I’m Christopher Noel, a writer of fiction and nonfiction, and a long-time teacher in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of the Fine Arts, in Montpelier.  My small family and I live twelve miles outside of town, off a narrow dirt road, where we happen to be blessed with a lovely and extremely peaceful locale, tucked away from the noise and commotion of the world, and it has struck me that this makes the perfect site for a writers’ and artists' retreat.  
                Part of the inspiration for this retreat comes from the life and work of my father, who passed away suddenly in 2002.   A Jung scholar, Daniel C. Noel spent his career meditating and writing on the nature of the imagination and the nature of language.  As you’ll see in the video (Video Clip I), my father held great reverence for place.  “I don’t think we can explain the power certain places have,” he says, “but I like to be in their presence because I feel something.  This is to me evidence of a kind of fuzzy proof…that there is something going on beyond the everyday, the ordinary, the consensus  perceptions that people have been taught. “  

He loved to travel to the British Isles in search of ancient sites, “sacred spaces” often built in stone.   On many occasions, I accompanied him, to Stonehenge, of course, but also to lesser-known sites that he’d locate on old maps.  We’d trample over fields and through hedges on these expeditions, sometimes finding nothing, sometimes coming upon a humble stone well, a burial chamber (or “barrow,” long since liberated of its contents), a mossy monolith, or a circle of standing stones.  

Over thirty-five years of such exploration, my father took

thousands of striking photographs.“I can’t capture the spiritual," he said. "There are no ghostly shapes that show up in the back of the standing stones, but just the standing stones and the countryside and the gray skies and the green grass and the gorse and the heather in the British Isles…is enough to send me on a reverie of imagination again. These are to me…I call them ‘otherworld openings’ .  And you can speak of the ‘otherworld’ as the imagination, but you still need an entrance.  Perhaps ‘entrance’ and ‘entrance’ aren’t similarly written for nothing…”

            In spring, 2004, I began searching for a monolith; I’d already come up with the name for the Retreat, so now I just needed an undeniably Tall Rock.  At a nearby granite quarry, I found one—twenty-eight feet long, weighing in at seventeen tons.  Using some of the money my father left me with his passing, I purchased this rock and the big day finally came on June 9, when I had it installed in my yard--quite a dramatic undertaking, which entailed the setting up of a 100,000-pound crane on my front lawn (again, see Video Clip I).  In an eleven-foot-deep hole (dug by a backhoe), I sprinkled several handsful of my father’s ashes.