- Northern Magazine

On a clear afternoon atop Sugarloaf Mountain, a shape like a distant trawler looms on the horizon. The mirage shifts daily, sometimes close enough to touch, sometimes a distant enigma. Mapping the nearshore waters by phone only reveals a name. 

To know this rock, you must ride the 600 hp, 32-foot French Zodiac, 30 minutes to an hour, depending on the chop of the lake. Granite Island, a 2.5-acre rock 12 miles north of Marquette and 6 miles from the closest shoreline, magnifies with each thud of the hull.

Once the Zodiac pulls away from the dock and speeds back toward town, visitors are stranded in deep space. Dazed, we haul gear 60 feet up via funicular cable car to the lighthouse, built in 1868 and restored in 2001. Three-foot-thick granite walls shelter a spacious kitchen, three bedrooms, and a cozy light tower for afternoon writing sessions. I rest outside on a slab of lichen-splotched granite, gazing north where mist marries water and sky. The stress of daily life quiets. I have nothing to do right now. No emails, no phone calls, no urge to doom-scroll. For the first time in memory, I am bored. From this stillness, the story that will become my master’s thesis begins to flow through my pen into my island journal.

I became an Islander in September 2023, when I lived on the island for three days with seven English graduate classmates. I returned to Granite Island in July 2024 as a teaching assistant for an undergraduate class. NMU hosts two island courses a year, summer and fall. Altogether, I’ve spent about 40 days out here with five different classes.

Over two long weekends, students live and work on the island, modern-day lightkeepers. Emily cleans spider-webs off the solar-powered NASA climatology station. We cook meals, share music, and kill black flies. Luke teaches his classmates how to paddleboard. Inspiration, rumination, and composition occur while we haul water buckets and gather firewood. Austin makes a study of seagull linguistics.

The forces shaping us on Granite Island are different from mainland pressures. Stone, wind, water, and stars twist and bend us. With each new class, I witness the island molding the students, pushing them into boredom, then inspiration, past comfort to growth. When the last tent is staked against the wind, we scramble by headlamp down a jagged granite face to a shelf slick with algae. Pipes and couplings litter the ravine, solid steel sheared to pieces by the last storm. Tonight, the water is calm. I drift out on my back, pinned between inky water and searing stars. I am a cosmonaut unmoored, the Voyager drifting 15.6 billion miles distant.   The sensation is overwhelming, and I pivot to grasp at the lit shallows. Making art is scary; touching the profound is terrifying. The light-lapped faces of my companions reassure me.

We bring the island back with us: woodsmoke in our hair, rhubarb in a jar, starlight and laughter, seagull stanzas. We bring grit to our daily trials, less pressing now that we have been out and back again. We are the initiated few who have visited the mysterious shape on the horizon.

Granite Island is owned by NMU alumnus and trustee emeritus Scott Holman ’65 BS, who is committed to making it accessible to his alma mater for research and educational activities.