Creativity as messy interface

This article builds on ethnographic fieldwork in Iceland, including interviews with writers and other literary figures. It shows how, in conversations and interviews, some interlocutors turned to aquatic and piscatorial tropes, both when they described the literary field and when they described their writing practice. Drawing mainly on Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of metaphor uses in everyday life ( 1980 ), literary studies, and anthropological studies of aesthetic processes, the article aims to show how the chosen tropes foregrounded certain aspects of literary practices in Iceland such as everydayness, urgency and dealing with the unknown . Furthermore, showing how fishing can be situated in a messy interface between human domestication and wilderness ( Lien et al., 2018 ), I suggest that the water and fish tropes point towards parallel structures between fishing and writing: Like fishing, writing literature seemed to happen in a messy interface, oscillating between subjective planning and will (domestication) and uncontrollable, unknown forces (wilderness). It is finally discussed how this analysis, bridging literary, linguistic, cognitive and anthropological research, brings new perspectives on creativity and how creative practices are mediated through language.