A FARM FOR STORYTELLING
Kingsville home retreat for writers
KINGSVILLE His great-great-greatgrandfather Adolphus Woodbridge bought the land to farm in 1854. His great-grandfather Dr. Walter Woodbridge built a house on it in 1911. And for seven generations, relatives used the property as a retreat.
Now Grant Munroe will use the quaint family home known as Woodbridge Farm as a writer’s retreat — and as a base to become the area’s newest publisher.
“It just feels right,” Munroe said Tuesday from the book-filled, twostorey yellow-brick home built by his great-grandfather, who survived the Great Depression on dentistry in Grosse Pointe and farming in Kingsville. “It’s what the family has been doing since we moved here.”
Munroe, a Miami-born dual citizen who came to the area in 1994 with his family, hopes to help others use the farm to produce prose as well as produce.
It continues a family tradition in a way.
“A recurring thing that continues to come up with the Woodbridge line is a deep level of civic engagement in the community,” said Munroe, a writer whose father, Kirk Munroe, is a Superior Court judge and who counts reeves and wardens and school superintendents among his ancestors. “All have served Essex County and the town of Kingsville. Each one of them stressed literacy and the arts.
“If my great-grandfather were alive to see this, I’m sure he would be delighted.”
In August, Andre Alexis — Governor General’s Award-winning author of Fifteen Dogs — will serve as Woodbridge Farm writer in residence.
Another Governor General’s Award-winning author, Diane Schoemperlen, will visit Woodbridge Farm for a workshop Saturday and public reading Sunday.
Sunday afternoon’s event is a rare double-book launch involving two publishers. Acclaimed Windsorbased Biblioasis, which in little more than a decade has become one of the largest small presses in Canada, will release Schoemperlen’s First Things First: Early and Uncollected Stories. Woodbridge Farm Books, meanwhile, will debut its first published work, a chapbook called One Thing Leads to Another, Schoemperlen’s musings on her lifelong love of collage-making.
“I was very young,” Schoemperlen said of First Things First, which offers short stories in chronological order. “It was interesting to go through all of these old stories and think about myself when I was just starting out. And some of these stories ...” — she lets out a hearty laugh — “they’re not horrible.
“But I can see that I was young and just trying to figure out how to do it. But I persevered.”
She has one main piece of advice for young writers, including herself back in the day: “You can only become a better writer by writing.”
The Kingston author may have won a Governor General’s Award — and may have written 14 books and counting — yet she still has time to make collage bookmarks for the first 50 people in Kingsville buying her new work.
That said, perhaps it should not come as a surprise that a woman who had a six-year relationship with a convicted murderer she met while volunteering at a soup kitchen would go the extra step for fans. But there you go.
Schoemperlen wants to make the most of her first visit to Kingsville, where for the weekend she will serve as writer in residence at the fledgling Woodbridge Farm Writers’ Retreat. Water. Breeze. Inspiration.
“I’ve never been to Woodbridge Farm before, but it looks great,” she said. “There’s a lot going on in the literary scene in that area and I think Woodbridge Farm is a big part of it.”
On Saturday, the Toronto Star published a piece on the burgeoning arts phenomenon in Windsor and Essex County, where one can find a surprising “literary scene that keeps coming up in conversations amongst the chattering classes from Vancouver to Toronto to Halifax.”
Besides Schoemperlen’s and Alexis’s pending visits, the article mentions other notables, such as Alissa York, Alexander MacLeod, Nino Ricci and Margaret Atwood — and the recently created Pelee Island Book House and Writers Retreat. It likewise pumps up Woodbridge Farm and Biblioasis.
“I’m really excited about this,” Schoemperlen said about Sunday’s reading overlooking Lake Erie. “For years and years, I’ve been doing readings in one place or another — but this will be something really different. It’ll be wonderful.”