Isle Royale ReflectionMy residency at Isle Royale represented not only my first time on the island, but indeed my first time in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and my first encounter with Lake Superior. Having spent most of my life on the coasts, I was a stranger in a new land, and I was immediately smitten, enraptured even. Prior to moving to the region, I knew the Great Lakes as little more than a scholastic exercise— the mnemonic HOMES was embedded in my mind from elementary school— or, on the occasions when I had to change planes in Chicago, the Lakes became part of the fairytale patchwork of the faraway land below— there, but hardly real. And then I came to Isle Royale and experienced Superior in many of her moods and guises— not all of them, of course, but a smattering, an introduction— and I realized one could spend a lifetime studying the Lake, the island, and still not know all of their mysteries. Perched at my cabin at Dassler Point, I began my study of this place. A year after my residency, I returned to Isle Royale, this time walking its spine from Windigo to Rock Harbor, reckoning it with my stride, apprehending it anew in a different way. I kayaked in Lake Superior and traveled to the Porcupine Mountains, where I lived in another cabin, rambled in the forest, watched the Lake, and wrote. I continue to write and write— about Isle Royale, Lake Superior, the Porkies. This all feels like the beginning of a deep and abiding bond. I know the Lake and the island will beckon me again; when they do, I will heed their call. - Yelizaveta Renfro, 2021 
An Excerpt from "Island Life, with Boy"If Lake Superior is a wolf’s head, then Isle Royale is the eye, peering west over northernmost Minnesota. And if Isle Royale is the eye, then Dassler Point is near the lateral canthus. But up close, Isle Royale doesn’t look like an eye. A 1914 travel brochure describes the main island “fringed with hundreds of small and scenic islands, like diamonds encircling a brilliant emerald or sapphire, each a natural gem in the silvered sea, rock-anchored and foliage-wreathed.” Your sketches of your location look like the head of an open-ended spanner wrench, your cabin at Dassler on one point, Scoville on the other point, with your rocky beach in the opening between the jaws. For a century, people have lived on this point among rocks and trees and sky—first, the Dasslers of Leavenworth, Kansas, summer after summer, camping and then building structures. For the past three decades, the cabin has housed artists-in-residence. On the first day, your boy is turned around and can’t find the outhouse or the boathouse, but with each day, you explore and add detail to your mental maps. Soon, he is bounding up and down the crisscrossing trails. Soon, you know this place by heart. 
About the ArtistYelizaveta P. Renfro was an Isle Royale National Park Artist-in-Residence from July 2nd to July 17th, 2021. She is the author of a collection of short stories, A Catalogue of Everything in the World, which won the St. Lawrence Book Award from Black Lawrence Press, and a collection of essays, Xylotheque (University of New Mexico Press), which won the Sarton Memoir Award from the Story Circle Network, was named a finalist for the Women Writing the West WILLA Literary Award, and was named a semifinalist for the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in North American Review, Creative Nonfiction, Orion, Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, South Dakota Review, Terrain, Blue Mesa Review, The Fourth River, Glimmer Train, Witness, Reader’s Digest, and elsewhere. In addition to her residency at Isle Royale, Renfro has served as Artist-in-Residence at Denali National Park and Preserve and the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park. A past resident of California, Virginia, Nebraska, and Connecticut, she now lives in northern Indiana. She teaches creative writing at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana. Her essay, “Loon Boy,” which was inspired by her time at Isle Royale, was selected as the winner of the 13th Annual Terrain.org Nonfiction Contest. You can view more of Yelizaveta Renfro's work on the artist's personal webpage.
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Last updated: March 20, 2024