SwampFire
Third Retreat: 2010
Burns family farm, Larwill IN
In June 2010, under the direction of Dawn Burns and Mary Catherine Harper, the Third Annual SwampFire Retreat was expanded to include invited students of the several majors of the Defiance College Arts & Humanities division as well as the division’s faculty wanting to retreat from the everyday world to produce art of various types: visual, musical, written, oral, photographic, videographic, plastic, digital, and even cross-media.
This Arts & Humanities SwampFire Retreat (the third annual English Department retreat) included Dawn Burns, and three fellow professors, Geromina Courtney, Mary Catherine Harper, and Steve Smith. Alumna Rachel Baker and Defiance College student Miles Byrne were also in attendance.
After a productive Saturday afternoon, members shared their works (language arts, photography, and visual arts) and responded around a campfire well into the night. Smith provided clay cups ready for carving by those whose medium is “words,” with the cross-media exercise designed to stretch creative approaches and themes. On Sunday the projects continued until mid-afternoon, when the group packed up and traveled back home through the squalls of summer thunderstorms.
Dawn Burns and Steve Smith carry wood to the fire 
Alumna Rachel Baker returns to SwampFire 
Steve Smith and Miles Byrne grilling chicken 
Dawn Burns brings kabobs to the fire 
Jerri Courtney with her brand new camera 
Steve Smith and Jerri Courtney dig in 
You want me to write what? 
The reading and response about to begin 
If you don’t take that camera away . . . 
Discussing the relationship between writing and working with clay 
Watching the fire as he listens 
The words I keep hearing in my head . . . Cool! 
More camera work as the night deepens 
When the reading ends, the texting begins 
That was a great story 
Fire in the swamp
Swipe left on phone.
Reflections by participants . . .
Moon so bright it might as well have been sunrise. Wasn’t sleeping well anyway between mosquitoes and the accumulated sweat of the day. Feeling better now as I sit inside on the couch, showered and itching a bit less.
The weekend has proven better weather-wise than I expected. The rain held off and the heat has not been oppressive. Even had a breeze yesterday as I sat outside to write . . . or tried to, struggling to tell a character’s story without allowing her the use of her own voice.
Stuck at one point, I went and got one of Steve’s cups for carving, tried for awhile to be her as I carved first her name and then two phrases into the cup—things I believe she will be able to say at the end of her journey. That helped me get moving in the right direction, even if the cup was not a keeper—before bed, I caved it in on itself, keeping instead another cup I had done.
There is something about carving that is so different than writing on paper, the way in which the mind can wander as the stylus works, feeling like a meditation somehow.
Back to the details of the day. We tested MC’s new grill equipment, which worked beautifully—grilled chicken, Jerri’s vegetable kebabs, Steve’s cheesy veggie packets, MC’s rice.
Always such a joy to be back at the farm, to share writing and photography and family histories and creative processes with others.
Impossible not to feel enriched by it all. 
~Dawn Burns
Rumbling breezes
Showers to rain
Tractors in the distance
Noises the same
Spring to summer
Yards green, still grows
Raymond [Norman] has sticks to pick
Fires for all
Friends we knew better
Some of them new
SwampFire old
We bid you adoo [adieu]~Steve Smith
The stillness is all, this space to quiet the soul and breathe deeply, seeing more than before. I carved in clay for the first time and wrote for hours from another time and place. Grateful.~Jerri Courtney
SwampFire 2010 was great. Many of those off-word noun-things were forgotten. I think it is an oddity of this place. Much like the oddity of that one special triangle at the one place where boats infamously disappear. All that aside, the time here was great. I enjoyed taking some awesome pictures, writing stories, and working on a pot.
Thanks, MC and Dawn.~Miles Byrne
And finally a poetic reflection on SwampFire . . .
~Sometimes It Is Enough to Be Silent
Sometimes it is enough to be silent.
To sit.
To eat.
To think silent thoughts in community.
Sometimes it is enough to be silent.
To wait.
To listen.
And when the time comes, to talk.
But sometimes it is enough to be silent.
Sometimes it is enough to play with a word.
To forget nouns and have to describe them:
That thing, you know, that’s white and soft and you put on a stick and hold
over the fire and then eat.
To re-imagine gravity through dandelions.
To seek not the perfect poem or story or sentence, but only the perfect phrase.
Sometimes it is enough to play with a word.
Sometimes it is enough to carve into clay.
To learn a language of texture and sight.
To slip inside clay furrows again and again and again and again.
Sometimes it is enough to carve into clay.
To smash the final product.
To begin again from scratch.
Sometimes it is enough to carve into clay.
Sometimes it is enough to love the rain.
To tire of sitting inside.
To desire the smell and taste and touch of water.
Sometimes it is enough to love the rain.
To listen to the soft applause of water on leaves.
To hear between claps of thunder the shouts of birds.
Sometimes it is enough to love the rain.
Sometimes it is enough to create through fears.
To discover a great-grandmother through a child’s curls.
To be gentle with pearls in left ventricles.
Sometimes it is enough to create through fears.
To hate the unsteadiness of hands but to use them still.
To risk a hundred photographs to find one happy accident.
Sometimes it is enough to create through fears.
And sometimes it is enough to be silent.
~Dawn Burns
Annual Retreat Archive
