life experience

Alas, my last days at Stegner House were such a whirlwind I hardly had time to write. But that's ok, since part of the craft is spending time out in the world, getting life experience.

On Saturday I finished a rough draft of the treatment I had come to Eastend to write, so I felt it was time to celebrate. The hockey playoffs were on, and with no TV in the Stegner House, we headed to the Cypress Hotel bar to have a few caesars and watch our team (they lost). It could have been a dismal evening, but in came a huge group of locals for a birthday party and things started to look up.

The town mayor, a large, gregarious man, broke the ice by buying us a round. We joined their table and he introduced us to everyone. There was a wide range of ages, from 19 to 70; all the men over 40 were ranchers, and all the men under worked in the oilfield. All the women worked in health care, except for two: an agricultural scientist and a petroleum engineer. They were a lively bunch and regaled us with heated political debates.

But as the night wore on, they opened up more and more. After jokingly calling me a "commie" for my left-leaning, big city politics, one young rigger told me that although he has all the money he could ever want, he is deeply unsatisfied with life. As he looked me deep in the eyes, I could see that under the tough exterior was a sensitive soul trying to live up to the manliness of his rough surroundings.

Fifty years ago, in Wolf Willow, Stegner wrote about the role-playing masculinity of his day, calling it "the code of the stiff upper lip. [....] An inhumane and limited code, the value system of a life more limited and cruder than in fact ours was." He was referring to the life of the wild frontier before the land was settled, when "men were men" as the saying goes. An aftertaste of that brutal period still survives.

Among these young men, the political creed may be "every man for himself" yet they all band together to save their neighbors' homes from the rising flood. They love to shoot guns yet, as one confessed, he feels terrible whenever he kills an animal. I've never known a people so rich in contradiction, so steeped in subtext.

No matter how imaginative you are as a writer, you can't hope to conjure all the complexities of life from scratch; little details absorbed from conversing with strangers, or doing things you wouldn't normally do in places you wouldn't normally be can come in handy when trying to add depth and character to a story. Fiction is often grown in the fertilizer of fact.

As I closed up the Stegner House in the bright sunshine of long-awaited spring, I was thankful for both the peaceful reflection and the colourful encounters I experienced during my time there. Not much has changed in this town since Stegner's day, and my secret hope is that it never will.

on a roll

The weekend already! How time flies, even out here.

Yesterday was a relative flurry of activity. I was invited to a local Good Friday ritual in which the townspeople, on foot, carry a wooden cross from one church to another, reading passages and singing hymns. It was both lovely and a little bit sad; the early morning air finally felt warmer and the robins and flickers (this town is full of them) contributed their voices in droves, but every few minutes we were deafened by the revving engine of a huge truck with an ATV in the back, or someone's barking dog. At the end of the service, the worshipers warmly introduced themselves and invited me for tea, but I was itching to get back to my desk and made my exit.

For the rest of the day, I was "on a roll." I've learned that when you get in the groove, it's best not to get out of it, no matter what. I barely left my desk until the late afternoon, when I heard voices in the back yard. The lady in charge of the Stegner House and her husband were piling sandbags against the back of the house, "just in case." (The water in the creek behind the house hadn't hardly risen since our arrival, but everyone in town wants to be prepared, regardless.)

Over veal parmesan and dry ribs at Jack's Café, we swapped stories and compared notes. We may lead different lives, but some things are universal, especially among old married couples. Although forty years our senior, they still knew how to have a good time, reminding me of what we might be like in a few decades.

Walking home under the millions of stars, I thought: this town sure knows how to make a writer feel welcome.

a monastic routine

There is a glut of light in this house. With windows on all sides, the upstairs is bright from sun-up to sun-down. In the big city, a space with this much sunlight would cost a fortune, not to mention the view.

Since coming here, I've settled into an almost monastic routine: up early and at my desk until lunch, out for a walk, back in for a nap, and at my desk again until suppertime when the study gets too hot from the sun. The evenings are quiet, with no TV (the selection of VHS cassettes left behind by previous tenants leaves something to be desired) and barely enough radio reception to break the silence. We spent the last two nights walking, listening to music and playing Scrabble until we got tired, and went to bed early.

