Day Trip to Drummond Island

I just returned from a four(ish) day writing retreat in the Upper Peninsula.  I finished a feature length script, finished an outline for a second and completely rebooted the concept for the third.  So yes, it was productive and I spent hours and hours in the green painted wooden chair that my Grandma Linda rescued from the Islington Hotel a million years ago.  So one of the ways that I decided to celebrate the completion of the script was by taking an outing to Drummond Island.

Drummond Island is the Island where my Finnish ancestors settled during the late nineteenth century and it flourished in my childhood imagination as the Edenic source of all of my prolifically storytelling Grandmother's happiest (and most tragic) memories.  Curiously, our trips there as children were exceedingly rare and I've visited her childhood home (the ruins of the family Sauna are some of the only remaining evidence of her childhood there) many more times as an adult.

I've invented a story, rooted mostly in the stories she told, and I'm gestating the possibility of turning it into a script.  So my afternoon there was focused on asking questions, pointing my camera, gathering facts and understanding the place better.

There were all kinds of adventures that included a growling rottweiler, a little bit of trespassing, the crossing of a wide swamp, the discovery of distant cousins embattled in a bitter land dispute, the recounting of countless unknown relatives and their recent deaths in the parking lot of an excavation company and a museum director who called me by name moments after I entered the museum (five years after my first and only other visit to the museum!).

Alyssa recently posted that she finds the Rough & Tumble's Music to be a great source of creative inspiration - and not only do I agree, but just two days before I had (stolen?/) pasted a bit of one of their songs into my video recounting of the day.