Published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, Staging Modernist Lives includes three original, annotated play-scripts about modernist writers, H.D (Hilda Doolittle), Mina Loy, and Nancy Cunard as well as an introduction on dramatizing research. I wrote the first of these plays, a one-woman, 2-hour biographical drama about H.D. and her circle in 2005-2006 and played all 25 roles (including Ezra Pound, Bryher, Freud and Richard Aldington) in the play’s début at the 2006 Vancouver Fringe Festival. The book is a culmination of writing and performance over the next 10 years, with lectures and performances across North America, Europe, and Asia, including appearances at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris (Canadian Embassy in France) and the University of Oxford. The book’s second play, The Mina Loy Interviews, was made into a short film in collaboration with veteran Vancouver actor Gina Stockdale and emerging film-maker Julian Giordano. The third play, These Were the Hours, explores the writing, publishing, activism, and controversial performance of racial identity of British shipping heiress, Nancy Cunard. The project as a whole was funded by a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 2009-2012.
Staging Modernist Lives is illustrative of my interest in using drama to bring literature and culture of the inter-war period to broader audiences. I have spoken on this theme at Simon Fraser University’s President’s Faculty Lecture and as a keynote panelist at the Ezra Pound International Conference at the University of Pennsylvania.
I am also interested in thinking about and documenting the process of creative research, notably in the preface to each play of Staging Modernist Lives and elsewhere in articles about the making of the Nancy Cunard play and the Mina Loy film.
Reviews of Staging Modernist Lives have appeared in B.C Bookworld, Theatre Research International, and The Year’s Work in English Studies 2019, which suggests “[t]he combination of critique and creative exploration in Staging Modernist Lives makes it a book unlike any other this year, and indeed unlike any other likely to come soon.”