ode to the power and pleasure of ‘retreat’

~ carin ~ Leave a comment

I’m depressed.

Okay, I’m not depressed, I’m glum. Or do I mean gloomy? Or is it just that I’m pissed off that I can’t go to Charlottetown next month to attend what I believe may be one of the best-kept-secret writing retreats in the whole blinking country (and why am I even telling you this ‘secret’??).

Two years ago I went to the first ever ‘Seawords’ on lovely red-earthed, bucolic, gorgeously peaceful and truly inspiring Prince Edward Island. A province we don’t think nearly enough about, and probably the islanders like it that way.

The retreat that year was held at Shaw’s Hotel on Brackley Beach where my days began with a short walk from hotel to ocean—an ocean which I was the only person visiting at that time of day. I mean, I had a whole ocean to myself. Sort of.

If the waves were big and the surf noisy, I simply sat and stared, took pictures, wrote I-like-it-even-if-no-one-else-ever-will poetry, made notes on the novel, collected flat red stones in geometric shapes.

If the waves were small, or non-existent, I swam and marvelled at the buoyancy of salt water vs the lake brine I’m used to.

After that it was breakfast in a sunny, large-windowed dining room, sometimes with other ‘retreaters’, sometimes alone with a copy of Geist, or TNQ and a large pot of tea.

The workshop facilitators were two writers I didn’t know: Anne Simpson and Carol Bruneau. What an idiot I must have been for not having known them. Anne is a poet who also writes extraordinary fiction and has won or been shortlisted for too many prizes to mention here. Carol (also of the multiple awards) writes extraordinary fiction, as well as a fabulous blog (in the most poetic of ways). Apart from all that, they are lovely lovely people — something you can’t pretend for a whole week in fairly close quarters. That’s the thing about retreats: if you’re not lovely, everyone soon knows it.

Also present was Jackie Kaiser. Yes, that Jackie Kaiser. From Westwood Creative Artists. (It’s like everyone was screened for loveliness and only the genuinely lovely were allowed.) So generous was she with her industry info and her time, whether in a session or when bumping into one another over dinner, readings, on the way back from the beach. Casual conversations, questions, everything simple and easy. No pressure. No scary stuff.

Ann-Marie MacDonald was also there. As was Lynn Henry (at the time, still with Anansi).

It rained once, maybe twice. Who cares? It was perfect. The beach, the hotel, the workshops, the seminars, the one-on-one time with Anne and Carol. The time alone to think and write in my tiny flowery-papered room; my makeshift desk set up in front of a tiny window overlooking the lawns, where I wrote and re-wrote whole chapters I’d been stuck on for ages, and then later, spending time with some terrific people who’d spent their time thinking and writing and re-writing too.

So, yeah. I’m a little cranky that I can’t go this year. Obligations at home prevent hopping a plane or, even better, a car, and heading east for what I know will be one grand week.

I haven’t even mentioned the oysters. 

Fortunately, I do know someone who’ll be attending– so I have at least the vicarious thing to look forward to.

Are you listening, Steve? 

Please take notes.

things i saw this weekend

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—woman in bright yellow sari, shopping bag in one hand, canadian flag in the other; teenaged boy draped in giant rainbow flag

—hydrangea bush so full of blooms i cut a basketful for my neighbour, who dries them and uses them as xmas tree decorations

—first tomatoes

—broken zipper in Laurentien-pencil-crayon-peacock-blue cashmere cardigan sky

—just green

~

canada eats

~ carin ~ 7 Comments

 

Am celebrating the 143rd birthday of our grand beau pays with my favourite things: words and food. Specifically—words about food. 

As far as I’m aware (not that I’ve done an extensive survey) I’m the only person I know who has a copy of The CanLit Foodbook—which, a few years ago, sprang into my arms from the ceiling high stacks at one of my favourite secondhand shops.

Why it’s taken me this long to crack it open, I haven’t a clue.

Assembled in the late 80’s by Margaret Atwood for P.E.N. International and The Writers’ Development Trust, it’s a collection of real and twisted recipes, essays, studies, poetry, fiction, thoughts and observations about food and eating and cooking, as well as reading and writing—about food and eating and cooking—from over a hundred Canadian writers. Or, as Atwood describes it: part cookbook, part “…literary symposium on the subject of food.”

The 200 or so pages are divided into sections [with illustrations by Atwood] such as: ‘Preprandial Prologue: Food as Metaphor’; ‘Cracked Dawns: Breakfast for Barbarians’; ‘Teatime; Strange Innuendoes Over the Cups’; ‘Eating People is Wrong: Cannibalism Canadian Style’; ‘Shindigs: Cocktail Parties, Weddings, Christmases, Funerals and Other Social Disasters’.

Each contribution receives its own brief preamble [again, by Atwood], such as ‘Graeme Gibson’s Right Way with Oatmeal’, about which she says:

Graeme Gibson learned to cook this in Scotland, and does indeed eat it while striding about the room.