Some people might think us crazy for spending our holiday in such an isolated place, but I can feel myself getting more and more "unplugged" each day. After losing yesterday afternoon to a sore stomach, I had a very productive writing day and my emotions are settling down. I could stand another two weeks of this, easily. Maybe a lifetime, who knows?

getting started

As any writer knows, the hardest part is getting started. After looking forward to this trip for months, today I found myself struggling for a number of reasons.

First of all, I chose to get started by re-writing instead of writing, which was a bad idea. Re-writing is a soul-sucking, discouraging process because it's all about judging yourself. After spending the good part of the day nit-picking the screenplay I've been working on for the past year, by mid-afternoon I had the blues and decided to get out of the house.

It doesn't take long to familiarize oneself with Eastend; all told, it probably has only a half-dozen streets and a half-dozen avenues. On my way to the drug store to pick up a new notebook, the few people I crossed gave me the three-finger wave from their pickup trucks. It made me realize how disconnected I had become from this pace of life; although I had spent almost 20 years of my life in a small town such as this, it suddenly felt alien to me. That in-between sense of displacement suddenly became acute. I decided to go back to the Stegner House and recharge my batteries.

After a nap, a meal and a long evening walk down a gravel road, I felt much better. Tomorrow I will start fresh with a change of tactic. I am here to write, not re-write. Perhaps I can use the strange emotions percolating in me as fertilizer for my brand-new screenplay.

a land to mark the sparrow's fall

Snow! When the plane broke through the clouds at Regina Airport, the fields were a patchwork of white. In places, flood water came right up to the roads, reflecting the steel-gray sky. Normally by this time the farmers would be seeding; this year, some may not be able to seed at all. Everywhere we went, people bemoaned the weather. 

But this morning, as I headed West on the Trans-Canada and turned South towards Eastend, it was sunny and snowing. The gleaming hills were veiled in a luminous white fog. Water stood steaming in the summerfallow. It was magical.

Once settled in our final destination, Wallace Stegner's childhood home, we took an evening walk along the swollen Frenchman River and breathed in the quiet. Not two minutes from our door, a pair of courting bush rabbits scampered through the wolf willows as though we weren't there; a scattered herd of mule deer stared as we passed, unalarmed. The air was cold and clean as a butcher's blade.

My writing room looks out on the river and the steep, silent hills. With the lamp turned off, I pull back the curtains to let in the dying light. I can't wait to begin.

"Desolate? Forbidding? There never was a country that in its good moments was more beautiful. Even in drought or dust storm or blizzard it is the reverse of monotonous once you have submitted to it with all the senses. You don't get out of the wind, but learn to lean and squint against it. You don't escape sky and sun, but wear them in your eyeballs and on your back. You become acutely aware of yourself. The world is very large, the sky even larger, and you are very small. But also the world is flat, empty, nearly abstract, and in its flatness you are a challenging upright thing, as sudden as an exclamation mark, as enigmatic as a question mark.

It is a country to breed mystical people, egocentric people, perhaps poetic people. But not humble ones. At noon the total sun pours on your head; at sunrise or sunset you throw a shadow a hundred yards long. It was not prairie dwellers who invented the indifferent universe of impotent man. Puny you may feel there, and vulnerable, but not unnoticed. This is a land to mark the sparrow's fall."

 - Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow

home again

"Home is a notion that only the nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend," wrote Wallace Stegner in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Angle of Repose.

I have always had an affinity for Stegner, that "Great American Author" who actually grew up in a small Saskatchewan town not too far from where I was raised. He kept returning to themes of roots and place over and over again in his books; even though he called his birthplace a "dung-heeled sagebrush town on the disappearing edge of nowhere," I think his writing owes much to its character. I would even go so far as to say that it, and his self-imposed exile from it, defined him as a writer.

My own artist's voice is also influenced by displacement. My family were pioneers who came to Saskatchewan at the turn of the last century to make a better life for themselves and their descendants. Four years ago (almost to the day) I moved far away from them and everything they had built in order to pursue my own dreams, only to be clawed at by guilt and homesickness. After confessing this to my grandmother over the phone, she said wisely, "Just do what you have to do." Her comforting words made me feel like a pioneer in my own right. 

Coming full circle, this spring I will revisit my home province and spend a week writing in the childhood home of Wallace Stegner himself, now a residence for artists and writers. Perhaps my work will benefit from rediscovering my roots as much as his did.

Stay tuned for my dispatches from the Great Southwest.