Waiting for the Parade is John Murrell’s play, set in Calgary during World War II, in which five women gather to work for the war effort while their men are away. Waiting for the Parade was first performed by Alberta Theatre Projects, Calgary. Subsequently, it has been performed by Northern…

A historical documentary of Sitting Bull’s exile in Canada after the Montana massacre at Little Big Horn. The play examines Sitting Bull’s relationship with superintendent Walsh of the North West Mounted Police and is the study of the disillusionment of a man who believes in his government’s integrity but who…

It is 1897, and word of gold on the Klondike has spurred a frantic rush of miners to cash in on the riches rumoured to be found there. But by the time the prospectors arrive, all the claims have been staked. Without enough supplies or expertise to endure the harsh…

Makes available for the first time the collected works of this significant feminist, experimental prose writer and member of the renowned TISH group.

War Cantata translated by Keith Turnbull How far will humanity go in its quest for power? Why do we desire to eliminate each other through war? War Cantata looks at ways the impulse for violence is transmitted from one generation to the next; for example, when a father teaches his…

Warriors enters the world of advertising where, even if the product is war, the product can be sold. Two ad men lock themselves in a room to work on a new slogan for The Canadian Armed Forces — the tension of creation is brilliantly and dangerously portrayed as they consider…

WASPs is one of those plays where the whole is quite literally much greater than the sum of its parts—so much so that it becomes, in retrospect, the subject of the play, “what the play is about,” and that doesn’t hit you until you are half-way home after a fun…

Wayside Sang concerns entwined migrations of Black-other diaspora coming to terms with fossil-fuel psyches in times of trauma and movement. This is a poetic account of economy travel on North American roadways, across Peace and Ambassador bridges and through the Fleetway tunnel, above and beneath Great Lake rivers between nation…

Canada’s master playwright applies his trademark black humour and incredibly crisp dialogue to the family and multiculturalism. We the Family follows the ripple effects within two culturally and racially divergent families when their children wed. The list of characters in We the Family reads like an ethnic joke, which, indeed,…

Inspired by a true story, we the same opens in 1979 Việt Nam, where six children and a mother become separated from their father and husband as they flee their homeland by boat. Against all odds, they survive pirate attacks, typhoons, and starvation, ending up shipwrecked on a desert island.…

When the Westray mine exploded, the human tragedy and suffering that resulted were chilling proof that the age-old price paid for coal is human blood. After the dead were laid to rest, the bureaucratic back-stabbing and corporate refusal of responsibility were all too familiar to followers of the history of…

In Wet, a transient Chinese American model working in Singapore thirsts for the unattainable: fair labour rights, the extinguishing of nearby forest fires, breathable air, healthy habitats for animals, human connection. She navigates place and placelessness while observing other migrant workers toiling outdoors despite the hazardous conditions. In photographs and…

A love story in which a faded old queen finds his life slipping away from him along with his young lover, who meets a new, younger man.“One day when I was sitting in a tiny little basement bar I noticed a man sitting alone at the bar—an elegant old queen…

Two-time Governor General’s Award-winning playwright Morris Panych has done with What Lies Before Us the almost unthinkable: he has turned Waiting for Godot into a comedy while simultaneously heightening rather than minimizing the profound existential questions it asks. But this play is no mere parody of a theatre classic, nor…

what’s left, a book in six related sections, presents us with cues and clues to the poet’s compositional strategies. The first section, “hazelnut,” measures time as the unfolding life of space. It alludes to mclennan’s long-term genealogy project, in which he discovers traces of the Sumerian flood, Etruscans, Icelanders, and…

Where the Blood Mixes is meant to expose the shadows below the surface of the author’s First Nations heritage, and to celebrate its survivors. Though torn down years ago, the memories of their Residential School still live deep inside the hearts of those who spent their childhoods there. For some,…

Dragging Newfoundland “kicking and screaming into the 20th century” (a quote attributed to Joey Smallwood), resettlement was a carrot-and-stick approach to depopulating the province’s fishing outports. Communities were encouraged to abandon themselves in exchange for financial aid and the promise of better services in centralized “growth” towns. Between 1954 and…

From the author of Into the Sun and Vandal Love, acclaimed for “prose that’s both lyrical and gritty, able to evoke big emotions with exquisite intimacy” (O, The Oprah Magazine), White is a riveting novel that explores whiteness, modern humanitarianism, and the lies of American exceptionalism and white supremacy.Assigned to…

The third volume in Marchessault’s autobiographically based trilogy. White Pebbles in the Dark Forests traces a reconciliation between men and women, children and parents, animals and humans, and the past and future as it looks at the connections between the visible and the invisible. Following Like a Child of the…

It’s October 1944. During a brief respite from the aerial bombardment of London, Sebastian Wigrum absconds from his small flat and disappears into the fog for a walk in the Unreal City. This is our first and only encounter with the enigmatic man we come to discover decades later through…

Willful Acts is an expanded and updated collection of Margaret Hollingsworth’s best-known and most popular plays, including The Apple in the Eye, Everloving, Diving, Islands, and War Babies (nominated for a Governor General’s Award); along with her latest play, Commonwealth Games. Hollingsworth’s earlier work showcases recurring women’s issues and themes…

Two buddies, theatre artists and long-time friends Marcus and James, sit at a table and pass the time together playing a made-up game in which they name people, places, or things – Pamela Anderson, microwave ovens, their fathers, Goldman Sachs – and debate whether they are successful or not; in…

With Bated Breath asks questions about memory—how and why it plays such a prominent role in our lives: how time affects it, how it fractures, how we often reinvent it depending on the situation—and why it is that certain things stay with us with a blistering clarity, while the shadows…

Three people gaze out their living room window as the days pass. Across the street in Withrow Park, life goes on – or is it a dream?Then comes a knock at the door. Time has found them, hiding in plain sight. Or possibly it’s just a man in a wrinkled…

Witness Back at Me is personal dissection that draws on the author’s childhood episodes of disembodiment, when, through the death of his mother from cancer at age two, he lost his ability to speak for nearly two years, which is also the time when he was placed in a foster home at a dairy farm outside Calgary, from age two to four. During this tim

In 1999, poet and novelist Madeleine Gagnon undertook to document the experience of women in the many war zones at the end of a “century of ashes” through their own eyes and in their own words. Her record of those encounters boldly confronts the harshest realities of and asks the…

Write It on Your Heart is a celebration of the late Harry Robinson, one of the great storytellers of the Interior Salish people of North America.Collected over a ten-year period, the stories selected for this volume tell from a First Nations point of view about the origin of the world;…

George Bowering was born in Penticton, where his great-grandfather Willis Brinson lived, and Bowering has never been all that far from the Okanagan Valley in his heart and imagination. Early in the twenty-first century, he was made a permanent citizen of Oliver. Bowering has family up and down the Valley,…

Torrential rains have descended upon a small isolated village, and the overflowing river has washed away everything in its path. The mudslide has gutted the writing room, the place where a group of senior citizens used to meet to record their memories. It was after the exodus of their children…