Last month, I realized that one of my projects was celebrating a significant anniversary. It had been a decade since I self-produced a workshop production of my play The Maple Leaves. This is a project that for me is one of the most significant creative milestones so far It continues to influence what I work on, how I work, and part of my intention with this podcast was to talk about some specific pieces and the insights that I've had on those and how they've continued to influence my creative work and my creative process, so this felt like the perfect opportunity to do that for The Maple Leaves, and hopefully the insights will be useful to you as well.
Part One: Finding The Maple Leaves
Just to go back a little bit further, I learned about World War I in my grade 10 history class. There was probably a two week unit and then maybe a two or three week unit in grade 12 history. But I don't remember very much of what I learned then, or really that I had any sort of strong connection to the period in high school.
And then in second year university, I signed up for a course that was totally focused on World War I. And the structure of it was that every week we went to lectures, and then our coursework was essentially every three weeks we met with the professor and another student, and we presented a paper.
When I went for the first meeting with the professor, he learned I was an English major, and he suggested maybe looking at the literature of the period for my focus.
And so I did that. The first paper I wrote on trench newspapers. I looked at the poetry of World War I. I looked at memoirs, and then I also looked at novels written by soldiers themselves. So in that course I was learning a lot of the history through the lectures, but I was also deeply engaged with the literature and the narratives that the soldiers were creating, the language and images they were using to describe this experience. And I felt almost immediately this very intense connection to the material.
And then because of that course, I went on to do an MA in English, and my thesis for that focused on contemporary retellings of World War I, Timothy Findley's, The Wars, Jane Urquhart's The Stone Carvers, and then a play by R.H. Thomson called The Lost Boys.
When I then left academia behind and I returned or recommitted to creative writing, one of the first pieces I wrote was a short story set during World War I. It was actually set on Armistice Day, and it was about a group of farmerettes, so women on the home front working on a farm towards the war effort. They put on a kind of variety show to celebrate the end of World War I.
That piece was published in Room, my first published short story, and I had this idea after that that maybe I would turn it into a novel, that there was a larger story there about women's experiences on the home front. I went to my local library's catalogue, and I was just scrolling through to look for some additional sources, and up popped this book called Theater and War, and I thought, oh, that looks interesting because of my interest in World War I and then also my life-long and love of theatre, but I wasn't really thinking about it for this project. I was just like, that could be interesting to look at for myself.
So I went to the library and this particular book, it was part of a special collection in a, just a small, tiny room at the front of the library. I pulled it off the shelf and I started flipping through it. And I came across this picture. It was a soldier sitting on a crate with a painted maple leaf on its side. But the soldier wasn't in uniform. He was wearing a dress, sheer stockings and high heeled shoes, and the photographer had captured him carefully applying his lipstick. There was also an officer in the photo who was kneeling in front of the costumed soldier holding his wig.
Who were these soldiers? I wondered, and how could I reconcile this picture with what I knew about the First World War, the senseless slaughter, the stench of No Man's Land, soldiers drowning in mud and poison gas.
The idea for The Maple Leaves was born from that one image. The play brings audiences into the onstage and offstage worlds of a World War I concert party group through the story of Billy Haven, a new recruit who arrives in the trenches of Flanders in 1917, just 18, and really eager to fight. However, instead of fighting at the front, he's ordered to put on a dress and sing. Billy joins the Maple Leaves, which is a group of soldier-performers in the play, which are based on the real life experiences of groups, the most famous one, most famous Canadian one is probably The Dumbells. These were soldiers who traveled all across the Western Front and staged musical and sketch comedy revues for their comrades just behind the front lines.
That photo I saw, that's the origin story of the play, and when I think back on that, I think one of the key things I learned was that the big ideas, the ones that can potentially transform you and your creative process, they will often find you. As I'll talk about in the rest of the episode, I really believe this piece was a formative one in my creative life, but at the time when I found that image, it really just felt like I had stumbled across something, that rather than searching out or trying to force an idea, it found me.
