Author Harley Rustad's new writer's retreat in Port Renfrew, B.C.Supplied
When the journalist Harley Rustad was holed up in Port Renfrew, B.C., in 2015 working on the magazine article that would eventually expand to become his first book, he discovered that a new neighbourhood of cottages would be built up. He soon came to see the cottages as a chance to boost Canadian non-fiction.
A Walrus magazine editor originally from Salt Spring Island, Rustad was already fascinated with the area along Vancouver Island’s Pacific coast. The book he eventually wrote, Big Lonely Doug, paid tribute to a giant old-growth Douglas fir a short drive from town – a possibly thousand-year-old tree saved by a logger that had become an emblem of conservation.
So he bought a preconstruction cottage, on a cliff overlooking the port with views of the Vancouver Island landscape, soaring eagles and bobbing seals. But Rustad didn’t just buy it for himself. As he saw it, he was buying a chance for others to see the way the natural world is changing – just as he’d done with Big Lonely Doug.
Harley Rustad bought a preconstruction cottage, on a cliff overlooking the port with views of the Vancouver Island landscape, soaring eagles and bobbing seals.Harley Rustad/Supplied
After renting his cottage out for self-directed writing retreats since 2019, Rustad this year is launching a wilderness-themed group residency for non-fiction writers to shape books and long-form stories. “The hope is that we can do something that mirrors the land that the writers are going to be working in – its complexity, in its diversity,” Rustad says.
The history of Canadian art and discovery is littered with stories of “explorer” white men “discovering” lands and landscapes that had been traversed by Indigenous peoples for millennia, he says. Rustad hopes the residency will bring fresh perspective and urgency to the country’s wilderness writing. Again he points to the landscape’s lessons: In old-growth forests, “the system is most successful when it’s at its most diverse.”
Rustad has cultivated a career out of telling stories about humankind’s relationship with the natural world, building on 2018’s Big Lonely Doug with 2022’s Lost in the Valley of Death: A Story of Obsession and Danger in the Himalayas. He’s also a faculty editor for the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity’s Mountain and Wilderness Writing residency.
Applications just closed for the first edition of the Port Renfrew Writers Retreat’s Wilderness Writing Residency, which will run from Feb. 24 to March 7. Six writers will take part. Joining Rustad as a faculty editor will be Kate Harris, author of the RBC Taylor Prize-winning 2018 book Lands of Lost Borders: Out of Bounds on the Silk Road.
A Walrus magazine editor originally from Salt Spring Island, Rustad was already fascinated with the area along Vancouver Island’s Pacific coast.Supplied
There’s a $200 fee for accepted writers, who will also need to cover travel and some food costs, but the program covers accommodations, all of which are in the same cottage development as Rustad’s. He’s been able to cover many of the program’s overhead costs thanks to support from the Chawkers Foundation.
Rustad already had a rapport with the foundation, which has a long relationship with The Walrus and gave him a grant for Big Lonely Doug. Between the shared history and the fact that the retreat hit three of the foundation’s biggest priorities – environmental efforts, education and long-form journalism – the retreat made sense for the foundation to support.
“There’s a cultural arrogance when you write as if you are the discoverer” of the wilderness, says Jim O’Reilly, the Chawkers Foundation’s executive director. “We need the experience of people who have been closer to it, who have lived in it and who are more open to other interpretations.”
Gloria Dickie, a Canadian climate journalist who has lived in the U.S. and the U.K., was disappointed in Canada’s relative lack of writing-retreat facilities when she took up the chance to work from Rustad’s centre in 2020 to shape her book Eight Bears: Mythic Past and Embroiled Future.
It was refreshing in more ways than one. “Being able to look at what you’re writing, and seeing eagles and the inlets and the foggy mornings, being able to take a break and go for hikes in the rain forest is super inspiring,” Dickie says. But being able to find peace and a proper place to write helped, too: “Non-fiction writers don’t have these opportunities often in this country.”