Ted Barris

It was a reverent moment. Our host entered. We had all enjoyed our first meal in the dining hall together, while on the wall over our shoulders a painting depicted Christ and the apostles at The Last Supper. Our host – a middle-aged monk – apologized that not all seven Franciscans normally resident there could be present; two of them – men in their late 80s – had recently been moved to hospital for elder care, he said. Nevertheless a younger 70-ish Brother Dominic bid us welcome.

“We are brothers of prayer,” he said. “But we welcome you here to St. Michael’s, your home away from home.”

Last Monday night, in the lush green Qu’Appelle Valley north of Regina, nearly 40 writers from across Canada gathered at a secluded monastery to begin the annual Sage Hill Writing Experience. While the majority of the new writers (attending the retreat) had arrived to spend the next 10 days working with well-known fiction writers and poets, a small group had paid tuition to receive instruction from me in non-fiction writing. Our home away from home, as Brother Dominic had put it, would be the half-century old St. Michaels Friary and Retreat just outside Lumsden, Saskatchewan.

“This year the Unitarians came for the 23rd time,” Brother Dominic said, “as well as the Anglicans, Lutherans and Catholics. We kind of pray together.”

A pamphlet near the entrance to St. Michael’s offers the history of the Franciscan order. Named in honour of 13th century friar Francis Bernadone of Assisi, Italy, the so-called Order of Lesser Brothers came to Canada several hundred years ago, but not to western Canada until 1908.

They first established communities of Catholic friars in Alberta and Manitoba. Their numbers peaked in 1964 at 113 friars, at about the time the Order built and opened St. Michael’s at Lumsden, Sask. Just a couple of years later the facility was attracting more than 2,000 retreatants a year; in recent years as many as 5,000 retreatants have visited annually – mostly religious groups gathering for studies, socializing and prayer.

The Sage Hill writers present this week planned to do more writing than praying, but like the religious groups that have come here repeatedly, this was the writers’ 21st annual gathering – most have been at St. Michael’s. In the days and hours leading up to the first colloquium (workshop), I had a chance to meet fellow faculty from all over Canada, to find out what draws them to this workshop in the middle of the Saskatchewan prairie.

Susan Stenson, who teaches and writes in Victoria, B.C. through most of the year, joined me in a constitutional walk on the first morning, before the workshops began. She’s won literary prizes for her published verse and national praise for encouraging teenagers to write and be published. But on this walk, she proudly wears her Sage Hill baseball cap.

“This place invigorates me,” she said. “Being here, working with other writers, it almost tears you open to the beauty of the place.”

Stenson’s teaching partner in the intro to fiction and poetry workshop is another veteran at Sage Hill. John Lent also teaches creative writing for a living at a community college in B.C.’s Okanagan Valley, but he too has chosen the busman’s holiday, inspiring others to explore the joy of fiction he has found writing and editing dozens of books.

“Do we call the participants students?” I asked Lent naively.

“Can’t really say,” he said. “They’re new writers I guess. But nobody gets hung up on it. It’s always so laid back here in Saskatchewan.”

This is my first time as retreat faculty – working with novice writers on their first major potential book manuscripts – but it is not my first experience writing in Prairie Canada. In fact, just around the corner (not Corner Gas, I hasten to add), in Lumsden back in the early 1970s, I conducted research on my own first book – the stories of steamboat navigation across the Prairies.

I’d learned that a Canadian real estate company had purchased large tracts of prime farmland along Last Mountain Lake (just north of Lumsden). The firm used the S.S. Qu’Appelle to ferry prospective American farmers up the lake and show off the land. Some of those involved in the land sale and purchase scheme still lived in the area. Their memories of the steamboat junkets made my trip here among the most rewarding of my writing career. Now, more than 30 years later, I’ve travelled back here to try to pass on some of that inspiration.

The value of that gift was echoed in the opening remarks of Sage Hill’s executive director, Philip Adams, the other night.

“To have the retreat here is in very much in keeping with the Prairie way of doing things,” Adams explained. “Part of the charter of the Franciscan brothers is to receive travellers.”

And for writers, like travellers, a mind at ease sees the destination clearly.