Writing
at home is being in the brick of a body squeezed in among all the bricks of
tasks. If a writing retreat were only time to write, it would be
indistinguishable from writing at home. Sage Hill Writing has a schedule with
lectures, discussions, one-on-one consultations with a teacher, social times,
and Pilates sessions. The 10 days could be blocked off as a distinct
higher-paced writing block.
Sage
Hill was started 31 years ago, and until this year offered its retreat in
person in Saskatchewan. (Most of the cost from Ontario and Quebec is travel.)
Given Covid, Sage Hill experimented with offering their streams of classes via
Zoom. I was in the Emerging Writer with Micheline Maylor and Tariq Hussain,
stream since my target project was to find my feet in my novel.
Virtual
residency is astral projection. Your creative consciousness is on a rubber tether
to snap you back to cooking, cleaning, errands, life maintenance, but you can
get distance and higher perspectives on how the craft is best done.
Being
able to go anywhere by Zoom is pretty amazing anytime, but especially during
quarantine. Our class, spread across several time zones from Nova Scotia to the
Yukon, was able to converse. People apologized for eating but, realistically,
with programming morning, noon, mid-afternoon and evening, we all have to eat
sometime. Online courses only lacks them feeding participants, and the vistas
and isolation from online. I suppose if I were exceedingly clever I would have
used all my good-energy days to make ahead frozen meals for a week or so. (Body
and organization didn’t work out that way. Partway through I considered a meal
subscription, but Covid.)
Being
able to have eyes on my baby manuscript and getting orientation from Micheline
Maylor, a mind and a writer I greatly admire, boosted my hope for finishing the
draft of my contemporary fantasy novel.
Class
cohorts were generous with resource sharing and I’ve devoured a couple
recommended books. My sense of the overall picture of literature is bigger and
deeper because I’ve never read fiction with the eye of a maker before.
My
concussion caught me up short. (Every time I feel functional I go wheeeee! I’m
freeeee! I’m cured.) I was going all blazes for five days straight. It was the
most intensively I’ve written or lived in a couple years. Then my brain hit a
brick wall with a soft splish, figuratively speaking. Body crashed into ache
and sleep need. Headaches came. With this being a unique opportunity, I tamped
myself down but continued as I could.
My
internet being what it is— I’m lucky to get a text email in or out one day in
three— my experience was, for no fault
of the program, hit and miss. I couldn’t indulge in evening chats as much as I’d
like. I often couldn’t get enough signal to broadcast my video. Being fiercely
shy around strangers, it was hard to join the evening circles when I was there in
person, so that tension was relieved. I think being on online chat is easier
because I can listen to fewer channels at once, and hide while listening
without being observed. Being a name or fixed image lost the advantage of
feeling more like real-time interaction, but cookies crumble as they do.
Rather
than hide away in my home office as I had planned, I was waving a computer
around in the porch like it was a lighter,
climbing around a hillside in deerflies, or up in our studio searching
signal, even enough for a phone-in only option, or on our neighbour’s porch or
in their basement. The neighbour brought me iced water and biscuits and butter
tarts, which took the edge off frustrations.
Tara
Dawn at Sage Hill sent out transcripts of readings, which made me feel
immeasurably grateful and included. Some
used the chat function which helped. Text is easier than audio. Some readings
were recorded so I could watch asynchronously when the internet was feeling
less fevered with demand. We were encouraged that there was no punitive weight
if we didn’t show because we got in a writing groove. I missed 2 Pilates from
writing grooves, but I could catch up later on the recordings. That I could get
into flow state was a breakthrough. I’ve been grinding my concussed brain
against walls for a couple years, when it would move at all. (PSA: I can do
high functioning, but not for sustained periods. Please don’t say I seem
normal. Invisible illness is by nature invisible and the spoons used is
enormous. No one but my hubby sees the energy crashes.)
Digital
copies of the readings done in the class were much easier to absorb as text
than to the ear (because hearing takes more neural load than text). Meeting
someone else in the class with concussion was a great connection. We’re
relatively rare as a sub-set of the writing community. We could compare
symptoms and journeys. All-campus and public readings meant putting faces to
writers whose names I’ve seen or whose faces I haven’t seen in too long.
It
was well-worthwhile. My gratitude goes to the anonymous donor who gave me a
bursary to halve the cost of my attending. I encountered a few writers I’m
keeping in contact with who I would likely never have met otherwise. As an
outcome, at least a couple groups formed and spun off to continue workshopping
together after. As fellow Sager Hiller Kim Fahner said, virtual "keeps us
connected during a disconnected time.”
Looking
methodically at the mechanics of prose showed it could be as much an art as
poetry. Micheline Maylor’s challenge bar, not to write something, not to
get it published but make it as excellent as any of the great writers was a
breath of fresh air. So many want to get things out there, be recognized or
paid or in print, but really, that’s small potatoes. The bar is to write
exceptionally, not sufficiently to an end. Maylor also said that writing is a
process to change the words to change the writer to change the words to change
the writer—a succinct way to conceive of writing as inner work made outer work.
I
applied to the Sage Hill program with a 10, 000 word “manuscript” that was, on
reflection, a gathering of scene summaries. Just over a month later, it is over
50,000 words, expanded out, with better and tighter sentences and more firmly
hooked-forward chapter structure.
Like
poetry, novel writing is also apparently about research and reaching deeper.
Actress Michelle Yeoh is a hero of one of my novel’s main characters. Yeoh
said, “When you face up to bad things in the past, the most important thing is
not to allow them to happen in the future, and as storytellers, we must play
our part in that.”
In
a recent interview with Adrian Harewood at The Ottawa International Writers
Festival, Thomas King admitted his greatest grief of writing his novels was
that they did not change the world. (I would add “yet”. Everyone, go read his
novels. Gift them for Christmas to your conservative relatives.) This larger
action of storytellers to build a world we want, to model, and to do it not
sufficiently, but effectively and sublimely, was a bugle call to the inner
writing hounds. At Sage Hill, there was time to consider this longer view of
what a piece of writing is trying to accomplish in the heart and in the world,
as well as the nitty gritties of mechanics of alert sentences and hooks.
It
took me a couple of weeks to recover from the overextending of my energies, but
I had got stuff done. I wrote 20,000 words or so in a few days. I was able to
get answers to writing-world questions that I’ve asked before and never got
clear answers, around POV and “how agents work”.
I
did Sage Hill in person about a decade ago as well and that allowed a deeper
sinking into craft, as well as meeting a few friends. The foggy pre-dawns with
raven croaks, the afternoon silence of the deep-walled cells, and the musical
evening singalongs will stay with me. It made me feel more like a real poet to
be accepted as one by strangers than to be accepted at home somehow. People who
will meet me again have a vested interest to not piss in the pool, but those
who will never see me again have less risk at being honest, if one can judge
human nature by internet trolls. A nasty metric, admittedly.
As
host Peter said years ago and host Tara Dawn Solheim reiterated this year, you’ll
never find a more supportive audience to test drive a manuscript than Sage
Hill.
I’d
add that it’s rare to find a more talented cohort of peers. So many people who
have never published anything write with jaw-dangling, foot-stomping
quality. So many in parallel writing
lives for decades, yet we were invisible to each other. All the connection. It
brings wetness to the eyes to witness.
Pearl Pirie
lives in rural Quebec within the calm of wildlife. She is perpetually building
a studio in the woods. Her 2020 collection, footlights, from Radiant
Press, is available in October.