And so something I'd encourage you to do is to stay open to those kinds of possibilities. Flipping through books and magazines, going to the theatre and art shows and talks. Being out in the world and hearing just a snippet of conversation and letting yourself be curious because that's the other component of this. Pay attention to what you notice and then allow yourself to be curious about it, to wonder about what it is that's drawing your attention, and then allow space to see what comes up rather than forcing that initial noticing, to become something, let it emerge.
I didn't see that picture and say to myself, that's a play. I saw the image. I definitely felt some curiosity, and then I went home and I wasn't really consciously thinking about it. And then the next morning I woke up, and I had these two characters, Billy and the other main character in the play, Captain Ashby, they were in my mind having a conversation, and I just wrote down what I was hearing and that was essentially how the play started.
When I think back, the first key takeaway or lesson that has continued to influence my creative work from this particular play is that the ideas will often find you and that that will happen when you're maybe focused on or looking for something else. And that something to cultivate in your creative life is openness and possibility rather than trying to force yourself to come up with "the big idea."
Part Two: Finding the story
I took a photo once of all of the drafts I'd printed of The Maple Leaves, and it was probably almost two feet high, and that was just the drafts I printed, which were sort of significant drafts, ones for readings or where something had really shifted in the story.
As you can probably tell from that big stack of papers, it took me a lot of time to find the actual story for this play. I knew the world of the piece really well, very early, and the first draft emerged very quickly, but then it took a lot of time to figure out the arc. I think it was over five years from writing that first draft until we staged the workshop production, and there were at least four or five different endings. The play went from seven characters to five at one stage. And then even after the workshop production that I'm focusing on in this episode, I'd say the last third of the play underwent significant changes.
When you're working on a project for that length of time, it can feel at points discouraging. We might get frustrated with ourselves that it's taking so long. We think that at this point we should just know how to fix it.
But I learned with this play, and I learn it over and over and over again, a creative work has its own timeline and it's really going to take as long as it needs to take, not how long I think it should take.
And truly, when you live with a piece that long, it is changing as you change, and it changes you in a way, that kind of depth of connection with a piece over a longer period.
What I would say is not to be discouraged if a piece seems to take five more drafts or two more years than you'd ideally want. If you still feel that connection, if it still feels like a story you have to tell, it's worth continuing trying to find a way to let that piece emerge in a way and in the amount of time it's meant to.
Part Three: Owning your intention
As I've just been discussing, the development process for this play was long, and it did involve at various points, a lot of external feedback. I don't want to dive too much into feedback on this episode, though it's something I'll definitely focus on in a future episode or two, but I think just to talk about it broadly for a moment, I hit a point with this play where I'd received some challenging feedback, and I nearly lost the ability to work on the project because I had this sense that the piece wasn't living up to this idea that someone else had about what it should be.
I think what made it more complicated was that for plays, especially, so much reveals itself to you when you get a chance to have a reading or a workshop and to work with the director and actors, and for me, at least back then, it felt like I needed someone else to give that to me, for some type of gatekeeper to say I'd got the play to a point where the piece was good enough to have that type of development and investment. I was essentially waiting for someone else to tell me that my work was good enough or ready enough, rather than deciding that for myself, and it led me to stall and really stay stuck with the play until I saw a call for SpringWorks, which is a local indie theater and arts festival, and I had the sense as soon as I saw the call that I needed to apply, that the only way forward for the play was if I workshopped it myself. And so I sat down and revised a draft in a week and sent in my application, and it was accepted.
I had lost so much power around the play itself and just generally in my creative process, so that decision to apply to self-produce a workshop production still feels like one of the most important decisions I've made in my creative life. It felt like I was reclaiming my work.
I see this kind of loss of power in our creative work with many writers I know, and some of those I work with as a coach and developmental editor. They've maybe been through a similar feedback experience where what they want for the work isn't centered or they've been in classes or workshops where they're told, "This is how you have to work," or "This is how you write a good story, and they have this idea that the value of the work needs to be judged or granted externally.
I didn't know this concept at the time, but I worked with Liz Kimball, who's a creativity catalyst and coach, and she talks about this idea of greenlighting and that "You are the greenlight," and that you are the one to make those decisions around your work and not a gatekeeper. And so when I heard that concept from Liz, it really struck me that that's what had happened in that moment. I had made the choice for the work and the decisions around the readiness of the work, not someone else. And that was the sort of most necessary decision I could have made in that moment for myself and my creative work.
