Lissa Edwards: Falling in love with her stories for nearly four decades

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Lissa Edwards photo by Rob Martin

By Berry Kendall

Sun contributor

Can a brilliant career be born from a moment of angst while hunched over a bathtub? If you’re Lissa Edwards, that’s a yes.

“From the time I was cognizant of anything, I loved Glen Arbor. And I always knew I wanted to be a writer,” she says. Laughing, the proprietor of Glen Arbor Wines professes, “I often say I can write and I can pour wine; those are my only two skills. I have no others!”

From 1978 to 1986, Edwards and her close friend Carol Hilton owned what was originally her grandparents’ business, The Soda Shop [now the Western Avenue Grill]. In 1982, Edwards, along with Carol and Dick Hilton, as well as Molly and Peter Phinny, started a quarterly literary and arts magazine called The Small-Towner. It was a spectacular success and they sold it in 1984, after which Edwards settled into full-time motherhood with her first child. One day while she was giving her infant daughter a bath “and loving her to pieces,” she was hit with the realization, “I’M A HOUSEWIFE IN A SMALL TOWN. Eeeek! That scared me!”

Motivated by that flash of clarity, Edwards sent a few story ideas off what was then called Traverse, the magazine and quickly landed some assignments, notably on the revival of the endangered Kirtland’s Warbler. On April 15, 1987, she was officially hired as a staff writer; her print bylines were always Elizabeth Edwards. She recalls, “I was 29 years old and thought I’d won the Pulitzer.” A trailblazer by necessity, Edwards was one of the country’s first remote workers, faxing her stories or bringing them into the magazine’s offices on a 3.5-inch floppy disk. This arrangement allowed her to write at home while mothering her three children, “albeit sometimes more in body than in mind, as they will be glad to tell you!”

Nine months ago, Edwards retired from what is now called Traverse, Northern Michigan, where her career as a writer and editor spanned almost four decades. Throughout, Edwards mastered the ability of sussing out compelling stories where no one else was looking. Her ideas were virtually inexhaustible and her process uniquely her own—so much so that her colleagues coined the affectionate term “Lissariffic.”

Jeff Smith was editor of Traverse, Northern Michigan for 21 years. He says, “When I think of Lissa I think of this word, ‘Lissariffic,’ that I heard people using when I first started at the magazine.” Explaining her singular brand of energy, he says, “She’s got a gazillion ideas and notes and she’s running in and out of the office with four bags dangling from her shoulders. It’s super charming, invigorating and fun to be around, but you’re not always sure how it’ll work out. But that’s the thing with Lissa: it always does work out. She always landed it. I really don’t know how she does it. I do know she’s a great networker and knows everyone in the county, and everyone loves her.”

Cara McDonald was Edwards’s editor at Traverse, Northern Michigan for seven years and is now the executive editor. “The thing that impressed me the most about Lissa is her capacity to fall completely in love with a story,” she says. “Lissa can unpack a human being’s story or a historical narrative and find the thread and the humanity and the emotion of a story like nobody I’ve ever worked with. There is no one who gets it better about what it means to choose a life in northern Michigan.”

Edwards credits the success of Traverse, Northern Michigan to a shared vision and reverence for the region. “From the beginning, I realized what an incredible staff Deb Fellows, the magazine’s owner and founder, had assembled. As employees came and went over the years – the very best of them had one thing in common: They understood that Northwest Michigan was one of the finest places on Earth – though possibly the most underrated. Our natural and human history, resources, landscape and people are almost unmatched on the planet. The stories were waiting for us on a silver platter.”

Articles in Traverse, Northern Michigan ranged from in-depth pieces on the first conservancies: Grand Traverse, Leelanau, and Little Traverse, to showcasing the veritable treasure of the area’s state and federal land, including the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and Pictured Rocks. Prior to “farm-to-table” being a trendy culinary buzzword, Edwards and her colleagues were in the kitchens of the literal farm-to-table chefs who were slowly putting the region’s culinary scene on the map.

