Start a Creativity Camp and Artist's Retreat

I’ve got this up for sale on www.nancytoday.etsy.com

Description
Six days and five nights of fun, arts, crafts and relaxation in the hills of Eastern Ontario, Canada.

Depending on the interests and stamina of the guests, we will do two to three crafts a day and spend time with nature.

Crafts can include sketching, painting, making a willow basket, a birchbark towel holder, soap, paper, a birchbark covered journal and a hammock. Guests may feel free to suggest other crafts they see at our retreat.

We can learn to make a labyrinth, how to build a tipi, and how to identify and harvest some common wildfoods.

We will spend time sitting alongside the babbling, winding stream, lying in our hammocks in the shade, playing drums and other rustic instruments around the campfire.

Guests may sleep in our tipis, may camp in their own tent in the spacious yard or the woods, by the stream or one of the ponds.

If they prefer, they can find accomdation in local B&B’s. We will eat homestyle meals together around a campfire where we can also learn firebuilding and how to cook with a dutch oven.

Other options may include, learning about growing willow for baskets; visiting osprey nesting sites, a porcupine’s home, beaver ponds. If they are in bloom on time, we can visit the largest collection of pink lady slipper orchids in North America. We can hike to and enjoy a spring as well as a spring-fed stream.

We can take nature walks through Ontario wildlands. We may opt for some kayaking or swimming.

I’m going to get The California nonprofit corporation kit by author Anthony Mancuso (Nolo Press, Berkeley, CA) and incorporate my artist’s retreat as my first step.

About ten years ago, I read about the Pacific Northwest tribes of Native Americans, the Salish speaking people, who gathered once a year to create collaborative art, share stories, and celebrate life all while sharing in the creative process of multi-disciplinary art. I’m a writer but I think artists in general are stuck communicating and sharing only with other artists working in the same medium.

I believe that artists should share in the creative process with artists from other mediums. I want this retreat to also serve under-privileged inner-city youth.

Just re-read my last entry and am tickled by the concept of “progress toward a retreat.” I’m sure I can spin this all day long!

Taking my daughter to D.C. for a week to sight-see & visit my uncle. Maybe it’ll jar something loose & I can get busy on this when I get back.

and realized part of my vision for my Creativity Camp/Artist retreat is to be a sort of “settlement house” for new or fledgling artists… those who are begining to “get” that they are artists in the first place.

I am also somehow attracting a variety of people who want to open their homes for classes and workshops which could be a great seed-place for the eventual location…. so this is all progress, slow, steady, inspiration based progress which makes me pleased.

I got frustrated with The Gift, and took a break to read West With the Wind by Beryl Markham. It’s beautifully written, and I’ve spent every spare minute with it. I’ll probably finish it onight and start back on The Gift.

Impatient, frustrated, really feeling like there is no progress at all being made toward the retreat.

still reading…

I like the idea of eating off of hand made plates. It seems more sustaining, Hemingway-ish – like choosing the piece of wood out of which you will turn the pole with which you will catch the fish that you will cook on the fire you built. It gives self-sufficiency a whole new dimension.

One of our guests has come to pour a cup of coffee. “Don’t use that one,” the cook says. “It tips over too easy.”

Lots of the dishes we use were made here. Some of them are ceramic, some are wood. The shelves are filled with hand made mugs – culls, or orphans, or favorites which were brought here and traded for new favorites. The one that our guest has picked was left because the bottom is a little lopsided. One friend winked, “Like my old girlfriend: too round on the bottom.” We made him help with the dishes for that one. But we keep the mug, and ones like it, with tiny cracks, or crooked rims. We keep them, I guess because we feel sorry for them. Who else will love a mug that threatens to scald you if you set it down?

We are getting ready for dinner, the cook and I. There is always some confusion about who is the cook and who is the assist, and sometimes it bothers me and sometimes I let it slide. “Peel the potatoes over the trashcan,” I tell her. “It’ll save you clean-up time later.”

“And what will I do with all that time I save from cleaning up potato peels?” She is good natured, and unconcerned about my moods.

“You could paint.” I answer. Our guest is watching us move around each other, pulling utensils and ingredients from cupboards. He tested the stability of the coffee mug, and decided to hold it, warming both hands. He is listening. Like me, he is trying to decide who is in charge.

“But I am not a painter. I am a cooker.”

“I’ve seen your stuff. When you’re not a cooker, you’re a painter.”

“Right now, I am a cooker, not a cleaner.” But she moves to the trashcan so that the peels fall in.

“Maybe you could learn to make coffee cups that don’t tip,” I suggest.

“And maybe you can peel some potatoes so that I don’t have a dozen starving people coming after me in two hours.”

We will be ready for them. She is in charge today, and our guest will help, and then we will sit together, and eat, and some of the plates will be hand made, and some will be bought, and we will listen to our companions talk about their progress, or their writer’s block, or their suggestions for each other….

The nourishment doesn’t come only from the food.

don’t really feel like I’m doing anything. I’m reading the book, The Gift, because it was recommended by someone who is doing what I want to do, but it’s slow going, and I’m not really that smart.

I found a B&B in NM for sale for $800K…. Not really exactly what I’m looking for, but close….

rec’d, started The Gift, as recommended by Judith Hill, owner of Rockmirth. read the preface, the introduction and part 1, ch 1, seg 1. It’s hard

have not responded to invitation to telephone tm. hopefully today. in the mean time, will email same.