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| l-r: Jessi MacEachern, Adam Haiun, Holly Vestad, and Kasia Van Schaik : photo credit: Canning Library |
le lundi 20 juillet, 9h18
Last night I was plagued by dreams in which I consistently slept through my alarm and failed to live up to the promises I had made other writers. This morning, I did sleep longer than I had planned, but I can’t think of a single promise I’ve made a fellow writer — other than the light agreement to send rob mclennan a residency report at the end of this week at Jampolis Cottage. I’ve just finished a two-week self-directed writers’ residency at the Banff Centre. The writers I met there seemed to understand that there is only one promise we’re meant to keep and it is to ourselves: that we will sit down and, once again, get to the writing.
Today is the first day of a new retreat at Jampolis Cottage in Avonport, Nova Scotia. I am here because of the three writers who originally applied for the gift of this time to the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia. These three are my companions for the week to come: Kasia Van Schaik, Holly Vestad, and Adam Haiun. I’ve left behind the staggering mountains of Banff; in turn, there is the Bay of Fundy storming in and wading out along Penny Beach. The four of us arrived yesterday. Kasia was first, driven into rural isolation after a temporary stay in nearby Wolfville. Holly, Adam, and I were kindly picked up from the airport in Halifax and driven by their generous friend to a nearby grocery store parking lot, where we piled ourselves and our luggage into the second car that same friend and his wife were so nicely lending us for the week. After a quick shop for essentials and a drive through increasingly treed and narrow roads, we were pulling into the horseshoe driveway.
Before we had exited the car, we were stunned at the beauty of the grounds: so many wondrous trees, including at least one of seemingly ancient origin, for our four pairs of arms would barely circle its imposing trunk; and the stretched horizon over water greeting us like solace. That evening, Adam made chicken and Holly made the accompanying salad. Over dinner, we four talked easily and sipped from sparkling water. Afterward, I washed up, while Kasia dried the cottage’s dinnerware.
That first night, we writers then tucked away to bed at a reasonable hour: I had the ground floor bedroom with its sleigh bed and trinket cabinet; Holly and Adam shared an upstairs room with a brilliant skylight; and Kasia, who had arrived first and had right of first selection, chose the main bedroom, which came with its own writing desk and stunning view of the water.
It is now Monday, the first official writing day as I see it, and the morning stretches before us.
In Banff, I was among a cohort of 20 writers and three faculty members (Jordan Abel, Dodie Bellamy, and Adam Dickinson). While the bulk of time was ours to spend in or out of our personal writing studios (with their two special gifts: a view of the mountains and a locked door), there were also optional events to keep us busy and inspired. These included faculty talks, literary readings, and meetings with our mentors. (Jordan was my assigned mentor and our conversations were richly affirming. He helped me see the shape my new book of poetry, The Hovering Animal, was taking: a series of diptychs! He laughed, kindly and expansively, in response to my reading aloud the tentative opening, a play-in-verse featuring the poems’ many interlocutors: Leonora Carrington, Jesus Christ, Cher, and Barbra Streisand.) Alongside mountain hikes and (sometimes glacial) lake swims, I finished drafting my absurd drama, wrote the tongue-in-cheek theoretical coda, and declared the manuscript of surrealist poetry and hybrid writing a finished draft.
Here at Jampolis Cottage, we four are alone with our writing and our view of the ocean. For me, part of the task of the next five days will be determining next steps: revising the individual poems so that they speak as a whole, as well as turning to other projects with more urgent deadlines (a reading guide and a critical essay).
le mardi 21 juillet, 9h42
The second floor of Jampolis Cottage has a main living space equipped with a long wooden writing table built of three extraordinary wooden planks. A small white writing desk and pink office chair are placed by the window. From this room, as well as the ground floor reading nook, the patio picnic table, and the brightly coloured hammock, we four wrote throughout the day. Mid-afternoon, we took the path through the shrub and down the wooden stairs to Penny Beach, eyes on the extremely low tide. A walk under the incredibly fortunate weather preceded a brief return indoors and to writing. By evening and high tide, we were ready for a swim, so we drove the short way to Avonport Beach. The water was cold, but the sun still shone brightly. Once dry, our evening divided us: two to nearby Wolfville for supplies (the ever-important bottle of wine, the gin, and — of course — the limes), and two of us to the cottage. I prepared a modest dinner of sausage, kale, and (gluten-free) pasta and we ate outside, looking over the water and the pink sky. (Was its beauty partly the play of light on wildfire smoke?) That Monday evening went long, as we took our glasses to the living room and shared stories of joy and grief, friendship and frustration.
Today starts slow. I drink my first coffee from a mug portraying the woody stems, green leaves, and purple flowers of rosemary. The sky is wide and blue. I am sitting at the picnic table, while the sun beats down on the back of my neck. (I have only just applied sunscreen there.) Birds sing in the surrounding trees, and I am made to think of the unfortunate fact that I do not recognize either: not the names or the birds, nor the names of the trees. Last night, Kasia shared the oft-quoted wisdom that these are the things every poet should know.
