Cloudberry Confessional: Essays on Life, Land and Legends

By Kati Saonegin Niina Kivilä

Structured like a conversation with a good friend, this collection of essays transports the reader into nature, where, treacherous and sinking, the mire becomes a paradise and a home as the cloudberry becomes a muse for its pickers.

Foraging berries is a quintessentially Nordic pastime and the berry pickers gold, the mire-loving cloudberry, rubus chamaemorus, thrives on the northernmost pine mires of the Nordic countries. It is there, where writers and friends Niina Kivilä and Kati Saonegin head to in an old Saab every summer to hunt their mutual golden berry muse, equipped with rubber boots, buckets, and a dogged forager’s determination.

Like a conversation between friends, whose friendship is cemented on the boggy tussocks of the cloudberry mire amidst clouds of mosquitoes, the mire opens up as a space, a sanctuary to tackle weighty subjects such as mental health, death, and childlessness, while the friends obsessively hunt the tenacious cloudberry.

A lyrical, intertextual manifesto for safeguarding our relationship to nature and the inherent value of its seemingly most inhospitable parts, Kivilä and Saonegin approach the history and ecology of the pine mires via their mutual foraging passion as well the creation myths of the Kalevala, intertextual references, and ecology. Ultimately showing us that the cloudberry plant is wiser than man, Cloudberry Confessional strikes the perfect balance between intimate yet objective, concise yet poetic, immersing readers in the Nordic relationship to nature with the life-affirming power of nature in Long Litt Woon’s The Way Through the Woods, and the essayistic style of Nina Mingya Powles’ Small Bodies of Water.

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About the author

Kati Saonegin is a Helsinki-based editor and writer with roots in the North. She has been walking on cloudberry mires since she was six. 

Niina Kivilä is a hiker, berry picker and a social scientist, who has often trekked the northern wilderness. She is currently studying writing at the Critical Academy in Helsinki.