Bøger udgivet af J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing

Like most Canadian playwrights of his generation, John Lazarus figured out the craft on his own. In doing that, he discovered a technique involving a dual approach: constructing plot on the one hand and improvising dialogue on the other. He's been using that technique since 1977 and teaching it to others since 1990, and it works--for himself and for generations of Canada's most successful theatre creators. In this book, John explains each of these "Two Ways" in detail, explaining why your characters won't invent your story for you, how to construct a plot using cause-and-effect, and how to refine your dialogue for the actors by chewing on it yourself first. He also guides the reader through other aspects of the profession--from current issues around creativity, originality and cultural appropriation, to nuts-and-bolts concerns like script submissions, workshops, readings, rehearsals and opening nights. Informed by over 50 years of professional experience as an award-winning Canadian playwright, teacher and critic, and delivered with John's breezy, informal style and sense of humour, Two Ways About It will give the beginner a dependable way into the profession and offer the more experienced playwright new and refreshing approaches to the art form.

Misty Lake tells the story of a young Metis journalist from Winnipeg who travels to a Dene reserve in Northern Manitoba to conduct an interview with a former residential school student. What Mary imparts in her interview will change Patty's life profoundly, allowing the journalist to make the connections to her own troubled life in the city. Patty knows that her Metis grandmother went to residential school when she was a girl. But Patty hasn't understood until now that she's inherited the traumatic legacy of residential school that was passed down to her mother from her grandmother. With this new understanding, Patty embarks on a healing journey. It will take her to the Dene fishing camp at Misty Lake, a place of healing, where, with Mary, she will learn that healing begins when you can talk about your life.

Joyce, Effie and BB are cowgirl goddesses on Mount Olympus who lament that the heroines of rodeos past are all but forgotten. It's a cowboy's world. Cocky steer-ropers have stolen the spotlight down on earth for long enough. The goddesses decide to use their considerable supernatural powers to give rise to a cowgirl revolution. When they discover Cassidy Clark, a talented, charismatic loner from Claresholm, they know they have found the barrel racer poised to lead their cause. The three goddesses appear to her one day, offering her all the gifts she will need to earn her first buckle at the Canadian Finals Rodeo championship. Cassidy and her trusty mare, Starbright rise to the top of the circuit, throwing back shots of Jack Daniels and two-stepping along the way..but just how far will Cassidy push herself and Starbright in pursuit of their dream?Co-created with Meg Braem and Christine Brubaker

our place by Kanika Ambrose is a new work set in a fictional Caribbean restaurant, Jerk Pork Castle in Scarborough, where newcomers Andrea and Niesha work in exchange for cash under the table. As the two women scrape out a life in Canada, leaving their children in their Caribbean homelands, they must also navigate their status as undocumented workers. This funny, keenly observant script unveils the lives of these undocumented Caribbean workers who go to desperate lengths to get Canadian citizenship for the betterment of their children--a moving, timely story of those rendered invisible in a "welcoming" Canada.

"Sisters Glenda and Suzanne have lived in Little Current on Manitoulin Island since Suzanne arrived on Glenda's doorstep single, penniless, and pregnant, thirty-three years previous. The sisters spend their days swapping stories about the locals and roping their appealing veterinarian neighbour, Patrick into various chores. But this summer, a visit from Suzanne's daughter Beth is about to force the women to confront truths that will change their lives forever. Where You Are is a hilarious and honest exploration of family, forgiveness and falling in love."--

Serving Elizabeth begins in Kenya in 1952, during the fateful royal visit of Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh. Mercy, a restaurant owner, is approached to cook for the royal couple. Though she could use the money, she is a staunch anti-monarchist. She vows to stick to her principles, but her daughter, Faith, keeps trying to convince her to take the job. In London in 2015, in the production offices of a series about Queen Elizabeth, a Kenyan-Canadian film student, Tia, serves as an intern on the project. It's a perfect fit for her as she has been a fan of princesses her whole life. But when she reads the Kenya episode, she starts to understand that fairy tales and real life are very different things. Serving Elizabeth is a funny, fresh, and topical play about colonialism, monarchy, and who is serving whom -- or what.

Sarena Parmar's The Orchard (After Chekhov) is an adaptation of Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, told through the eyes of a Sikh farming family in the Okanagan Valley, Canada. Set in 1967, the play offers a fresh perspective on our history, and a subversive look at ethnicity within the classical western canon.Still grieving the loss of her youngest son, the matriarch of the Basran family returns home after five years abroad in India. But all is not well; the family she left behind is unravelling and their orchard has fallen into foreclosure. With the bank calling and relations strained, will the Basrans be able to save their beloved orchard in time? Inspired by the playwright's own childhood, The Orchard (After Chekhov) is a bold new adaptation that confronts life, loss, and the immigrant experience with bravery and beauty.

Katherena Vermette's award-winning poetry collection North End Love Songs is an ode to the place she grew up, where the beauty of the natural world is overlaid with the rough reality of crime and racism. When a young girl's brother goes missing, she learns what prejudice and discrimination mean, as the police and the media dismiss his disappearance because he is young and Indigenous.Read alone, or as a companion to Vermette's award-winning novel, The Break and its follow-up, The Strangers, North End Love Songs is a moving tribute to the people who make the North End their home.

The evolution of Farkas poetry since he began writing it 35 years ago illuminates one of Montreals key literary figures, first, as one of the Vehicule poets of the 1970s, an experimental group of writers bent on celebrating life and pushing the boundaries of their craft and, later, as one profoundly aware of his role as a poet engaged with the world, one with a social conscience and a moral obligation to speak about it. In many of his darker poems, he ruminates on oppression and injustice and on some of the sources of Mans more subtle discontent, but always somewhere in the shadows lurks a hopefulness, an awareness that the jazz that paints the night is also about love and human fellowshipand compassion. As a poet, Endre Farkas celebrates the flux, the internal energy of a poem. He is not afraid to quot;playquot; or to follow a poem down a strange road, sometimes detouring into unfamiliar territory. He has never been afraid to revisit a piece years later or to rethink it for the stage. Perhaps he has a little of the gypsy in him. Forced to flee his native Hungary at a young age, he saw himself, in the early days, as a writer in exile, an immigrant Canadian trying to make sense of a new reality and a complicated past. It is undoubtedly what informed his early writing and what, in subtler and more complex ways, continues to frame the more recent meanderings of his imagination. And just where have these meanderings led him? Down a myriad of roads, a map of which is here, in this selection. Leaving the Big questions to the philosophers, he has chosen, instead, to answer his own questions by writing about the quotidian, the everyday. For him, the poem is an act of consciousnessndash;raising, a fragment that reflects a piece of the universe, the quot;herequot; of the moment he happens to occupy, ultimately nudging the reader along his own path into an awareness about that universe. In the end, the poem is a well of inspiration, hope, consolation, celebration. And, of course, it is food for thought.