K.I. Press : Banff's Summer Writers Residency

 

 

 

 

Packed streets and thronging crowds make Banff today a fever dream of the Banff of my childhood. I grew up holidaying in Banff in the 80s and 90s: fewer people, more animals. It must have been a better deal then, too, for my dad, who was notoriously cheap, used to rent us a cabin at Johnston’s Canyon. I don’t even want to look up what that would cost today.

The Banff Centre was not a place we ever visited. It feels like it’s outside of town because of the long winding drive up to it; but in fact the foot path is an easy 10 minute walk down (maybe a bit longer up!). My first time there was in 2010 at a conference, travel paid by work. I brought my baby, and my mother (not paid by work). The hotel room was very small for all three of us. Nine years later and hallelujah, I felt able to leave my no-longer-a-baby for 10 days and did a brief residency in one of the Centre’s Leighton studios, basking in the intense bliss/exhaustion of being alone, keeping odd hours, and writing.

This time around, at the Summer Writers Residency, though the town was packed, the Banff Centre campus seemed much emptier and quieter than those other two times. Chalk it up to post-pandemic recovery, I think: the Centre hosts academic and business conferences alongside its arts programming (we saw veterinarians, mathematicians, and military dudes—the latter doing mountaineering training, albeit with excellent buffet dinners), and I would guess that away conferences have not fully bounced back. I know at my job, conference travel is no longer allowed.

Let me be very clear here: I love residencies and residential writing programs. I know some writers (hi rob!) who’ve done a great job fitting their life around their writing. I am not one of them. My life intrudes every which way. When I am lucky, I write in short bursts—maybe on Christmas vacation when my vacation days don’t correspond to school holidays, or in summer when I can sit outside with my laptop (like I am now) and no one bothers me (because my family doesn’t like the outdoors), or late into the quiet night (if I don’t have anywhere to be the next day). The rest of the year, I dutifully schedule writing time in my elaborate calendar, but it’s always the thing that gives way when my class takes longer to prep than I thought, when we are out of groceries, or when I am too exhausted to keep my eyes open. It’s really hard to write anything sustained, like a novel, that way, which is one reason I keep coming back to poems, which can arrive in smaller packages.

My first experience of a residential program was Sage Hill (in Saskatchewan) in 2000. Smitten, I followed that up with several more: Toronto Island, Hawthornden Castle in Scotland, one in eastern Iceland in 2006. I still dream about Hawthornden Castle. One of the reasons I went to Banff’s Summer Writers Residency this year: I saw that one of the faculty was A.E. Stallings – whom I meant at Hawthorden exactly 20 years earlier. It was a sign.

The time to write is only part of it. Solo residencies are all about hunkering down, but the collegial aspect of group residencies can be just what the universe ordered. Writers converse differently than normal people. I find I don’t have to edit my out-loud thinking the same way when I am with writers. Astounding leaps of association are just how the conversations go: I’m not the only one like me. I don’t get to converse with artists and writers like this in my day-to-day. Just hanging out with people who take me and my work seriously is a kind of validation I need once in a while. I keep my Banff “artist card” on display in my office as a reminder.

I had the time and freedom to go to residencies in my twenties—short-term jobs, flexible vacation dates, no family. I got a travel grant whenever I needed one, and wrote three books before I was thirty. I’m jealous of that globetrotting, productive Karen. Sometimes she even worked in the arts, so what did she need to seek out writer-colleagues for?

Cheap going to Banff is not--even though, for Literary Arts programming, the current standard is that you only pay for 50% of the room and board and 0 for tuition, plus your own travel. My cost doubles when I’m also sending the teenager to her own away experience. I can hardly leave her at home alone for two weeks while her dad is working—or even when she is not. So I when I go on a residency, so does she—to camps, or relatives, or a combination of both.

