Winter
The new winter edition of our Journal, a winter full moon, a blizzard on the Baltic, a literary climb in Chamonix, and a quick book and publishing update from Hydra.
THE WINTER EDITION OF THE JOURNAL OF THE HYDRA BOOK CLUB
We had the privilege one month ago, of launching the first winter companion to the Journal of the Hydra Book Club in Aspen, Colorado.
The once booming silver mining town had fallen asleep until Pussy and Walter Paepke roused it with their utopian vision in the 1940s and set it on course to become the year-round meeting place of international intellectuals it is today. Their “Aspen Idea” was an otherwise impossible blend of Bauhaus, philosophers, artists, and of course skiers and mountaineers.
“The original value system from that time was what was in your mind, how well you knew poetry and philosophy and appreciated music, not to mention if you could ski!” says longtime Aspen resident DJ Watkins, owner and curator of the Aspen Collective Gallery. “When people are surrounded by the mountains, their creativity is unlocked, inspiring them to explore big ideas about culture, art, and the future,”
Those big ideas were explored by some of the the 20th century’s most infamous personalities engaging in often radical activity - Hunter S. Thompson ran for sheriff, Andy Warhol skied Buttermilk, anti-conformism bled into unchecked drug use, radical ski gangs roared down the slopes, and visionary artists founded Aspen Center for the Visual Arts (now the Aspen Art Museum). The inaugural exhibition in June 1979 was American Portraits of the Sixties and Seventies showing works by Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Chuck Close, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Mapplethorpe, Warhol and many others. We went to Aspen to honor this legacy.
I don’t think it is too bold to proclaim a “Hydra Idea”. Like the Aspen Utopians, we also wish to explore big ideas, to engage with radical artists, and to encounter the natural world both on our island and in the mountains.
When we are not in Hydra, Filip and I are drawn to the Tatra Mountains, the Swiss Alps, Montana, Chamonix, the snowy forests of Northern Poland, Vermont, Sweden, and Aspen. We read about mountains, we ski them, we climb them. There is a striking similarity in these mountain communities, like Hydra, where the power of nature draws generations of artists together.
Available in bookstores and online.
The cover is a drawing by the artist Nancy Whang
The Journal of the Hydra Book Club Winter Edition features fiction, essay, and image from Christopher DeLoach, Shawn Dogimont, Jonah Freud, Irini Karayannopoulou, Layla Kerley, Kinga Kiełczyńska, Michael Mcgregor, John Muir, Grzegorz Polański, Zach Seely, Mark Segal, Nan Shepherd, Nancy Whang, and Jagna Wróblewska. A limited edition for Aspen includes a flexi disc with a track composed and recorded by Nancy Whang and Nick Millhiser (LCD Soundsystem) and a custom bumper sticker poem by Christopher DeLoach.
WINTER FULL MOON
The first week of the new year, nights on Hydra were illuminated by a full moon so bright the craggy rocks of the mountains that surround the harbor and village were visible in detail, and my shadow long as I climbed back up to the house. The island is quiet, and at night, it is rare to cross paths with anyone or anything other than the cats who walk with me, up and down to the port. Cats made lonely by the lull of winter. The night of the full moon, the “wolf moon” as it is called by legend, a warm, thick wind blew from the south. Strong, dusty gusts battered the damp chill of island winter, ferries service halted, street lamps flickered on and off. Even the heartiest cats were gone, hidden beneath brush or sneaked into empty houses. At midnight, I walked alone up the sloping village to the “good wells”, kala pigadia, with the wind at my face and with the intensely peculiar sensation of being watched.
Now is the season of hungry mice, cold rabbits / lean owls hunkering with their lamp-eyes / in the leafless lanes in the needled dark; / now is the season when the kittle fox / comes to town in the blue valley of early morning
Mary Oliver, Wolf Moon, from Twelve Moons, 1979
A Navaho friend and his brother once visited me in New York. It was his brother’s first time in New York and first time meeting me. When they arrived to my basement apartment in Brooklyn, the brother pressed a dark grey stone carved into the shape of a howling wolf into my hand and said,
“I dreamt of you before knowing you. You came to my dream as a wolf.”
I still have the stone wolf over 25 years later and it is always with me when I travel.
Last January, in the dense, frozen forest of northeastern Poland, I locked eyes with a wolf. We stood facing each other for an instant, and all else vanished. That is until a pack of 14 others appeared and began running towards me. I began to shout, “It’s me! It’s me!”. I felt like Buck in The Call of the Wild, ready to join them, my true wild nature finally revealed. They stopped about 10 meters in front of me and began to play.
It is an indescribable mix of terror and exhilaration to be seen by a wild animal, to feel its gaze directed onto you.
A few weeks later, I was in Yellowstone National Park, in winter so deep the moisture in the air froze into sparkling ice-glitter. The park was mostly closed to traffic save the road accessed from the north entrance in Montana. This lead us to the Lamar Valley where we saw two different packs of wolves. They kept a distance this time, perhaps due to the crowds of amateur wildlife photographers that follow them - “Wolf People” of which I am now one.
“It’s me! It’s me!”
It is a journey into being, being, being. And the quality of the being is for the moment enough. There is no need for action, no need for the past, no need for the future.
Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain, 1977
This past October, 2025, the French mountaineers Benjamin Védrines and Nicolas Jean became the first to summit Jannu East, a 7468M peak in the Nepalese Himalayas. A recording Védrines made as he achieves the summit was aired during an interview feature on RTS Swiss radio.
