Welcome, friend! I am thrilled to bring you this interview with Buddy Levy, the author of Realm of Ice and Sky: Triumph, Tragedy, and History’s Greatest Arctic Rescue. This book called to the explorer in me and I had a great time visiting the polar ice caps and learning about navigating it in airships. Check out below what the book is about and then read on for the interview with Buddy. We talked about narrative historical fiction, blending history with adventure and exploration and much more.
Realm of Ice and Sky
National Outdoor Book Award-winning author Buddy Levy’s thrilling narrative of polar exploration via airship―and the men who sacrificed everything to make history.
Arctic explorer and American visionary Walter Wellman pioneered both polar and trans-Atlantic airship aviation, making history’s first attempts at each. Wellman has been cast as a self-promoting egomaniac known mostly for his catastrophic failures. Instead he was a courageous innovator who pushed the boundaries of polar exploration and paved the way for the ultimate conquest of the North Pole—which would be achieved not by dogsled or airplane, but by airship.
American explorer Dr. Frederick Cook was the first to claim he made it to the North Pole in 1908. A year later, so did American Robert Peary, but both Cook’s and Peary’s claims had been seriously questioned. There was enough doubt that Norwegian explorer extraordinaire Roald Amundsen—who’d made history and a name for himself by being first to sail through the Northwest Passage and first man to the South Pole—picked up where Walter Wellman left off, attempting to fly to the North Pole by airship. He would go in the Norge, designed by Italian aeronautical engineer Umberto Nobile. The 350-foot Norge flew over the North Pole on May 12, 1926, and Amundsen was able to accurately record and verify their exact location.
However, the engineer Nobile felt slighted by Amundsen. Two years later, Nobile returned, this time in the Italia, backed by Prime Minister Benito Mussolini. This was an Italian enterprise, and Nobile intended to win back the global accolades and reputation he believed Amundsen had stripped from him. The journey ended in disaster, death, and accusations of cannibalism, launching one of the great rescue operations the world had ever seen.
Realm of Ice and Sky is the thrilling narrative of polar exploration via airship―and the men who sacrificed everything to make history.
Get to know the author: Buddy Levy
Hi Buddy. It’s a pleasure to have you on Armed with A Book. For readers who may not know you, could you share a little about yourself and how you came to focus on narrative historical nonfiction?
Hi Kriti—My pleasure. Thanks for having me. It’s been a circuitous and in ways unlikely route to narrative history, as I call it (but narrative historical nonfiction works!) I grew up in Sun Valley, Idaho, and went to a very small middle school (31 students in the first few years). One of my teachers saw some something in my work during a creative writing class, and she suggested I work with a writer and editor named Clara Spiegel, who had been with Hemingway on safari and published some novels. Clara worked with me editing a short story I was writing, and it ended up getting published in the local newspaper when I was fourteen years old. I loved the process and the affirmation and kept writing through college (University of Idaho) and grad school (MA, creative writing and literature, also University of Idaho).
Throughout this academic period, I wrote and published poetry, essays, and then in the late 90’s bumbled into journalism, writing about expeditions, adventure races, and doing a lot of magazine writing—profiles, long form event coverage, most of it centered around adventurous kinds of activities I’d grown up doing myself: mountaineering, trekking, hunting and fishing, skiing, etc.
In 1998 I published my first book, a natural history and rumination on the introduced game bird species the chukar partridge. Through a writer friend, I ended up sending that book to the agent Scott Waxman (Waxman Literary Agent), and he liked it enough to ask me to send him ideas for another nonfiction proposal. We settled on a biography on the life of the frontiersman David (Davy!) Crockett, and after finishing that book, I was really hooked. I have since written seven more books (now totaling nine) and I keep seeking out stories of extreme hardship, adventure, and survival. That’s a long answer!
Your books are renowned for blending history with adventure and exploration. What inspired you to pursue this unique niche?
Great question! Growing up, my father introduced me to Jack London and of course Ernest Hemingway. The area of Ketchum/Sun Valley was a place Hemingway spent a lot of time (and ultimately, sadly, where he took his own life), so I was reading and participating in outdoor adventure from an early age. I always loved stories of people’s exploits on the edges of danger, especially those about surviving in harsh environments. So that became a natural theme for many of my books, including River of Darkness, about the first Europeans (Spanish conquistadors) to descend the entire length of the Amazon Basin to the Atlantic.
During the journalism phase of my career, I ended up in Greenland covering an adventurous multi-sport race. There, I met an amazing Norwegian woman named Ingerid Aase, who gave me a book by her countryman Fridtjof Nansen called The First Crossing of Greenland. My father, who was an Olympic Nordic skier and ski jumper, had told me about the exploits of the Scandinavians, and after reading Nansen’s books (including Farthest North), I became enthralled with stories of Arctic exploration and polar explorers, and that began what is now a run of three books set in the frozen north.
For someone picking up your books for the first time, how would you describe your approach to storytelling?
I try to pick enthralling historical events, figures, and stories and write about them in a style that blends incorporates the techniques of good fiction, so they read like a novel; to this, I layer in a cinematic element, so they also feel like you are watching a thrilling movie. This way, when it works, the reader feels so immersed in the world I’m recreating that it seems like they are there, experiencing the events, trials and tribulations, the tragedies and triumphs, first-hand. That’s the goal, anyway; it’s what I aspire to do. I endeavor to write page-turning narratives that also get the history right.
Do you find that storytelling in narrative nonfiction comes with unique challenges compared to fiction or academic or journalistic writing?