This summer, when I did the Summer Writers Residency, was the first time I was turned down for every travel grant I applied for. And the thing is with the travel grants, the way the timing works, you have to pay for the thing, or most of the thing, before you find out whether or not you get a grant anyway. Some people I met at Banff this year were still waiting to hear back on their travel grants to the residency they were already on.

Which is all to say, that no matter how you slice it, going to residencies is a tremendous privilege. Contrary to what my life might look like, I didn’t have a few thousand dollars lying around for this. I could do it because I’m a homeowner with a full-time job and access to relatively cheap credit. Writing, is, of course, itself a privilege. People are quite fond these days of pointing out that Virginia Woolf’s magic power was not so much having her own room, but having her own servants. It’s like She Had One Job. I have three jobs—my family/house, my job, and my writing. And I know many of you have more.

So I made the airfare for me and my daughter do triple duty: I went to the Banff Centre and she to a theatre program in Edmonton, we did our vacation by going to the Edmonton Folk Festival, and we visited my family there. Being able to make my trips multitask is one reason I favour Banff as my residency of choice right now.

 

The Summer Writers Residency was more social than I had anticipated, feeding my need for artistic collegiality perhaps more than my need to Just Write. I did take stock of my current project and generate a lot of raw material. On a few poems I consulted with A.E. Stallings, who is a superstar and so intuitive with her feedback she doesn’t even need to read things in advance. She also specializes in formal poetry, which I was working on, so I was keen to get her eye on a few things. But even though the talks, readings, and social events scheduled during the residency are all styled as “optional”—in addition to the non-optional orientation and check-out activities that in practice take two days out of your 12-day stay-- it’s very hard to say no. There were only a few people we didn’t see much of who had a lot more willpower than I did.

Plus, you’d be a fool not to take advantage of the perks of staying there. For one thing, the Banff Centre hosts a calendar of world-class arts events. I got to see Cliff Cardinal’s As You Like It: A Radical Retelling, which I regret having read before I ended up seeing it (it’s a no spoilers kind of situation). There are also the perks of essentially staying at hotel. I swam in the pool every morning. Others went on a hike and swam in the river every morning—they had better knees than I do.

Being away from your job and household responsibilities is not just a good way to get writing done, but a good way to get adequate sleep, food, and exercise. I was a lot kinder to myself at this residency, with its more structured approach, than I have been at others where I was left to my own devices and bad habits.

I did spend a lot of time writing, just not as much as I had imagined before I go there. One downside at Banff was that the studio I was offered was intended for visual artists. It was gigantic, brightly lit, and didn’t have full walls. I’m very sensitive to light and noise, so the set-up didn’t work well for me. I set up a whole bunch of lamps and rarely had to turn the big lights on after dark. There wasn’t much I could do about the noise from the hallway and other studios, so I used a combination of noise-cancelling headphones and running a big box fan full-blast.

According to poet Derek Beaulieu, who runs the Literary Arts programming at the Banff Centre, the literary arts residencies will soon expand from 14 to 21 writers at a time. Obviously right now they don’t have enough studios to put writers in. But help is coming: the Centre is renovating a historic building on campus, Vinci Hall, to house studios and a common room for 21 writers. So if you go to Banff next year, you should find yourself in different digs.

Despite the challenges, I can hardly wait to go to Banff, or another residency, again. Maybe as soon as I get my line of credit under control. In the meantime, I do have enough poems churned out for a manuscript—they just still need a lot of work. Plus all that time to think and discuss just kept giving me a longer list of books I need to read for my project. But all that is normal. Right now, the validation of going to Banff has given me the courage to re-read one of my abandoned novels. (Let’s just call this novel “idiosyncratic.”)

Since I went back to my job the day after I got back from Alberta in mid-August, I haven’t even managed that one task.

 

 

 

K.I. Press is a Winnipeg writer originally from northern Alberta. Karen’s four books of poetry are Exquisite Monsters (Turnstone, 2015), Types of Canadian Women (Gaspereau, 2006), Spine (Gaspereau, 2004) and Pale Red Footprints (Pedlar, 2001).