Island Sojourn: A Memoir (Collected Works)

A CLASSIC OF WILDERNESS LITERATURE—AND A LUMINOUS PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG WOMAN LEARNING TO LIVE DELIBERATELY

Island Sojourn combines the attention to language of poetry, the speculation of philosophy, and the page-turning story. It is the best such book I have read since Thoreau's Walden .” ~ Linda Pastan

Magnificent…heart-stopping…vigorous scouring reportage ~ Kirkus

Island Sojourn concerns itself with the gradual attainment of a state of grace – a satori of the sixth sense. ~ Globe and Mail, Toronto, Ontario

Prose that is as clear and compelling as the water in the lake. ~ Washington Post

Lyrical without being sentimental…a remarkable first book.” ~ Windsor Star

A painter's eye for recording the world's voluptuousness” ~ Literary Guild of Canada

When Elizabeth Arthur set off for northern Canada at the age of twenty, she had no idea she and her then-husband would end up buying a rocky three-acre island in a huge wilderness lake. Nor did she imagine she would one day write a memoir about the experience. Although she was the daughter of two writers, a ferocious reader, and gripped by Greek philosophy, after her father died when she was fifteen, her imagined future had vanished like smoke.

But three years later she went on a mountaineering course in Wyoming, dropped out of college, and married the man who had taught her the skills of the wilderness. Together, they moved to Canada, and with a modest inheritance from Elizabeth's father, were able to buy a wilderness island and build a simple house on it.

Though they were forty miles by water from the nearest town, and more than fourteen miles from the Carrier Indian village where their nearest neighbors lived, at first the island offered everything they had dreamed of - solitude, self-reliance, harmony with nature. They explored abandoned cabins, crossed paths with lynx and moose, and learned to navigate the lake's shifting moods. But as winter storms cut them off from the mainland, their dream of solitude became a test of endurance.

Time Magazine wrote Island Sojourn is a graceful meditation on survival, both in a harsh, external landscape, and in the scarier terrain of the self. Leon Edel wrote, ....a fascinating mix of Thoreau and Robinson Crusoe – a fresh, bracing story of young people trying to live with the wilderness and in it.

Like Walden , Alaskan Travels , and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek , but all its own, Island Sojourn stands as a lyrical, unflinching exploration of what it means to live deliberately. From its precise and gorgeous evocations of the natural world, to its clear-eyed portraits of the people she met in the wilds, from its vision of harmony and peace to the dark incursion of sudden death and unexpected violence, this is the story of a young woman who moves from innocence to knowledge – and in so doing, discovers the shared quest at the heart of every human life.

With a Foreword by Elizabeth Arthur's husband, Steven Bauer.