Columns from the long dark winter

Hi, it’s Juhani. This week: the hour the light gives up. At three in the afternoon the one street lamp comes on, and the whole town gets quieter.

Also new: why i heat the sauna on a wednesday, and a candle in the window.

In the shop: The Long Dark: Collected Columns, Year One. Fifty-two weekly columns from my first year of writing about the dark, the stove and the sauna.

See you next week, Juhani

I live in a cabin by a frozen lake, where the sun is gone for most of the winter and the days are a long blue dusk. I was a newspaper sub-editor for years, and when the paper closed I kept writing, because I had a habit of one piece a week and no wish to break it. The column moved from the page to an email.

I write about what is in front of me: the light, the wood stove, the sauna on Wednesday, a candle in the window and the small routines that get a person to spring. The column is short, around six hundred words, and it comes every Monday morning before the coffee has cooled.

I am not a famous columnist. What I sell is what I have learned in twenty years of writing to a deadline: the columns collected as ebooks, a reading list for the dark months, a pack of templates for planning your own column, and two video courses on writing one.