Overview

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 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.

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9781965321966

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Reviews

""Island Sojourn is a graceful meditation on survival, both in a harsh, external landscape, and in the scarier terrain of the self. . . Arthur gives an uncanny account of what her experience felt like. At her best, she can make a strange, unfamiliar setting provide shocks of recognition."" Paul Gray, Time, Sept. 29, 1980 ""Arthur labors at tracking down essences and essential relationships in the progresses of wind and water, or human and animal. . . There are magnificent, stormy crossings to and from the island, both threatening and intimate; there are heart-stopping visions of an eagle, of swans contemplating the end of fall, of the shooting and soft death of a moose. . . Vigorous, scouring reportage which places Arthur firmly in line to join the Hoaglands and Dillards and other astringent precisionists."" Kirkus, March 1, 1980 ""A sensitive, compelling account. . .a book of location and movement in the physical and spiritual world. Time and again Arthur crystallizes experience with acuity. Island Sojourn, with its drama and poetry, is like a fine diary or letter. It begs re-reading for its honesty, brevity, and insight."" Gardner McFall, Newsday, Sept. 28, 1980 ""She tells her story in prose that is as clear and compelling as the water in the lake. . . a rare, honest, look at a dream gone flat, like an old balloon, like a frangipani pressed between the pages of a book."" Suzanne Freeman, The Washington Post, July 26, 1980 ""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 ""Island Sojourn is a fascinating modern mix of Thoreau and Robinson Crusoe - a fresh, bracing story of young people trying to live with the wilderness and in it - embracing the cruel north and being embraced by it. There is fine writing and considerable feeling in this latest glimpse of plain living and pioneering, even while using the tools of a technological age. Nature still wins: but Elizabeth Arthur gives pause - and awakens warm sympathies."" Leon Edel ""Island Sojourn concerns itself with the gradual attainment of a state of grace - a satori of the sixth sense."" Globe and Mail, Toronto, Ontario ""A painter's eye for recording the world's voluptuousness, a philosopher's ability to get inside the objects of experience, and a writer's sensitivity for handling feelings."" Literary Guild of Canada

Author Information

Elizabeth Arthur is the author of five literary novels (Beyond the Mountain, Bad Guys, Binding Spell, Antarctic Navigation, and Bring Deeps) and two memoirs (Island Sojourn and Looking for the Klondike Stone.) Her books have been published by Harper and Row, Doubleday, Knopf, and Bloomsbury U.K. She has received fellowships and grants from the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, the Vermont Council on the Arts, the Ossabaw Island Project, and the Indiana Arts Commission. She twice received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and was the first novelist ever given an Antarctic Artists and Writers Operational Support Grant from the National Science Foundation. Her novel Antarctic Navigation was chosen by the New York Times as a Notable Book. She is the co-author, with her husband Steven Bauer, of the 26 mystery/adventure novels in the New Three Investigators series (2025-2027.) Steven Bauer is the author of three books for young people, the young adult fantasy Satyrday, the middle grade novel A Cat of a Different Color, and The Strange and Wonderful Tale of Robert McDoodle, a picture book in verse. Bauer's writing has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He has also been given grants and awards from Prairie Schooner, the Ossabaw Island Project, the Massachusetts Arts Council, and the Indiana Arts Commission. He is the co-author, with his wife Elizabeth Arthur, of the 26 mystery/adventure novels in the New Three Investigators series (2025-2027.)

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