Canadian playwright, actor and dramaturg Beth Graham is MacEwan’s 33rd writer in residence.
Graham was born in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, grew up in Cochrane, Alberta, and now lives in Edmonton. Her plays and collaborations have been produced nationally and internationally in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Turkey.
She has been a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for The Gravitational Pull of Bernice Trimble in 2015, is a two-time recipient of the Gwen Pharis Ringwood Alberta Literary Award for Drama and has been a finalist for the Carol Bolt Award. Her plays and co-creations include: The Drowning Girls (co-creator), Pretty Goblins, Weasel, Mules (co-creator) and Dora Maar: The Wicked One (co-creator). She has also published four books with Playwrights Canada Press, including the soon-to-be-released Mermaid Legs.
Recently, Graham was the Lee playwright in residence at the University of Alberta and the dramaturg in residence at Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre in Edmonton.
We caught up with her to find out more as she prepares to take on this role with MacEwan.
How did you get started as a writer and what led you to discover that this is what you wanted to do?
I wrote a lot as a young person. I wrote some poetry and short stories, and then I got into theatre. I started writing plays when I was in theatre school in the early ’90s. I started writing and collaborating with other writers, and The Drowning Girls, which I co-wrote with two other writers for the Fringe Theatre Festival, went on to tour across Canada.
If you weren’t a writer, what would you have done?
I probably would have stuck with acting, but you need more than just being an actor. So some of the writing came from necessity, but then I realized how much I loved it and that I had a real passion for it. Then I discovered dramaturgy, which is the study of dramatic composition and scripts. I was working with other writers to discover what they were working on with their plays, and I quite enjoyed being a script coach.
Some of your work is historically based and others are more situational – what motivates you to pick one or the other?
Sometimes a play starts with an image, sometimes it starts with a historical event or a person in history and sometimes it starts with a theme. But more often than not, for me, it starts with dreaming up characters. Sometimes those characters might just be a footnote in history. Then I want to build out their story and invent from there. My history might not always be fully accurate, but there certainly are plays that come from events that I read about, events that are of interest to me.
Once you have a character in mind – whether it’s historical or not – what is your process from there?
I’m a bit of a gardener, so I write out in all directions to try to discover character – what motivates them and what their next steps are in the story. I will write little themes that I’m stimulated by, thinking of events in their lives or little lines of dialogue that might occur to me. Then often I will collage it together and a structure will start to present itself. Usually, my process is to generate a whole heck of a lot of writing and then try to see what it’s telling me. That’s when I find the narrative, and for me, it takes a lot of time. Sometimes a play will just emerge and it will write itself – that’s the dream! But usually it takes me years of experimenting before it starts to come together.
How challenging is it for you to take the way that you work and help young writers with what they want to do?
I love working with different writers at any level of experience. It’s just trying to be intuitive with them and to listen and to respond. Sometimes, as a writer, you don’t even know what the work is about – you’re just writing from an intuitive place. It’s great to have another set of eyes read what you have. That conversation with someone else can help get you unstuck. It can get you going in another direction that you hadn’t considered before. I’ve learned to be a cheerleader in a lot of ways and sometimes that’s what you need as a playwright.
What are you most looking forward to in this role at MacEwan?
When you meet new writers, there is always someone new to be inspired by and to hopefully inspire in return. Primarily, my interest is in playwriting. I’ve had a little experience in other forms or riffing with people about how they write short stories, novels or poetry. I’m excited to learn about that and to see how I can feed these other forms of writing
What advice do you have for aspiring writers?
Read as much as you can, and go and see plays if you’re interested in being a playwright. Read plays and write, write, write! Just sit down and get some words on the page or on the screen and see what happens!
Visit MacEwan.ca/WIR to learn more about the writer in residence position, or to make an appointment.