When we're alone

Summer is waning and with the change of season comes lots of other changes in my corner of our vast country. In fact, my corner has changed!

Last week, my partner and I moved thousands of miles westward to the beautiful, mountainous, oceanic Vancouver, BC.

In a few days I begin an MFA in Playwriting & Creative Writing at UBC. It's wonderfully exciting and feels really right.

Before leaving Toronto, I had the great pleasure of collaborating with a fantastically talented friend, Cat Montgomery (of Cat and the Queen). We created a series of one-on-one encounters exploring who we are when we are alone called inside with a handful of ridiculously talented beings (John Gordon, Sarah Jurgens, Krista Mennell, Mark Paci and Nadeem Umar Khitab).

inside taught me about feeling like I don't know what I'm doing, trusting, and creating something from that place. It taught me about listening to my gut and doing what freaks me right out. It taught me about claiming my power as a creator, and not being afraid of being bossy. It taught me about the alchemy of a shared vision, shared creative priorities and the importance of truly honest communication.

All of these aspects are tremendously important to me.

Perhaps the most important thing I learned, however, was that I didn't need to give everything over to this "little project that could".

I was a week away from moving when the show opened. I was packing, and crying, and blaring Sam Smith, and hugging my beloved family (a lot). Because I had so much on my plate, I couldn't be consumed by inside. It ended up being the healthiest process I have ever been apart of. I carry with me a new sense of self-care during production time and where I want to be on the balance beam of artistic process.

When Cat and I began making inside, we followed a mantra of our theatre gurus at

One Yellow Rabbit - "available light". It means use what you have. What you have is a gift. We had a house, a few hundred dollars and about fifty hours to make an immersive, theatrical thing. We had some killer peeps that wanted to get down and jam with us. We had all that we needed.

I encourage you to challenge what you think you need. You might have it all right there, too.

I'm really proud of inside.

I'm excited to keep simmering it this year, and grow it further as soon as we can.

If you didn't get a chance to see it, I really hope you can the next time around.