Picture yourself beside a shimmering blue lake, a warm mug of coffee in your hand. You have nowhere else to be. Around you, artists are talking, laughing, making things, and following ideas. Tonight, you’ll eat together, sit by the fire, and look up at a sky filled with stars.

This is the experience I want to create at the very first Kreativity Kibbutz.

For years, my partner, Sarah Garton Stanley, and I have called Birchdale “our little kibbutz.” Birchdale is our 58-acre off-grid property in southwest Nova Scotia, built in 1911: rustic cabins tucked among the trees, trails, canoes, a library, a sanctuary, and our own lake.

A kibbutz is traditionally a collective community built around working together, sharing responsibility, and living life together. That spirit is already part of Birchdale. We cook, care for the land, solve problems, swap stories, laugh, and remember that we belong to something larger than ourselves.

For years, I imagined inviting Jewish artists here. Sarah kept saying, “Make it real, Tracey!”

So, from October 14–18, 2026, the first Kreativity Kibbutz will welcome Jewish artists, creatives, and the creativity-curious for five days and four nights of conversation, creation, community, and rest. You don’t need a fabulous résumé or even a finished project. You can simply be someone who wants to feel more creative.

This is a place where you can arrive and be fully yourself: curious, contradictory, tender, angry, funny, faithful, doubtful, or all of those things…before lunch!

Questioning is our legacy.

Judaism has a long tradition of questioning and debating. We turn an idea around, challenge it, look at it from another angle, and ask a better question. That is also how we make things. A story, a song, a book, a painting, or a performance grows through curiosity: What is this really about? What happens if I try it differently? What truth am I not yet telling?

My life’s work has been helping people transform the raw material of their lives into one-person shows. At the Kibbutz, I’ll be available for conversations about your raw material - the memories, questions, obsessions, turning points, and half-baked ideas that might become something more.

You can arrive with a new play, three handwritten pages, a few lines of a song, a stubborn question, or nothing at all. You might share unfinished work with others, begin a collaboration, or walk through the woods following a thought. The work does not have to be “Jewish art.” The Jewishness may simply be in how we gather: around a table, talking with our mouths full, laughing, debating, and making room for complexity.

We’ll also care for Birchdale together - stacking wood, tending trails, and looking after its historic cabins. Our unofficial slogan is: “Chop wood. Make art.” There is something grounding about creating in the morning, working beside someone at the woodpile in the afternoon, and meeting again around the fire at night.

I hope people leave with new ideas, new friends, and the feeling that something inside them has come alive again. Most of all, I hope they experience joy: the joy of making, playing, eating, laughing, and being together among the trees.

Does this sound like a place you need - or something a Jewish creative in your life has been longing for?

Reach out to me at tracey@soulo.ca, or share this article with someone who should be there.

Come for your art. Stay for the community.