Wallace Stegner House by Luanne Armstrong

In October, 2010, I had the wonderful opportunity to be the writer-in-residence at Wallace Stegner House, in Eastend, Saskatchewan. It was definitely a shock to run away from my too-busy life, writing, teaching, farming, part of my community and my extended family, to a small town where I knew no one and had really nothing to do but write and read and look after myself. But it worked. It was a productive time, and with the availability of solitude and silence, there was also time to re-examine my other, somewhat too crowded life.
Wallace Stegner House is a beautifully renovated house, on the edge of town. The writer's studio window upstairs looks west, over the prairie and the white mud hills that Stegner wrote about. The sunsets are amazing and the prairie grass colours subtly beautiful.
Wallace Stegner is primarily identified as a writer of the American west but he spent part of his childhood in Eastend, a place he writes about very evocatively in Wolf Willow, one of his best known books. In 1914, Stegner House was built by Wallace Stegner's father, someone who, according to Stegner himself, could never settle down. The family soon left Eastend and moved to Salt Lake City, but a framed quote from Stegner on the wall says that he thought his ghost would come back to Stegner House. I occasionally wondered if it had.
Eastend is small, friendly, quiet, set on the banks of the curving, brown Frenchman River. When I was done writing in the afternoon, I would wander around the town, past the golf course, the rodeo grounds, the disused tennis courts. I found the library, small but well stocked, looked in the windows of various small art galleries, and wandered the aisles of the two grocery stores, wondering what to make for my solitary supper.
I was there to write, so I didn't start making contact with people until the second week, when I sent out an email to members of the Eastend Arts Council that I would love to have coffee and learn more about the place, the town and the people. Several people responded and came for coffee, or took me driving. Plus Saskatchewan is one of those places in the world where a sense of neighbourliness is alive and well. People are friendly, curious, affable, and still have a strong sense of community, of their place, and their history.
For me, this was intensely interesting. I went to Eastend with two agendas. One was to create writing time for myself, but the other was to research a family story with a view to a future book.
My grandfather and his two brothers and his sister had come west in 1907, from Markham Ontario, to set up a ranch in the Cypress Hills of Alberta. Eventually my grandfather bought a wheat farm near Central Butte, Saskatchewan, and because of the drought in the thirties, he moved to BC, and bought the farm I still live on.
So while I was at Eastend, I also visited some of second cousins, grandchildren of my great-uncle, my grandfather's brother. I read the journals of my great-aunt Catherine, who was keeping house for her three brothers and her father, and who detailed the work, the joys and the perils of homesteading on the prairies.
When it was time to leave Eastend, I came home to my life with a deeper understanding of my own life and family history, with two partially completed manuscripts, and with fond memories of a sunlit, small town where the customers at the local coffee shop are just as likely to wait on you as the owners. As I drove away from the prairies and into the BC mountains, I felt shut in and crowded.
I missed that big sky and all that space. Perhaps, I thought, I should live in BC and vacation in Saskatchewan. Artists can rent Wallace Stegner house for a retreat at any time for $250 month or a portion of that, but October of every year is reserved for a writer –in-residence. People wishing more information should contact the Eastend Arts Council.
More information is also available on the website at http://www.stegnerhouse.ca