A fantastic writing room

I return quite mellowed after about a week away. I have the good fortune of having a friend with a cottage near her summer home who rents it to friends at a very reasonable rate. It's on Lac Connelly, near St-Hippolyte, about an hour north of Montreal. My partner and I made it our writing/reading room for the week. Click on any of these photos, & they'll fill your screen. Views from the front room, which is surrounded by windows:

This tree has a special significance. I'll get back to it later. Below, yours truly at his Thinkpad (why didn't IBM come up with Imaginepad? Createpad?):


It was a productive week, free of distractions: I wrote four prose poems to pretty nigh completion plus three quite promising poem drafts and part of a song. My partner, meanwhile, wrote a draft of a short story.

Books & Stuff read: The Saranac Review #3 (the first review I've read from cover to cover -- it turns out I was not disappointed in what I was saying before, all the poems are good, as well as a number of the short stories) Theodore Roethke's The Waking and some of Words for the Wind out of his Collected (this was really suitable to this setting), some of Creeley's Selected, a pretty fair portion of Michèle Lalonde's Défense et illustration de la langue québécoise suivie de prose et poemes including her famous (and still apropos) protest poem, Speak White, plus Femelle Faucon by Quebec poet & friend Nancy R. Lange. I also listened to selections of William Blake, Byron, Shelley and Keats in the MP3 version of A Hundred Classic Poems. This of course punctuated by walks in the woods, and swimming & sunning (when weather permitted) by the lake.

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By the way, I just added a "Currently Reading" section to my sidebar -- some titles I'm reading right now.