a shipwrecked alien navigating by synaptic constellations
To write is to translate complex neuronal encounters with both sides of reality
I’ve rarely met a sentence I didn’t want to play with. I adore James Baldwin’s advice to ‘write a sentence as clean as bone’, since syntax is an underappreciated art form in and of itself. The most memorable writing leaves imprints on the body like braille, easily thumbed and reignited when we need it later.
As a practicing journalist, interviewer, and aspiring novelist, I look for a kind of chemical combustion in all my interactions—from interviewees leading major arts institutions across North America to the texture of trees, a stranger’s speaking posture, or a fascinating idialect to collect for a character.
I’ve learned to trust an internal ballast, and writing has been the best way to sand and shape this natural, buoyant weight so that it can survive any storm. When I have to swim down deep into an idea shrouded in hadopelagic darkness or investigate a disturbing subject in an article, I know the ballast will be waiting on the surface for when I return to write.
Professional Writing
A contributor with Blue Riband and smART Magazine, I’m currently exploring how the arts have adapted to a global pandemic and how that crisis itself has just begun to crack open the diamond-dense global structure of white supremacy. 2020 allowed me to develop my skill as an interviewer and investigative journalist grounded in the values of compassionate activism.
In my previous positions with Inside Out LGBT Film Festival, Against the Grain Theatre, the Toronto Arts Foundation and Playwright’s Guild of Canada, I’ve always relief on a rigorous writing and editing process to make my projects stand out and move a reader. From meticulously crafted high-engagement social media posts to newsletters designed to pull the eye along to formal policy and grant writing, I go into a subspace when focused on rendering any written communication. I call it the Bathwater State, when all surrounding sounds and stimuli become submerged, distant, and obscured while I work.
Creative Projects
I’m in the middle stages of writing a novel that explores how consciousness manifests in both material and immaterial reality, and how unloved children adapt in mysterious ways that transcend the border. Repressing frostbit memories of the glacial warren she was born in, a lonely child pursues an oscillating exhilaration that will swallow her backwards out of a hostile underground city. When mutilated gods seek her out to help them die peacefully, a scientist branded as a heretic for her thesis projects and fighting to get back to her sons has to answer why.
I’m also developing a screenplay that centres around how neurologically similar a haunted house is to an abusive home, mirroring the constant tension and need to navigate around an irrational, violent presence that cannot be reasoned with—which haunts a person’s nervous system long after they’ve escaped.
In line with both these projects, I’m committed to a long-term narrative of trauma recovery that investigates how my imagination insulated me (as much as possible) from a radioactive environment as a child. It also explores how opera, ballet, theatre, symphonies and drag queens all provided intensive forms of therapy in my twenties. I’ve always been looking for a cathedral in some form or another, a space to submerge in thunderous song and sound—the frequencies at which one’s soul sheds its scar tissue. The mind and body together can function as such a cathedral, even when fire-bombing opens the vaulted ceiling to the elements. To heal the spirit from ongoing, complex trauma is, to me, an act as defiantly resilient and spiritually rewarding as every post-war architect that built back the proud ceilings of caved-in cathedrals.
Background
I’ve enjoyed four years as a creative associate with White Mills Theatre Company as an actress, writer, and movement consultant. Staged at Spadina Museum, we performed an adaptation of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol during the 2019 holiday season in which I played The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, and a production of Gian Carlo Menotti’s “The Medium” in October 2018 in which I played another ghost. I’m extremely grateful to help this incredible company bring their fresh, haunting operatic productions to life.
After studying English and Theatre at the University of Toronto and matriculating through the Dance Current’s Emerging Arts Critics program, I built a portfolio of published reviews and articles based in Toronto’s performing arts.
