and McWilliam, Kelly, 2020. Screen Media: Analysing Film and Television. Routledge. (Chap. 6 Narrative Trends) Available at: https://www.vlebooks.com/Vleweb/Product/Index/2056516?page=0 (Accessed: February 21st.)

This is written by Jane Stadler who is a film lecture and it talks about the main genres involved in film. because of this I think this source can be reliable.  “There are three key features that function that make such a predictable story structure more interesting: The nature of the character, the conflict and the questions that drive the narrative... What such narratives encourage us to overlock are their underlying ideologies.”