Escapes to Ladner, Vancouver, Port Townsend, and Nowhere Else: adventures in rest, reading, writing, cinema, and music

I’m writing today from my favorite coffee shop in Port Townsend. With deep gratitude for Anne’s encouragement and support, I am taking a week off from certain challenges — here, in one of my favorite homes away from home (thanks to some generous friends who opened the door) — in order to rest and recuperate from a punishing season. Anne’s going to take a retreat for herself soon too, for peace and for poetry.

Thirty years into our relationship, we’re still madly in love, still devoted to our original vision of building and sustaining a writing life together, and still figuring out strategies for living in a way that feels like more than just survival. We miss each other every hour. But over the last several months, it has seemed like every conversation involves heavy, complicated decision-making, and almost all of our conversations have been about difficult matters related to book promotion, school, family, and the cruelty tearing down so much of what we love. We want to be together all the time. But we also need the solace that comes from stillness, mindfulness, and listening for the voice of wisdom we can only find in quiet because it is so still, so small. Solitary retreats have become as essential for us as vacations together.

We’re on an adventure together soon too, on our way to our third Nowhere Else Festival. We weren’t going to be able to manage it this year, and were trying to feel good about balancing our budget. But generous souls surprised us with helpful resources, so we felt like it was meant to be. And then, another surprise: We were invited to become part of the show. After my keynote address at last year’s festival, I was so grateful to Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist of Over the Rhine for what I thought was a once-in-a-lifetime invitation. But now both of Anne and I are on the 2026 program! (You’ll find details about us and about many other artists — including musicians we’ve loved for years like Anna Tivel, Jeffrey Martin, Daniel and Laura Goans of Lowland Hum — in the fine print of the schedule poster below.) Festival passes are still available! Come join us for a weekend full of joys and surprises, one I’m sure we’ll be talking about for the rest of our lives.

In love with Ladner

My sanity break began with a couple of days in the charming neighborhood of Ladner in the city of Delta, British Columbia. Why there?

I’d love to say that I crossed the border into Canada just to give some business to America’s friendly, peaceable, longsuffering neighbors to the north while they suffer the injustice of Trump’s hateful madness and the violence of the MAGA-GOP enslavement to his will. It did feel good, though, to support businesses there, to engage with them — and even apologize to some of them for what economists and historians alike are calling “the dumbest trade war in history” declared by the most narcissistic, childish, and cruel President my country has ever seen.

But the real motivation for my Ladner adventure was to visit my kindred spirit and longtime friend Ken Priebe — the author, illustrator, and animator who drew that avatar of me playing the banjo that you probably see adorning this website. I’ve wanted to see this place that he lives in and loves, and which I have driven past in my adventures to Vancouver, B.C. We walked and walked and walked around this town, and I’d have been happy to stay longer and see more. He even pointed out scenes in his neighborhood that I recognized as the inspiration for some of his drawings and stories. Now, I kind of want to live in Ladner.

Ladner is such a walkable neighborhood, with a quiet labyrinth of shop-lined streets with welcoming coffee shops, bakeries, second-hand stores, sandwich shops, restaurants and pubs (some with riverside patios), international cuisine, comic book and gaming stores, art galleries, and — danger, Overstreet! — used record stores full of treasure.

And there are a lot of long, lovely trails in the area, including “Spirit Trails” in the woods that are populated with wizards and gnomes and dwarves brought to life by a local woodcarver.

Ken gave me a day-long Saturday tour, and then we explored its tremendous street-vendor market that bloomed up and down the downtown streets with color and creativity and all kinds of savory, all kinds of sweet. We talked with a local artist. We had a profound breakfast conversation with Pastor Lee, Ken’s longtime friend (and another kindred spirit for my expanding chosen family).

And then, we took a car and a train and a ferry to get to the Granville Island marketplace in downtown Vancouver, where we met up with our longtime friend Daniel Melvill Jones, who took a brief break from his responsibilities as a new father and the new curate of a parish in Gibsons, B.C. I made a long list of books I found there to request from my local libraries.