His voice cracks not with fatigue but overwhelming emotion. We hear him cry, a tear he describes as “strong, real, simple”
The journalist asks him, “what are tears like at over 7000 meters altitude? Do they freeze?”
We cherish this passion for a universe that generates a vast amount of literature. It is quite strange that, for the very small number of people who actually climb mountains, the number of books it inspires is so great. The readership far exceeds the circle of those who practice mountaineering…I believe this literature is universal and eternal. It is close to the spirit of Ulysses and Homer. When one goes into the mountains, when one experiences true adversity—not the ordinary climb, but something we might call the epic, where life is at stake, when one sets foot in hell and is dragged back from the brink of death into the world of the living...The account of that experience, which is not ordinary life but something in the realm of the extraordinary, is still capable of sending a shiver down one’s spine.
Michel Guérin quoted in Des Violons pour Monsieur Ingres, Marie-Christine Guérin, Editions Guérin, Chamonix, 2013 (translated from French by J Hickey)
WHEN HEL FROZE OVER
A narrow, curving, scythe-shaped sand dune named Hel separates the bay of Puck and the open Baltic sea. Hel, from the old Polish word hyl, used to describe a barren, desolate place exposed to the elements, is a hook of land, a mere sandbar, in constant peril of total erosion by the steady thrashing of winter storms.
A storm of a particularly high intensity was due to hit just as I arrived with Stanisław and Filip to the mostly shuttered sea side resort village of Jurata. Jastarnia, Jurata, Hel - the towns exist here solely for summer. There is a preference for the new, and most of the charming 1930s architecture has been replaced by glossy condominium complexes and hotels emblazoned with five gold stars and names like Villa VIP or Villa Glamour. Developments under construction advertise “new definitions of unparalleled luxury”.
Our luxury is the deep January winter, and the promise of a storm. We spent the storm together walking along the sea too angry to completely freeze (which it did just after the storm), hurling blocks of ice onto the shore. Blinded by the snow until miraculous openings in the sky bled color and light onto the snow covered dunes. The story is out now in Artroom, a new magazine by Marcin Kempski and Mikołaj Jazwiecki with Filip as their editor in chief.
ARTROOM ZINE BY MARCIN KEMPSKI, MIKOŁAJ JAZWIECKI, EDITOR IN CHIEF - FILIP NIEDENTHAL, ART DIRECTION - MARYSIA MASTALERZ. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE - HYDRA BOOK CLUB ARTISTS PETER THICKETT, MICHAEL MCGREGOR, AND MARCIN MASECKI.
LITERARY ADVENTURE IN CHAMONIX
I had the great pleasure of writing for the issue 6 of the brilliant ski magazine Hard Pack, published in January. I had gone climbing with mountaineering and steep-skiing legend Vivian Bruchez, who was finishing his first book at the time. The publisher is Editions Guérin, a pillar of mountaineering literature for now 30 years.
“For me, writing a book is above all a way to explore a new form of expression — one that allows me to share a little more detail than I can through social media or films. It’s perhaps a bit more personal, with a strong sense of passing something on.”
The literature of adventure is the first opening of the doors of perception for many young people – future skiers and climbers (or even non-climbers!). Those who venture into altitude and return are compelled to share their story, as these expeditions are not mere sporting accomplishments, but profound existential experience. Mountaineering and literature are symbiotic. The mountain is the ultimate protagonist - unpredictable, beautiful, generous, cruel, unforgiving. The contrasting intensity of emotion demands great mental as well as physical strength.
Should the question, “Why does mountaineering produce so much more literature than any other sport?” arise, the answer is inevitably “mountaineering is not a sport.”
Mountaineering (I use this general term to inclused alpinism, ascension, climbing, skiing) is a lifestyle. It is a choice to live in the mountains, and to enjoy relationships informed by the values learned there. It is a contemplative practice which provokes profound, life-altering (and sadly, too often life-ending) experience.
This is powerful storytelling. Why climb a mountain? Mallory famously replied, “because it is there.” This response reads like a zen riddle. A simplification of a complex and very introspective question.
And Vivian and I finished a post-climb coffee, we discussed transmission. His catch phrase is “let’s go take a look!” I ask if taking a look and seeing new things, performing new feats comes with the responsibility to share the experience. Vivian heartily agrees, he spends much of his time as an instructor for young skiers learning to master steeps. And now a book will join the list of films and stories already told. Generosity is the most natural of Vivian’s traits.
HARD PACK MAGAZINE IS AVAILABLE HERE. THE FOUNDER AND EDITOR IN CHIEF ZACH SEELY IS ALSO A CONTRIBUTOR TO THE JOURNAL OF THE HYDRA BOOK CLUB
SOME HYDRA NEWS
It is a stormy mid-March day here in Hydra, moody and perfect for reading all day at home.
We have encountered some delays and disappointments with our project to open a new space. September and October will be brilliant, as always, in the Museum, and an outstanding program of events will make our literary autumn even better than years previous. We remain committed to sharing our love of literature, and the literary heritage of this island, and will soon be able to provide access to our collection through the year.
We are looking forward to a new issue of GLOTTA arriving in May, and the 4th volume of the Journal of the Hydra Book Club arriving in June. We will celebrate these new issues in Athens and at the Old Carpet Factory Hydra. Hydra publishing is thriving!
Our Journal, now entering its fourth edition - and including a new winter companion edition - features excellent writing and image from an ever expanding community of writers and artists. While we do not have plans to make a digital edition of the Journal, we will begin making some select content available here on the substack to increase access to great stories!
First up - Shawn Dogimont’s story, Moonwalking into the Future.