Edwards’ many interviews took her riding through the Pigeon River State Forest on horseback in search of elk, and piloting an AuSable riverboat down the AuSable after interviewing George Griffith, who helped found the national organization Trout Unlimited. She tracked wolves in the Upper Peninsula and kayaked from Beaver to Garden Islands. For one of her most memorable stories, Edwards tracked down the granddaughter of the chief who brought Longfellow’s daughter, Alice, a present in Boston in the 19th century because the natives from Sugar Island loved his poem so much. Edwards shares that Alice reciprocated by bringing the Sugar Island natives a stained glass window that still lives on in their church.

Her adventures in reporting were endless. “I wrote about the renegade Mormon King Strang who ruled Beaver Island in the 19th century; searched for the shipwreck, The Westmoreland, and its stash of gold on Platte Bay; hiked Garden Island to the Indian Cemetery alive with snakes writhing over the spirit houses of the dead; dove deep into the story of Company K, a group of Native American sharpshooters who carved totems on their rifles, traveled with an eagle and were the last to die in the infamously tragic Civil War battle of the Crater; followed the U.P. 200-sled dog race all night long; and lived to ski Mt. Bohemia and write about it.”

Her diverse and detailed stories garnered the magazine national attention. Traverse Northern Michigan earned several awards in the early 2000s from the City and Regional Magazine Association (CRMA), including the Gold Award for General Excellence. On the heels of this triumphant high came a defeating low: the Great Recession of 2008.

“The recession was coupled with a huge time of stress for me,” says Edwards. “It was clear I would need to get out of a 28-year marriage that had yielded three incredible children. I knew my days of colorful adventures would have to be put on hold. I needed much less stressful work.” So, she struck a deal with fellow editor Jeff Smith suggesting to him, “You do the adventure stories. I’ll do the home stories.”

Edwards took the helm as editor of a separate publication that has been Traverse, Northern Michigan for years, Northern Home & Cottage. It was a good fit in that her father had been an architectural historian and from an early age, she had absorbed a love of architecture from him and their international travels. “Over the next 16 years I was in hundreds of homes across Northern Michigan and along the way gained a huge respect for our architects, contractors, and crafts-and-trades-people. Like everything else about Northern Michigan they are among the finest on the planet.” She adds wryly, “I also learned, after several embarrassing moments, to wear decent socks in my shoes-off interviews.”

Multiple changes occurred in the next 10 years, including the global pandemic, the retirement of Deb Fellows in 2022, and her subsequent sale of the magazine to Heritage Broadcasting. Through all this, Edwards says there was a silver lining. “My lifelong friend and mentor, Cara McDonald, was coming back to be executive editor. My last two years of this 37-year career, now as senior editor, would be working with Cara, and the unbelievably talented Carly Simon and Allison Acosta. It was the sweetest of times and those beautiful and talented women continue to carry the torch for this amazing magazine—now known, as it always should have been, as Traverse Northern Michigan.”

Concluding her career with the magazine, Edwards wrote about “Turner Booth’s spectacularly insightful reinvention of Glen Arbor’s old mill—a building I’d watched slowly deteriorate for years and an architectural icon that more than deserved being saved.” Her swan song? A story on Maggie and Jeff Kato’s renovation of what she calls “the historically exquisite” Sleeping Bear Inn in Glen Haven. It was a story replete with poignancy for Edwards. She says, “I remember having blueberry pancakes there with my grandparents when I was five. Say no more than that my life came full circle with that story.”

In another full circle development, Edwards recently married Rob Martin, whom she dated briefly in college and happily reconnected with 46 years later. Professionally, she sees her next chapter as “turning my story-writing skills to the incredible musicians who play at Glen Arbor Wines and the artists who show their work. I’d also like to do stories on the super-cool lodging popping up around Glen Arbor. And then maybe … a couple books that have lived inside me for a long time!”

Click here to read our January 2023 story “Chickens Loose in Leelanau” about Thursday dispatch blotter night at Glen Arbor Wines. 

 

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