Back in the pre-pandemic era, I
was enjoying a brief residency at the Banff Centre. It was my first experience
in the Leighton Studios, squirreled away in the Hemingway studio (named for the architect,
rather than he of muscular fiction). rob mclennan was in the process of
launching this journal and invited me to write something, perhaps about my
Banff experience. I hesitated. What was there to say about Banff that hadn’t
already been said? I had been a handful of times, doing the occasional
self-directed residency (once with a four-month-old who resolutely remained on
Newfoundland Time, waking at three while barely managing to sleep), and once I
took a week-long workshop.
There’s some kind of special
sauce up there. I’ve tried—and failed—to unpack it. Maybe it’s the big windows,
the good food, the daily trudge with the ravens up Tunnel/Sleeping Buffalo to
look the mountains in the eyes, or lunching with musicians and writers and
puppeteers, each on their own monastic intermission from external hustle. Or
maybe it’s just the Artist Card: I am artist, it’s written right there! In
Banff, I don’t feel I have to justify or explain. When I call myself a poet,
nobody giggles. Scuffing off to the studio after breakfast and watching the
snow settle gently in the woods with nothing besides my own (formidable) doubts
to disturb me, locking those doubts in the engine room and pushing on, then watching
the pages pile up and the pieces come together, is affirming.
My residency ended on March 8.
Days later, the Banff Centre cancelled its programming until at least
September. I was lucky my time there happened at all.
In the 73 days (but who’s
counting?) since the pandemic was called, pretty much everything has been
cancelled. School for my three kids has been cancelled (“closed,” school
officials are quick to correct; school is still proceeding in some fashion);
the unit I normally work on at the hospital was closed and I was moved to
another hospital, where I work with people whose faces I have never fully seen
because we are all masked; organized sports and camps and festivals and social
gatherings, all cancelled. We have all been making valiant efforts to keep
things grinding on by moving life on-line. Some of it works. It’s better than
nothing.
But as lethargy sits in with
all things digital, I wonder if societally we’re beginning to value embodiment
more. Don’t you miss the physical presence of friends and family? Strangers
even? The affable human burble of a coffee shop or bar? Tons of great things
have happened online since March 13 2020, including workshops and retreats and performances
and festivals. I’m grateful they have, and I’ve partaken. But let’s not kid
ourselves: it’s just not the same.
It leads me to think that the
special sauce of Banff may be just what we stir up anytime people put their doubts
aside and come together in a room, with a tiny bit of hope, for a shared
purpose. That something important emerges from the choice to show up. Fingers
crossed, the Banff Centre will soon throw open its doors, and we can start
thinking about writing on the mount again, or even about hugging friends and
eavesdropping in bars. Maybe a lesson in all of this will be that we owe it to
ourselves to show up for each other. And for poetry.
Monica Kidd’s latest collection of poetry Chance Encounters with Wild Animals (Gaspereau Press, 2019) was shortlisted for the 2020 Stephan
G. Stephansson Award. She is Acquisitions Editor at Pedlar Press. She lives in
Calgary where she also works as a family physician.
