about
Founded in 2019 on the west coast of Vancouver Island, Port Renfrew Writers Retreat is a space for writing that relates to the natural world.
Through in-person residencies and year-round self-directed retreats, we support the development and craft of writing projects in one of the most spectacular and storied corners of Canada.
Many of our residents have gone on to publish books and articles based on work done at Port Renfrew Writers Retreat.
Port Renfrew Writers Retreat was founded by Harley Rustad, the bestselling and award-winning author of Lost in the Valley of Death: A Story of Obsession and Danger in the Himalayas and Big Lonely Doug: The Story of One of Canada’s Last Great Trees. Harley has written for publications including Outside, the Guardian, the Globe and Mail, and Geographical.
He is a senior editor at The Walrus magazine, and a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.
He is originally from Salt Spring Island, British Columbia.
Why Port Renfrew?
The story of Port Renfrew Writers Retreat starts with the story of a single tree. Big Lonely Doug is a 20-storey, 1000-year-old Douglas Fir that was saved from the saw by a logger named Dennis Cronin. The tree—the second largest of its kind in Canada—was left standing in the Gordon River Valley, a short drive from Port Renfrew, while the entire old-growth forest around it was cut down. The tree has since become an environmental icon, drawing tourists from around the world to glimpse both the spectacular capacity of what nature can create in stark contrast with the reality of industrial logging of old-growth forests on Vancouver Island.
It was this one tree that brought Harley to Port Renfrew in the summer of 2015 to report a magazine article about Big Lonely Doug and Dennis Cronin and then later a book. It’s a corner of Canada with an undeniable magic in the mist coiling through the forests and in the whales breaching off the coast, in breathing the salt-tinged air and spotting a black bear or a cougar or an elk—or stumbling upon one of the largest trees in the country.