Field notes for returning home: Creative-critical conversations on the home place in Kroetsch’s completed field notes
type: CreativeWork
description: 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.
abstract: 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.
author: McFarlane, Rhea Terese
language: en
date published: 2024-12
date modified: 2026-07-24T04:03:43Z
provider: University of Regina
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research, University of Regina

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: https://hdl.handle.net/10294/16818

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.82465/4752