It’s been a long time since I went anywhere at all. I’ve probably been a bit slower than most other people with re-entry into society after the pandemic, which means I’ve hardly been in any indoor spaces with groups of people, and certainly not on an airplane.
At least until this month, when I got to do an incredible thing: I went to a writing retreat in Saskatchewan, run by dedicated and impressive staff, in a stunning location, with courses led by brilliant, exceptional, caring, and well-known and highly respected instructors (confession: I was star-struck). And surrounded by students who were smart, funny, kind, serious, well-read, hard-working, accomplished, and very very skilled. (Unlike me, many or maybe most of them already had published at least one book or produced at least one play.)
It was intimidating, it was terrifying, it was fun, it was overwhelming, it was a kick in the pants. And I’ll be processing it all for quite a while.
Somehow I had never been to Saskatchewan before, although I’d wanted to for a long time — to see the famous prairies and that famous big sky, and to meet the people who elected Tommy Douglas, which led to Canada’s universal healthcare system — or at least their descendants. (And Saskatchewan is also the home of the wonderful Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild!)
And the landscapes turned out to be even more beautiful than I expected, and people even kinder and more friendly.
But of course that was only part of it. A retreat is its own small universe, and that was where we went to our classes and one-on-one meetings with our instructors, and hunkered down alone in quiet spaces to work on our projects, and crowded around long tables at mealtimes to share and listen to stories, and did readings, and hung out in the lounge for unofficial happy hours (and a couple of sing-alongs), and talked and talked and talked.
And we carried this little universe with us when we walked into town in small groups and had drinks in the bar; the generous owners even let us take it over one night for a kind of literary cabaret.
Back at home, most of us spend most of our days doing things that are not writing-related at all — when we make time to work on our stories or novels or plays or poems it’s always at the expense of something else that we’re supposed to be doing, work or school, looking after our homes or children or other people, and so on.
I know some writers go to retreats regularly and it may not be quite so magic for them, but for me it felt like a glorious thing to have no responsibilities at all except to write, and to know that I was never more than a few steps or a few minutes away from being able to talk other writers — writers I like and admire and can learn from. (And writers I hope I can stay connected to.)
And I did learn a lot, and I came home energised, and while I really hope I’ll get to do this again someday, I also hope this experience might hold me for a while.
Postscript: Old and new notebooks
Coincidentally I found a notebook today from a writing course in Victoria that a friend and I went to many years ago. It was also in the summer, and we also stayed in some kind of dorm set-up, but many of the writers there were absolute beginners, which meant that the energy was quite different, with most of the conversations about getting started, establishing a practice, and where to begin submitting work.
It’s interesting to me now that those old notes hardly say anything about the classes (or workshops?), and nothing about the instructors —my scribblings are mostly about what we students talked about when we weren’t talking about writing.
But looking back at my notes from Saskatchewan, mostly what I see is writing and talking about writing, the silence in the hallways as everyone worked in their rooms, talk about word count and craft — and of course line after line around ideas and process — and oh, the focus of the place and how it was motivating me!
That feeling of being surrounded by powerful and determined writers, everyone around me working hard and well. I’d almost forgotten the power and intensity of place — and other people.
