The island-on-an-island

On making art among women, and may we all live like Tove Jansson

I spent the last week of June teaching a writing workshop at an arts school on an island in Lake Superior. I’d never been there before, and from Seattle, you’ve got to work for it. I flew to Minneapolis, then caught a commuter flight to Duluth, and then was retrieved by a minivan and its captain Ray and driven to Bayfield, Wisconsin, where we caught a ferry to Madeline Island, a verdant swoop of prairie meadow and poplar floating in the southwest corner of Lake Superior. We were barely in Wisconsin, sort of falling off its northern tip, but I thought every day about the fact of our particular location — that I was, that week, in a state where a trigger ban had gone into effect two days before my arrival.¹

I heard that a few female students had, at the last minute, canceled their stay at the school that week, and no one said so, but I wondered if the overturning of Roe v. Wade was the reason. I wondered if they were pregnant, and if they worried about having access to health care in the event of an emergency. Were I pregnant, I don’t know that I would have gone.

I read up on Wisconsin’s abortion ban, which dates back 173 years. It became law in 1849, was effectively muzzled during the five decades of Roe v. Wade, and is now once again in effect, following Roe’s reversal on June 24. I read that, in the early days of June, Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers, tried to repeal the ban through a special legislative session. The Republican-led legislature gaveled in the session, as ordered, on June 22, but then immediately gaveled it out again,² refusing to vote on the repeal and thereby shackling the women and other uterus-havers of Wisconsin to a set of cultural and legal strictures that predate the Civil War.

Meanwhile, I rolled onto Madeline Island on June 26, onto the red-barned campus of an art school that, for the week that followed, would be home to approximately forty women. The gender skew wasn’t on purpose, but that’s how it tends to work out when a place runs concurrent workshops on memoir writing, floral painting, and quilting. Madeline Island School of the Arts was, for that week, a figurative island of women. Most days, there was only one male-identifying person on the property, and he was the husband of one of the quilting students, a kindly figure who, when I ran into him one evening on the road as I was fumbling with my iPhone, attempting to make a sheepishly narrated video-tour of the place for my spouse and my mother, smiled beatifically and, with hope in his voice, asked, “Are you recording the birdsongs?” I said I was. Actually, wait, there was one other man: the school’s octogenarian president, who would occasionally stop by. But women ran the place, populated the place, and were my students, my companions, my colleagues, for the week.