Or her introduction to Salutin’s instructions on making toast and tea:

Playwright and journalist Rick Salutin used to have a phobia about cooking, until he mastered this recipe. After that, he went on to other culinary triumphs, such as Heating up Frozen Coffee Cake.

Margaret Laurence makes cauliflower soup, Timothy Findley serves fresh peaches and explains how to cream rodents, while Michael Ondaatje jellies them and Erica Ritter offers an essay on food and dating. There are foodish excerpts from known and not so known novels, precise directions for making Pierre Berton’s version of the perfect black Christmas turkey as well as corned beef hash; Catherine Parr Traill describes the means by which fish are caught and Alice Munro shares her recipe for Maple Mousse.

There is this from Paulette Jiles:

Paper Matches

  My aunts washed dishes while the uncles
squirted each other on the lawn with
garden hoses. Why are we in here,
I said, and they are out there.
That’s the way it is,
said Aunt Hetty, the shrivelled-up one.

  I have the rages that small animals have,
Being small, being animal.
Written on me was a message,
‘At Your Service’ like a book of
paper matches. One by one we were
taken out and struck.
We come bearing supper,
our heads on fire.

~

And that’s just for starters.

Speaking of which, I’m going to begin the reading today with a piece by Mavis Gallant who writes about a meal with one of my favourite painters. And the cooking will begin with Rudy Wiebe’s ‘Warm Potato Salad’…

A happy ‘grand beau pays’day to one and all.

Bon Appetit!

installation: 1.1

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This started out as a cracked vinegar container sitting on the pavement next to a clump of hosta, waiting for me to take it to the recycling bin.

Then, from the vantage point of his chair on the patio one night, Peter said: hey that vinegar thing almost looks like it’s supposed to be there, like it’s a… what’s the word—installation.  

And I laughed.

Yeah right, I said. That’s funny. An installation. Like it’s a commentary or something on the emptiness and inflexible nature of society whose sourness has corroded itself from the inside—juxtaposed against the richness and beauty of nature, and how nature will always win because, by comparison, society is nothing more than a cracked bit of plastic.

To which Peter said: what?

To which I said: tomorrow’s recycling, right?

~

true colours

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This may look a little freaky, the way the red ‘pops’, but it’s not photo-shopped. Just happened to catch some weird late afternoon ‘light’. Keeping the Cardinal flower company are Veronica, Shasta Daisy, yellow ‘Maria’ flowers (someone named Maria gave us a couple—now they’re everywhere), and a few wee something elses that look like a kind of Ox-Eye Daisy. The garden’s always a happy surprise; untamed, and different every year.

Makes my heart sing.

~

thank god for dames

~ carin ~ 1 Comment

“ONE DAY LAST SPRING I was standing in the reception area of a fashionable hairdresser’s in midtown Toronto, waiting to pay my bill ($12 for a stark haircut that made me look exactly like one of the Presbyterian aunts I’d spent most of my life avoiding looking like). Ahead of me in the line was this very slick, chic lady of maybe thirty-eight or so dressed exactly as such a lady should be when she is going to spend the morning at the hairbender’s (that’s what chic ladies call all those rickety-cheeky Cockney boys who’ve taken over big-time women’s barbering in the last half-decade) and then on to luncheon with an old friend from school and maybe a meeting of the women’s committee of the symphony. She was wearing a beautifully cut midi coat and dark stockings and a Kenneth Jay Lane bracelet and the kind of tan you get in Acapulco when your husband feels he just has to get away in that dreary time between the skiing and the sailing, and her hair was pale and perfect.

“While the cashier was ringing up her $25 bill (pale and perfect costs more than stark and Presbyterian), she stood looking idly out the window. At that moment, passing in the street, was a couple in their late teens or early twenties, the kind of kids the chic lady doubtless calls hippies, though the way things are going now with kids they may very well have been graduate students in aerodynamics, for all I know.

“The boy had a lot of hair tied back with a leather thong and one of those Iranian embroidered skin vests and very narrow hips and jeans that did them proud, and the girl looked like some kind of curly pre-Raphaelite Madonna in a long wool challis dress with a lot going on underneath that obviously had nothing to do with lingerie. She was sucking an orange and licking the overflow juice from her fingers, and he was holding on to the wrist of her other arm and laughing at her, and they both looked happy or sensually aware, as the Gestalt therapists call it—in any case, as though it was pretty good to be nineteen or twenty-one and with no underwear in the sunshine in late April. The chic lady turned abruptly away from the window and I caught a glimpse of her in the mirror behind the cashier and she was touching her hair with a little rapid patting gesture and in her eyes was this unmistakable look of fear, the kind of o-my-god-why-has-thou-forsaken-me? look, her god being Good Taste or something like that.

“The whole incident didn’t take any more than a minute, but it was a pretty important minute for me because it left me wanting to rush out and phone somebody and say, “Listen, I think I’ve just been witnessing the death of slick.””

~

(from the *essay “Requiem for the High Life” in My Life as a Dame, [personal and political essays] by Christina  McCall)

*Originally appeared in Maclean’s, September, 1971.