retreat report : home,

I was calling it such, but it was more complicated than that (as things so often are). Ridiculously early on Saturday, July 2^nd, Christine and her mother took our young ladies through two flights to Winnipeg, leaving directly that morning from mother-in-law’s Ottawa residence, Christine and the girls having left ours the evening prior (that seemed more efficient, they decided). Christine’s 94-year-old Oma lives in Winnipeg, as do mother-in-law’s two sisters, none of whom had met Aoife yet, and had only met Rose once before, when we made a similar trip with baby Rose. They spent four days running around Winnipeg visiting various friends and family, and even managed a trip to the Winnipeg Zoo (which always reminds me of the poem by Robert Kroetsch), as well as various other excursions (all safely masked, of course). I received multiple daily updates.

All of this left me solo at home (with our dear boy, Lemonade the cat, naturally) from Friday evening until late Tuesday afternoon, which I’d planned to spend returning back with full force into working on that novel I started back in summer 2020 (as well as watching various television things that Christine hates); remember that? I don’t even think I’d looked at the novel since last fall, having focused instead on reviews and reviews and poems and poems and poems. I’d spent the month-plus prior to their first Covid-era jaunt pushing myself to complete and post as many reviews as possible for the blog, thinking I could carve a path of a couple of weeks to simply work on prose without distraction (beyond, say, our wee ridiculous children, of course). Was such a thing possible?

A home-based retreat. Well, retreat doesn’t presume going away. Retreat means to step away, as I’m sure you know. To withdraw. I didn’t need to head to Banff or Sage Hill. Just a few days at the pub would have been more than enough, honestly.

Of course, once they left, it sparked my simultaneous and inevitable plans to deep-clean the house, and put together multiple above/ground press mailings, folding and stapling as much material as possible. Does this all count as writing? And my first evening solo was spent in Kanata at my brother Darren’s house, celebrating his mother’s (my birth mother’s) birthday (this was only the second time I’d seen her in person). It was a grand evening, that.

I did manage two different writing-related outings of pub afternoons, pushing to return to the space of the thinking of the novel, including one at my favourite, The Carleton Tavern. I also spent an outdoor patio hour at the most god-awful sportsbar closer to home (for the sake of time I didn’t wish to travel further) which made do, I suppose, but geez. Once Christine and the young ladies were home, I did manage a second afternoon at The Carleton, eventually pushing at least two further drafts through the process. Might this be the year I finally manage to complete this and start sending it out?

If I can get enough drafts furthered, I might even post another excerpt (there are a few earlier excerpts posted here and here and here and here), but I’m not quite there yet.

And beyond that, might I ever return to that novel I started on New Year’s Eve 2007, “Don Quixote”? I still consider that project in-progress, despite not having looked at it in years. I’ll get there, someday. Once this project is out of the way, perhaps I can even try.