Portolan Quarterly — What My Mother Heard in the Static

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Monochrome portrait of a woman in a pale collared shirt, lit from a window — photo by Tokuo Nobuhiro on Pexels

Photo illustration by Ines Dalgleish; source photograph courtesy the family

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My mother's favourite sound was the crackle of the shortwave at four in the morning, a wooden set the size of a bread box that she kept on the sill above the sink. She was from Skagafjörður, where the

Family Papers What My Mother Heard in the Static