What do I know? I know that, in a few minutes, I will return inside with the intention to sit at the little white writing desk and resume my work: revise the next group of nine poems, write one more section of the paid reading guide, and fret over at least 1,000 more words of the unruly essay (this latter text beginning to multiply in red-marked drafts). An evening dinner at the house of the same friends who so kindly and generously lent us their car is on the horizon. As usual, the call to eat marks the end of our writing day. Tonight’s dinner, hosted by friends, is an invitation to rejoin the world we have retreated from.
le mercredi 22 juillet, 18h48
We appear to be writers who accept a rainy day as a gift. From morning until evening, we have been inside the cottage or around its damp periphery: making subsequent pots of coffee; thinking hard from our individual desks or the dining room table; sharing meals, frustrations, and good news; and, of course, writing, writing, writing.
I’ve just returned from a barefoot walk around the plentiful property, acquainting myself with the seemingly ancient trees, moss and mushrooms crowding their bases like loyal fangirls. This was a well-deserved break following the successful accomplishment of the day’s tasks. I have mostly isolated myself in these pursuits today, but the cottage is alive with the energy of my fellow writers. Kasia and Adam are exchanging short stories. Holly is making astounding progress on her novel.
It’s tempting to look forward and already mourn the coming end of the protected time of this retreat. But these hours have been so rich, it’s surely greedy to expect the slightest bit more.
le samedi 25 juillet, 9h53
The remaining days passed quickly. I was too eager to rearrange my poetry manuscript on Thursday morning and to complete the reading guide and declare the academic essay a tolerable draft on Friday morning to sit with this notebook. Now, it is our final morning, and the cottage is busy with activity: each writer is packing up their things, and a final cleaning up awaits us. We want to leave this beautiful place as we found it.
Suitcase packed and dishes waiting, I’m pausing to sit in the full sun at the picnic table on the back patio. Its surface is littered with rocks, including a centre piece bearing the deep impression of algae that we found at “Fossil Beach.” The tide is high, so beyond the green yard the water stretches calmly before me: a murmuration of (still nameless) birds intersecting with the barely perceptible horizon.
Wednesday night, we gathered in the sitting room — with its bountiful windows facing this same view — and shared work from the creative projects we have been busy writing (or, in my case, revising). I read an excerpt of the essay I had chosen to close my manuscript-in-progress. It was received warmly and my astute listeners encouraged me to consider it — as a work that interweaves memoir, theory, and literary history — for an opening piece. Over the next two days, I would incorporate their feedback, altering the original prelude so that it, a surrealist chamber play, became the “After Party,” and foregrounding the original coda as a cheeky opening note on such ephemera as bird shit.
Holly read a cinematic opening scene from her novel-in-progress, a gripping work that each of us wants more of immediately. Kasia, the first pages of a hallucinatory new short story in which a jetlagged woman fights the physical and existential confines of her temporary rooming. And Adam, three genius poems, each one composed after a day in the striking landscape of Avonport, NS.
Thursday was the day of our community reading. The morning began as usual, each writer claiming an inside or outside surface for their writing desk. This was the day I rearranged the opening and closing movements of my manuscript. Having completed my revisions of the poems, by mid-day I had another version of the final draft, ready to try out on publishers.
In the afternoon, Kasia and I drove into Wolfville for more supplies. On our return, Kasia was navigating and advising me to turn left, so I turned right and we enjoyed a slightly harried detour on the highway before returning belatedly to the cottage. There we found our friends Bart and Ben, who had arrived with their arms full of wonderful snacks. We ate and talked — of publishers, cinema, and bread — at this same picnic table until it was time to leave for the event.
Canning is a sweet, sleepy town and Canning Library is run by active, smart women who know the necessity and value of a public library. We writers were astonished by how full the room became as individual women from the surrounding streets, and some having driven a long way across the Bay, steadily arrived to fill the dozen or so chairs assembled in the reading room. A reading nook window flooded our gathering with natural light. We were all so touched by our audience’s presence and attention. We only wish we had brought more of ourselves — in the form of a visit to their writing groups, a public writing workshop, etc. — to the community.
Friday was our final real day of the retreat. My poetry manuscript, The Hovering Animal, placed aside, I finished some paid work (ahead of deadline!) and made some slow but steady progress on the academic essay I’ve been writing, in fits and starts, on the poet, experimental writer, and collaborative artist Bhanu Kapil.
We had all been so productive all week long and the day was green and hot, so we played hooky early in the afternoon: combing nearby Blue Beach for fossils, driving to a swimming hole and diving into the cool silk of the water, before finally ordering flights of wine and a charcuterie board at an Annapolis Valley winery. Back at the cottage, we assembled dinner from our remaining, plentiful supplies and ate outside, partaking in the still astounding view. Only once the evening was dark and we were covered in bug bites did we relocate our wine glasses to the living room, talking late into the night. We four writers have already been busy planning how we will organize our time on our next stay, intent to apply for another retreat, as soon as possible, to further reap the benefits of silence, time, and beauty provided by Jampolis Cottage.
Jessi MacEachern is a poet who lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Her two poetry
collections, Cut Side Down (2025) and A Number of Stunning Attacks
(2021), were published by the small, scrappy, Canadian press Invisible. She teaches
at Dawson College. New poems are available or forthcoming in The Antigonish
Review, Yolk, This Magazine, and The Dalhousie Review. Her new
chapbook, The Nose on Her!, is available now from Turret House.
