The first time Joanna Lilley visited Eagle Plains, she spent a good chunk of time at the bar. Before you get judgy on her for hunkering down indoors instead of going outside and taking in one of the territory’s most beautiful landscapes, you should know she’d spent days doing exactly that by the time she ordered her first drink. In fact, Lilley was practically part of the landscape for anyone driving the Dempster Highway that summer, 30 years ago.
Lilley, who was visiting from the U.K. for a cross-Canada bicycle trip, had logged plenty of hours in her saddle. A good number of them involved staring at the Richardson and Ogilvie mountains surrounding the 740-kilometre stretch of highway between Dawson City and Inuvik, Northwest Territories.
Still, if you think she had her fill of Yukon sights on that trip, you’d be wrong. When she flew home to the U.K., the Yukon was lodged in her head — specifically Eagle Plains.
That’s why Lilley, a writer now living in Whitehorse, attended the Arctic Circle Artist Retreat (ACAR) in the community in 2021.
The retreat offers selected artists a week’s room and board (including a $60 a day per diem) at the Eagle Plains Hotel, a $1,000 honorarium and $200 in gas money to make it up the Dempster to spend that time creating. It’s done so since 2016, or it had, until 2022 when it went on hiatus.
In early January of this year, ACAR announced it’s once again accepting submissions, this time for 2024. The deadline to apply is Feb. 8.
Lulu Keating is one of ACAR’s founders. She says the reason for the downtime was a combination of not securing the funding needed, and not having the people to pull it off (a few members left the collective that established ACAR at the same time, leaving only Keating and Dan Sokolowski to operate it).
This year, with a revitalized collective and support from the Yukon Arts Fund, Klondike Institute of Art and Culture, Yukon School of Visual Arts, and more, ACAR is accepting applications again for a total of six one-week retreats.
Artists apply with a project, and are encouraged to give a presentation on their practice in Dawson City, but there are no concrete deliverables expected, says Keating. It’s a process-oriented retreat, where there’s no expectation of completing anything at the hotel — a one-floor building with 32 rooms and an attached RV park.
“Dan and I both love Eagle Plains and the highway,” says Keating. “He’s done lots of shooting 16 millimetre and he did camera for a short film I shot there. Together we decided to approach Stan [McNevin, the hotel owner, in 2016] who went with the idea right away.”
Artists have access to their rooms, a dining room and the Millen Lounge. The latter is a 1970s dream, with a carpeted floor, high-backed wooden stools, hides tacked to the walls, a pool table and piano for entertainment, and more horns and antlers on display than you’ll likely see the whole drive up (that is, unless you’re lucky enough to catch the May or September migrations of the Porcupine caribou herd).
Outside, infrastructure has cropped up over the years to serve the big rigs that come through Eagle Plains, hauling goods and groceries to northern towns. Tourism has also picked up on the Dempster.
Trip Advisor reviews of the hotel are left by tourists from Indonesia, Switzerland, Australia, Canada, America, the Netherlands and beyond. They come to hunt, hike, camp, sightsee and take selfies at the Arctic Circle, 35 kilometres from Eagle Plains.
There’s a gas station that can handle tire repairs — by far the most common incident on the highway, which is surfaced with sharp shale in sections — and a tow truck you can call if you’re lucky enough to have cell service when you need it. There’s a laundromat, showers and a rough airstrip for bush planes to land. The population in the community is eight.
It might seem like an odd spot for an artist residency, but not if you talk to anyone who’s done it.
“It’s just such a special place,” says Lilley. She says one of the neat things about the location is how unexpected a spot it is for a retreat. She liked the way opposites sit side by side in a sort of geographical yin and yang.
“You’re in this beautiful landscape, and yet you’re staying somewhere very functional,” she says. “There’s massive trucks and the sort of workings, the infrastructure, that keeps Yukon going. It’s just a wonderful contrast. I don’t want to say ugliness, but it’s that sort of functional infrastructure versus this incredible, vast, beautiful landscape.”
Returning to Eagle Plains, where she’d been moved by the scope of the place decades earlier, allowed her to get back into an equally overwhelming-feeling novel she’d started and stopped years before.
Part of it was the luxury of not having to worry about making her own meals and having time to focus. (“It’s absolutely blissful to have a week on your own in a hotel room with nothing else to do except get on with your writing,” she says.) But part of it was the sense of space she felt from the location itself.
Landscape often informs Lilley’s writing. In this case, it was key to helping her push through the daunting task of getting reacquainted with a novel that felt unwieldy. To ease into it, Lilley started with notes and poems that came to her because of where she was.
From there, she found her way back into the book, which to her now feels infused with what she calls the “archetypal northern Canadian Yukon landscape” of Eagle Plains.
For more information, or to apply, visit arcticcircleretreat.com.
Contact Amy Kenny at amy.kenny@yukon-news.com