Ken and Daniel are on a chat group with me and John Barber, a fellow we know from the Hutchmoot arts conferences, and while we made the most of every minute of this first-time in-person gathering, we wished John could have been there to complete this momentous summit. I’ve lost track of how many friendships that began online have developed into some of my most meaningful in-person friendships.

According to my phone, I walked more over the course of these two days than I have over any two day span in many, many years. And I’m still feeling it.

Now, a few days of not talking.

One of the things that Anne and I loved about each other right away was how comfortable we were sharing silence together. She’s taught me the rewards of prioritizing a shared pursuit of quiet, of listening. I wonder if my longing for a way of being I did not know much about had something to do with why I was drawn to films like Wings of Desire, in which the angels drift through the world of human experience and merely look, merely listen, and then write down the occasions of grace that they witness.

Settling into my first long stretch of solitude in as long as I can remember, I can feel my busy brain and my weary heart settling down.

And as they do, I find myself on a rollercoaster of emotions. I’ve been through a lot in recent years — we all have, yes? — and I’ve had very little opportunity to reckon with the highs and lows of it all. Occasionally, I feel as if I’m surfacing for brief gasps of oxygen, and brief glimpses of sunshine after a season submerged in a flood. More frequently, though, I feel on the edge of tears. Too many losses through which I had to work hard to help others, and to hold things together, rather than tending to my own wounds. The pandemic. The sale of Camp Casey. The closing down of so many essential programs at my university, and the departure of so many kindred-spirit colleagues. The losses of my father-in law, then my mother-in-law, then my own father. And the ongoing dismantling of my country’s government and ideals into an organization driven to genocidal violence and other war crimes, flagrant bigotry and racism, out-in-the-open fraud and lawlessness, and unchecked greed. Fractures from my heartbreak have risen to the back of my throat, threatening to break through in sudden tears at inconvenient moments.

And I realize that this opportunity for a retreat is a grace and a privilege, something a lot of people never get to know. I want to make the most of it.

I feel some pressure to produce something while I’m here. Some of that is insecurity about being alone with silence. Some of it comes with the gratitude that others are supporting me (and they’re supporting this website, too). But I came here to write without expectations, assignments, deadlines, or restrictions. If I’m not writing as a form of play, I’m not likely to discover new ideas worth sharing.

And I am writing. In fits and starts. But mostly I find that my attention is drawn to the water, to the trees, to the skies. They seem to be speaking to me in a language I’ve almost forgotten. It’s a language I need because it’s the one that speaks the fullest consolation, that sings of promises that will hold no matter how much harm the agents of ignorance and destruction unleash in this time and place.

Some of the huge stack of books I brought are proving to be meaningful medicine.

I am reading Brian Volck’s beautiful new collection of poems: Chora (Cascade Books, 2026), and looking forward to a conversation about it — which you can join via Zoom on October 24. I’m also getting my first look at Kelly Foster Lundquist’s award-winning memoir Beard. She’ll be hosting that Zoom conversation. (Details coming soon!)

I am also reading meditations from Fr. Richard Rohr, like this one and this one, which are like receiving medicine that goes straight to work.

And, of course, I’m watching movies.

Since this is a time of recuperation and meditation for me, I’m aiming to keep my reviews short and (hopefully) sweet, although some of them testify to the sour or the unsalted.

Here are some of the things I’ve seen in recent days that I hope to report on soon:

• Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)
• Tony (2026) — which I saw at Port Townsend’s beloved Rose Theatre
• Crime 101 (2026)
• Cloud (2026)
• Mississippi Masala (1992)
• Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)
• The Dark Crystal — an extended-edition fan edit (1982)

As time allows in the next several days, I hope to post brief reflections on each.

I’ll start with The Dark Crystal.

I hope that all of you have opportunity to take some time for stillness, for listening, for freedom from expectations and assignments and management of others. I wish you some time to read — and to read actual books, which will probably not try to sell you anything or distract you. I wish you chances to listen to whole albums, not just fragments of songs that accompany video clips. I wish you a long, meandering walk full of unexpected surprises. I wish you a view of sky or water or mountains, the languages by which you can sometimes receive a restorative word. I wish you rest and strength for all that lies ahead.

I will leave you, for now, with some Port Townsend fence art...