Part Four: It takes a village
So the play was accepted and I had, I think it was four or five months to put everything together alongside Gada Jane who was directing the piece. Gada was a key collaborator already on the project by that point. She had founded a writer's group called Predella, which I was a part of, so as I went through this struggle with the feedback around the piece, Gada and the other writers in Predella supported and encouraged me and my writing, and helped me to continue to hold space for my work, even though I felt like I was struggling with my own faith in this particular piece.
Having people in your creative life who encourage you, who hold that kind of faith for you, who are excited about your work, and encourage you to still stay true to your own intention and who know your work deeply, have seen you and it evolve and change, but also what's remained consistent about your insights and interests as an artist, that's really just one of the greatest gifts you can have, and I feel incredibly fortunate that I was so supported in that way while working on The Maple Leaves.
As I said, I've been a lifelong lover of the theatre, and I had at that point seen many, many productions, but I had never really been involved much in putting together a production.
And with Spring Works at that point, a lot of the time companies would sort of do a reading rather than stage a piece in development, but the first decision Gada and I made was to try and get the play on its feet, to spend five days workshopping and rehearsing and then actually stage the play at the theatre festival.
What we did was we just wrote on post-its every single step and task we could think of, all the things we imagined you'd need to do when putting on a play, and then we organized those into a kind of timeline when we thought things needed to happen, and that was basically how we did it.
And when I say we, it was Gada and I, and then it became a much larger community who supported the production. We found an incredible group of actors and a stage manager to support us. The actors came into our five day rehearsal completely off book. They learned all the blocking really quickly. They also had to learn musical numbers. Two of the characters, as I said, are female impersonators, so they are in drag at several points in the play. So in all of these ways, it was a huge undertaking for the company in the time we had, and they gave it their all.
My father built our set. We rented uniforms, but then my mom sewed Edwardian-style dresses for the female impersonator characters, and even made one really last minute because one of them just wasn't quite working.
I had so many friends who helped with advice and then putting up posters, spreading the word, and basically whenever we needed something, someone was there to help.
And there was also our audience, so many family and friends who came, traveled to see the production and showed their support of the work.
The whole experience had something of that "Let's put on a show" energy from those old Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland movies I would watch as a child on rainy Sunday afternoons on the TV, but that also felt so right for the show, it was perfect since it felt very in line with how the soldier-performers themselves would've put on their shows.
So much of the work we do as artists is done alone, but that doesn't mean that we are totally alone in our work. This was a much more collaborative project and theater typically is, but I think what I learned is that at points in the project where you are ready to share your work or to involve others in some way, there can be a community there to support, to potentially be involved in furthering the creation of that work in a way that still centers you and your intention, of course, and that there are people there to engage with it and witness it, and being seen in that way is incredibly important.
Another lesson from this experience is asking for help and support. I often try and do everything myself, to be totally self-sufficient, but it was literally impossible with this project. It involved trusting and needing the support of others, and when I think back to this experience, it is that feeling of creating with others, not doing it all myself, that has really stayed with me.
I'd encourage you to think about how these ideas around community and support connect to your own artistic life. You might think about what help or support you need and who might be able to offer that, or something else to consider is what community you currently have, and if you're at a stage where it feels right to be opening the work up, who is that community for you, and how might you start developing more of those relationships if maybe you are feeling too alone in your creative work right now.
Also, to go back to something that I talked about earlier, there was such a community of support around this work, such a belief in it, and I am incredibly grateful for that. But others supporting and believing in this work and being a part of it through collaboration or as an audience member, that was only possible because of that decision I made to stop waiting for someone else to say it was ready or it was good, or it was worth sharing. I believed in the work and its readiness, or at least in the need to open it up to others so it could grow and develop and become more itself, and all the belief in the piece that came afterwards, it had to start with me.
Part Five: Limitations
I talked before about how we had this intensive five-day workshop/rehearsal process, and there was a point on the second last day where things felt really, really hard. There was a lot of struggle in the space and in the process, and my instinct was to try and fix it, to do something to help.