Certainly, yes. The research aspect, while often a part of both fiction and academic writing, is paramount in narrative nonfiction. It’s very challenging and time-consuming, but also highly rewarding. I love poring over the journals and diaries of explorers and reading their first-hand accounts, often written in incredibly trying circumstances: from the shore of a raging river or the inside of an igloo on a detached floating ice floe. I also love spending time in archives, reading everything that’s ever been written about a subject (or as much as is humanly possible) and bringing all that to bear to tell the best story I can. Importantly, I also make a point to go to the places I write about and spend a good deal of time there, often following parts of the routes taken by the explorers I’m writing about. That really helps me to create a visceral setting that I hope gives the reader a real sense of what it might have been like for the explorers I’m writing about. And that adventure travel is exciting and sometimes a bit dangerous, creating some unique challenges.
What inspired you to write Realm of Ice and Sky, and how did you approach recreating the tension and drama of these missions in your narrative?
While writing both Labyrinth of Ice and Empire of Ice and Stone, one of the themes that kept recurring was the quest for the North Pole. During the time of these narratives, from the late 19th Century to the early 20th Century, it remained one of the last places still blank on the world’s maps. At one point during my research, I came across references to explorers attempting to reach the North Pole via dirigible (airship, or blimp). It fascinated me; such courage, they were like early astronauts! I filed some articles away in a folder for later. Once I finished Empire of Ice and Stone, I revisited the articles and became more and more mesmerized by this amazing period of pioneering aviation coupled with a quest for the North Pole. The story had everything!
How do you approach the research process for a project like this? Do you have any methods or rituals that help you uncover the human stories behind the history?
I spend the initial period (sometimes a year or more) reading and notetaking. I try to read as widely as possible, including first person accounts, books by expedition members, books and articles by others, newspaper accounts from the time, diaries, journals, captains’ logs. AS I’m reading, I try to think of the historical figures like characters in a novel, getting a sense of who they were, what their personalities were like, what others thought of them and said about them, and really flesh them out, extricating them from history and bringing them back to life.
Then, once I think I have a solid handle on the story and the historical figures/characters, I lock myself in the office for many months or a year (usually), and don’t come out until I have a finished book. It’s a slog, but a rewarding one.
Again, that’s the hope and goal, and sometimes I might even succeed.
If airships had continued to develop, do you think they could have revolutionized exploration and travel today?
Airships HAVE continued to develop, and the last chapter of Realm of Ice and Sky deals directly with the advent of the modern airships, stunning modern aircraft which are poised to be used in all sorts of contexts, including humanitarian aid and luxury adventure travel. The new airships are remarkable achievements of technology, using much safer non-flammable Helium gas, solar power, and electric motors, significantly reducing their carbon footprint.
Do you have a favourite scene or passage in Empire of Ice and Stone that you find yourself going back to?
Yes, I sure do! There are a number of them actually, but one favorite occurs when the expedition’s ship, the Karluk, is crushed by the ice. There’s a moving, dramatic scene in which the captain, Bob Bartlett, stays on the ship as it’s slowly being consumed by the ice and is sinking. He and his entire crew are about to be stranded on the moving, fracturing ice, hundreds of miles from civilization, and their odds of survival are slim at best. He plays records on the Victrola while the ship is sinking, at last putting on Chopin’s Funeral March and playing it loud as he steps off the rail onto the ice and the ship sinks below the surface. It’s awesome. Bartlett had a flair for the dramatic.
Were there any moments or figures in your research for Realm of Ice and Sky that surprised you or challenged your assumptions?
Indeed. Walter Wellman was probably the biggest revelation. Before really digging into the research, I had never even heard of him. Few people have. But he’s a very compelling historical figure. He was a noted journalist, a very famous one, who was a Washington insider and hobnobbed with Theodore Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, and numerous captains of industry of the day. And then, he ended up having a side-hustle as an Arctic explorer! Such bravado. He was a pioneer in airship exploration and the first (with a very small crew) to attempt to fly to the North Pole via airship. And yet most people have never even heard of him.
The Arctic has been the setting of many horror and mystery novels. The cold. The long nights. The wind. What’s one of the most surprising or eerie stories you’ve uncovered about the Arctic explorers?
You are right—one needs look no further than The Terror to see what you are talking about!
In my book Labyrinth of Ice, there’s a tragic sequence of events, as the remaining survivors of the Greely Expedition are clinging to life on the frozen shores of Ellesmere Island, Canada, when some of the men resort to cannibalism. It’s macabre, and gruesome, and terrible. But it happened, and I try to write about it with respect and dignity, given the horrible circumstances.
What’s next for you? Are there other historical adventures or time periods you’re eager to explore in future works?
I’d like to write about someplace warm pretty soon, since I go to the places I’m writing about. Maybe Tahiti haha! Seriously though, I haven’t settled finally on the next project. I love the periods of exploration and discovery, but also the opening of the American West, the frontiersmen and frontierswomen who risked everything to try to realize their dreams. I’m also intrigued by mountaineering adventure, such as the history of attempts to summit Mount Everest. So many good stories and only so much time.
Is there anything else you’d like to share with readers before we conclude?
Thanks so much for taking the time to listen to ramble on, and above all—thanks for the readership. I appreciate it beyond words.
Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me and share with my readers.
It’s been a pleasure.
Thanks for joining us! Learn more about Buddy on his website.
I hope you will check out Realm of Ice and Sky on Goodreads.
Many thanks to St Martin’s Press for giving me a chance to connect with the author and to highlight this book on my blog in exchange for an honest review. 🙂
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