How I began In the Frame
Beach at Hollyhock, Cortes Is., B.C. August 2009. Pat Sullivan
In August 2009, I attended a 4-day writing workshop at Hollyhock, a retreat centre on Cortes Island, BC. Unless you fly, it’s a trek to get there. I forget how I made my way to Horseshoe Bay, but after that I took the ferry to Nanaimo, then a mini-bus to Campbell River, then a water taxi on choppy Discovery Passage and Sutil Channel to Manson’s Landing on Cortes. A Hollyhock shuttle bus picked us up and brought us to the south end of the island. As the instructor said, nobody comes to Hollyhock unless they have something they need to get out. What did I need to say?
I had signed up for a workshop called Writing Start to Finish, my first such commitment to several days of writing. I thought I would work on a creative non-fiction piece about researching my family history. As I strolled along the beach before dinner that first night, I wondered if I would be able to produce enough to fill the time
At the introductions that evening, I bit my tongue as I listened to some of the others. Several people wanted to write their memoirs and treated this gathering as a chance to spew out unconnected details from their lives that were better left in their rough notes. I did not want to treat the workshop as a therapy session. As a longtime journal-keeper, I worked out my angst privately. I wanted to delve into craft and shape a readable piece.
Some participants brought laptops, but I used a 99-cent Hilroy exercise book that I’d bought at Safeway. In between its solid blue lines, there were dotted blue lines, to help children print upper and lower-case letters. I must have used a similar notebook 51 years earlier, when I was learning to print! Longhand was still my first choice: gripping a pen helped squeeze out the words more easily than tapping on keys.
On the first morning, the instructor asked us to write about a dramatic moment in our lives. When I read my piece on my father’s death aloud, I heard gasps from the listeners. But later when I read my work on my family history search, the content I thought I’d come to work on, it felt flat and I sensed boredom from the group. I was dismayed. I told the instructor that I felt my writing was too formal and reserved. She said that’s why she’d assigned the first exercise, to make us reach vulnerability and write from the heart.
I brooded on this as I strolled the beautiful grounds in between our sessions. On the rocky beach, I perched on a log and stared at the ocean. I ambled past the well-tended gardens that supplied the vegetables for our tasty meals and photographed the abundant flowers. I’d left steamy Vancouver for a paradise with fresh air and cooling breezes. No need to prepare meals or do chores. For a long time, I had vaguely thought of going to a beautiful place to write. Here I was! Now what?
We were supposed to write from 4 pm to 5 on that first day, but I lay on my bed in my room, not sure what to do. I no longer felt interested in my family history topic. I had long harboured a secret desire to write a satirical novel about a fictional public art gallery, my work milieu, but all I’d done was take notes. In my funk, I told myself, “I’m on vacation. I can do what I want! If not now, when?” I rose from my bed, as if pulled by the notebook on the desk, and sat down and wrote, “The wine ran out at 7 pm.” When it came time to go to supper, I didn’t want to stop.
The next day the writing flowed. For much of it I sat on the deck of the house, caressed by the balmy air as I wrote. I took breaks for a nature hike and a massage, but kept writing. When I sat on the beach after supper, fifteen eagles flew over me. Their magnificence made me appreciate why Indigenous people revered them. I was having such a good day that I could not help thinking their appearance meant an auspicious omen for me, too.
On our last evening, we each had to read for ten minutes and write comments on what we heard to give to each writer at the end. I was the only one who read fiction. Some of the memoirs were more interesting than I had expected, but I didn’t pay them much attention. I was so gratified by the reactions to my piece. One woman said, “You brought us into this whole world, the drinks, the gallery, the people, everything, and all without using a laptop.” She looked pityingly at my humble notebook. On the feedback sheet, a man wrote, “I can see myself lying on the beach in the sun reading your book. Really well put together—flows naturally, the dialogue and characters.” The instructor commended me: “What a shift. The fiction form suits you.”
My Hollyhock writing became The Opening, a novel I worked on for ten years until I did a re-think in 2019. By that time, I was long past the Hilroy notebook and able to compose on my laptop, but it still took six years of revisions until In the Frame appeared in 2025. I’ll always be grateful for those few days at Hollyhock. I may not have become as free as those magnificent eagles, but I found my voice.