Jampolis Cottage

It’s my last day at Jampolis Cottage as the 2024 Robert Pope Foundation poet-in-residence. I’m writing indoors—by a wall made up of sea-facing windows—for the first time since I’ve moved in, because of heavy rain. Every other morning, I rose with the sun, brewed my coffee and walked, notebook in crook of arm, across the yard to the ocean’s edge, where a flock of morning geese greeted me dutifully and I watched the sky change. I watched the indigo flank of Blomidon and its dark skirt of evergreens retreat behind a curtain of clouds and re-emerge as the wind parted them. I watched the seagrass sway hypnotically in the wind, and the slow, faithful pulse of the tide as the Minas Basin filled and emptied, over and over. In this ritual, my own pulse slowed to the bay’s cadence, and I came to understand my own weather, pen in hand.

And words did come to me on the wings of birds, on the wind’s cool breath, and in rusting September leaves, but this residency was so much more than productivity.

It was the pasturing cows at the neighbouring farm that kept me company with a comforting moo; the fisherman gathering on the right shoulder of the beach each day, dipping their lures into the water and releasing the day’s catch; the bald eagle that returned on its stately sail each morning to feast on the leftover bait; the coastal quest from Penny Beach to Blue Beach at low tide, a museum of periwinkles, rock fossils, and blue mussel shells; it was trading good mornings with the kind man and his dog on their daily walk by my ocean perch and later meeting his wife foraging driftwood, who told me about the history of the cottage and stories about their friends, Neil and Jane Jampolis—Neil’s groundedness and his driftwood sculptures that filled the backyard, Jane’s zeal and affinity for all things bovine.

It was the way the solitude and silence both humbled and opened me, eager to strike up conversation with the rare stranger, connections I’d normally miss out of shyness. It was the kindness of those strangers, the kindling of that conversation. It was the rewilding that stirred my spirit—all the ordinary miracles spilling into my palms: a pair of playful foxes by a river to enchant me after a long, solitary hike; the young deer prancing across Penny Beach at dawn that paused her journey to console me as I cried from the weight of writing grief; the murmurations of sandpipers putting on a private show for me each morning.

It was the bookshelf well-stocked with the company of other Nova Scotian writers, the generosity of their words forming a bridge to a felt community. It was the rare gift of wide-open time and space that allowed me to call myself a writer and begin to believe it, in spite of the lack of publications under my belt. It was the bay water that buoyed me, the landscapes that beguiled me, and the old house that held me in its history.

I’m so grateful to have been invited to pen a small part of this history in its new literary chapter, thanks to the generous support of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia and the Robert Pope Foundation and, of course, the Jampolises for entrusting their beloved cottage to Nova Scotian writers, giving us the rare gift of time and space—“a cottage of one’s own” to freely pursue the creative path without having to work against the grain of a capitalist value system that makes it so difficult to make a living as an artist. As I leave with a handful of songs and a fruiting manuscript, I know I’ll never forget my time at Jampolis Cottage and all it gave me—most of all, the momentum to keep the pen moving.