Field notes for returning home: Creative-critical conversations on the home place in Kroetsch’s completed field notes
This thesis utilizes a creative-critical approach to explore the concept of returning home as a place-based practice through the reading of three early poems from Robert Kroetsch’s Completed Field Notes. Each chapter begins with a personal, embodied experience related to the home place where I grew up and a Kroetsch poem grounds each chapter and acts as a field guide through which to view the experience of home. The selected Kroetsch poems, “Stone Hammer Poem”, “The Ledger”, and “Seed Catalogue”, each demonstrate a tension common in Kroetsch’s work: finality and simultaneity, product and process, and history and archaeology. The result of applying the tension of the Kroetsch works to my experiences with returning home is a thesis that works though, but does not eliminate, the hyphenated reality of creative-critical modalities for settler-descendants writing from a prairie home place. In the end, there is a returning to a home place that is as changed as me: Like putting on an old jacket that doesn’t quite fit but still warms me with the comfort of recognition.
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research, University of Regina