And I remember Gada talking about the need to actually step back and leave it, and to let the actors stay in the struggle and discomfort, and for me to also sit in the struggle and discomfort of letting that moment be hard.
She talked about how we'd come to a point in the process where we were essentially running up against our limitations. There was this sense of what the play was asking of us, and we were aware of all the potential of what it could be, but we didn't have the time left to get it to that point, and we were essentially coming up against the gap between what it could be and what it was in its present state.
One of my creative touchstones is an essay by Ann Patchett, where she talks about how she makes up a novel in her head, and it's beautiful and intricate, and as she writes, "The greatest novel in the history of literature ." And then as a writer, you have to get that beauty down on paper so everyone else can see it, and it's, she talks about how it's like plucking this beautiful butterfly from the air and smashing it down onto the page. She writes, "Everything that was beautiful about this living thing, all the color, the light and movement is gone. What I'm left with is the dry husk of my friend. The broken body chipped, dismantled, and poorly reassembled. Dead."
That experience feels so familiar, the way in which we have this vision of the work, this ideal, beautiful, perfect vision, and then it just doesn't translate on the page.
And I think on that day in rehearsal when there was such an atmosphere of struggle, it was connected to this idea too.
We are often as artists coming against what we perceive as our own inadequacy. We judge ourselves for our failure to achieve or translate or capture that ideal vision we're holding in our heads.
And yet there is so much beauty to be found in the trying, in the struggle, in risking sharing what wants to come through us rather than keeping it contained and enclosed and perfect in our minds but never let free from that cage.
Part Six: The grateful ache
We got past the struggle of that particular rehearsal day, and the company put on wonderful performances and we had large, enthusiastic audiences, and it was really the first time I had shared my work and had immediate responses from so many people, and to witness how it resonated with people was a beautiful thing.
And it felt like that moment was a significant one, but it didn't feel like the end of the journey for that play. It felt like we'd shown that there was more potential and an audience who this piece would resonate with, and I had learned what I needed as the writer to go back in and make some more revisions to the script.
After the festival, that's exactly what I did. I was still working with Gada on refining the piece, and once I got the script to a place where I felt it was ready and there really wasn't anything else I could do on my own at that point, I started submitting it in the hopes that it would be developed further and hopefully one day produced somewhere.
And then: crickets. There were a couple of notes of rejection, one really lovely one, but on the whole, there was just no reply, and that is fairly typical and I will talk in a future episode about submissions and, and handling rejection.
With there being no kind of external interest, I was also not at a point where I could really do further self-producing. It just wasn't feasible given the scale of the play.
For a while after that, it was just really hard for me to even think about the play because there was this really strong ache I felt whenever I did.
I think that can happen to us as artists when we put so much into a particular piece, and we just have the sense, or we have some evidence of how it seems to connect with people and then for whatever reason, it doesn't really find its way into the world as fully as we'd hoped it would.
And I have to say, if I'm being honest, that the ache has lessened, but it's not entirely gone. There's still just this tinge of it when I think about the play, but I can hold that alongside the immense gratitude and joy that the work on this play gave me. Like with so much of the creative process, I can hold both seemingly contradictory things and know them to be true.
I learned so much about myself and my creative work and my creative process through this experience. It brought some wonderful collaborators and friends into my life. It allowed my work to be witnessed and seen, and as I said earlier, it gave me the chance to reclaim my power in the work and how it made its way into the world.
Also, this play was a chance to share a story that meant so much to me. I remember sitting in one of the lectures for my World War I history class, and the professor was describing his experience of going to a community war memorial, and of how he read, he witnessed each individual name, and he was on the verge of tears describing that experience to us, and I felt the same sitting there, thinking of that immense loss and sacrifice and of the soldiers who wrote of that loss and the horrors they experienced and witnessed, but who also wrote about how they survived it, and that creation and art and performance, those are absolutely necessary parts of how we as a species survive.
That is what resonated so much for me in that second-year university classroom, and in reading the literature of that period, and what I recognized instantly in my gut when looking at that picture of a soldier who was getting ready to put on a show that would for an hour or two make the unbearable bearable.
We get through, we survive through what we create, and what we can offer others through our creations.
