Coffee Chats
Held each morning March 7-11, over Zoom, coffee chats are an opportunity for playwrights, dramaturges, panellists, performers, and the community to connect.
Monday March 7
10:00am- 11:00am Coffee Break hosted by Courtney Brown
Come and chat about what’s on your mind. Projects-in-process, writers' blocks, ideas, inspirations, etc. This low-key morning check-in has no designated topic - come and say Hi!
Tuesday March 8
10:00am- 11:00am Coffee Break hosted by Nicole Smith
Come and chat about what’s on your mind. Projects-in-process, writers' blocks, ideas, inspirations, etc. This low-key morning check-in has no designated topic - come and say Hi!
Wednesday March 9
10:00am- 11:00am Coffee Break hosted by Karen Monie on Parenting in the Arts. BYOY - Bring your own Youngster! This morning's check-in is welcome to all but will include a discussion
on parenting in the arts. Babies welcome.
Thursday March 10
10:00am- 11:00am Coffee Break Group Mingle hosted by Andrea Dunne
Participants will get the chance to break into smaller groups for short chat sessions - get the chance to make
a few new friends or catch up with old ones!
Friday March 11
10:00am- 11:00am Coffee Break Conclusion hosted by Nicole Smith
Nicole will lead us in our final coffee session of the week to decompress and finish off after a busy week of
festival-ing.
Email [email protected] for your invite!
Held each morning March 7-11, over Zoom, coffee chats are an opportunity for playwrights, dramaturges, panellists, performers, and the community to connect.
Monday March 7
10:00am- 11:00am Coffee Break hosted by Courtney Brown
Come and chat about what’s on your mind. Projects-in-process, writers' blocks, ideas, inspirations, etc. This low-key morning check-in has no designated topic - come and say Hi!
Tuesday March 8
10:00am- 11:00am Coffee Break hosted by Nicole Smith
Come and chat about what’s on your mind. Projects-in-process, writers' blocks, ideas, inspirations, etc. This low-key morning check-in has no designated topic - come and say Hi!
Wednesday March 9
10:00am- 11:00am Coffee Break hosted by Karen Monie on Parenting in the Arts. BYOY - Bring your own Youngster! This morning's check-in is welcome to all but will include a discussion
on parenting in the arts. Babies welcome.
Thursday March 10
10:00am- 11:00am Coffee Break Group Mingle hosted by Andrea Dunne
Participants will get the chance to break into smaller groups for short chat sessions - get the chance to make
a few new friends or catch up with old ones!
Friday March 11
10:00am- 11:00am Coffee Break Conclusion hosted by Nicole Smith
Nicole will lead us in our final coffee session of the week to decompress and finish off after a busy week of
festival-ing.
Email [email protected] for your invite!
Workshops
Monday March 7, 1:00pm-2:30pm
Write like a M#therF$ucker
Stacy Gardner returns to the Women's Work Festival with her signature writing workshop that will have you doing exactly what it says. Have your paper and pens handy because you will need them as different ways to get writing and KEEP writing are explored. You might not leave with a finished manuscript, but you will leave with a toolbox full of tips and tricks to get you writing regularly and feeling like a writer!
Wednesday March 9, 1:00pm-2:30pm
A Workshop on being a Workshop Actor
Acting in a workshop with a dramaturge and the playwright is different from acting on stage in a performance. Come and find out and learn some skills on how to be the best workshop actor you can be for the playwright. Join Nicole Rousseau and Allison Moira Kelly as they discuss the development process, it’s uses, and how much fun it can be!
Monday March 7, 1:00pm-2:30pm
Write like a M#therF$ucker
Stacy Gardner returns to the Women's Work Festival with her signature writing workshop that will have you doing exactly what it says. Have your paper and pens handy because you will need them as different ways to get writing and KEEP writing are explored. You might not leave with a finished manuscript, but you will leave with a toolbox full of tips and tricks to get you writing regularly and feeling like a writer!
Wednesday March 9, 1:00pm-2:30pm
A Workshop on being a Workshop Actor
Acting in a workshop with a dramaturge and the playwright is different from acting on stage in a performance. Come and find out and learn some skills on how to be the best workshop actor you can be for the playwright. Join Nicole Rousseau and Allison Moira Kelly as they discuss the development process, it’s uses, and how much fun it can be!
Performance Walk & Hot Chocolate Social
Friday March 11, 1:00pm-3:00pm
A walk around downtown St. John's with pop-up performances along the way that will start outside the LSPU Hall and end in a Hot Chocolate Social at Atlantic Place.
1250 - 1pm: Meet outside the LSPU Hall, 3 Victoria Street (Jana will be warming up so you can follow the sound of pipes!)
1pm: Opening remarks, land acknowledgement from Laura Williams
Bagpipe performance by Jana Gillis
Spoken word Poetry by Leslie Butt
Walk to Harbourside Park (5 min)
Susan Kelsey performs an excerpt of her new play "Gold-Star Girlfriend"
Walk to St. Michael's Printshop (5 min)
Comedy Performance by Katy Warren
Clown Performance by Vanessa Cardoso Whelan
Walk to Atlantic Place (5 min)
Poetry & a Song by Allie Duff
Poetry by Violet Drake
HOT CHOCOLATE SOCIAL!
Friday March 11, 1:00pm-3:00pm
A walk around downtown St. John's with pop-up performances along the way that will start outside the LSPU Hall and end in a Hot Chocolate Social at Atlantic Place.
1250 - 1pm: Meet outside the LSPU Hall, 3 Victoria Street (Jana will be warming up so you can follow the sound of pipes!)
1pm: Opening remarks, land acknowledgement from Laura Williams
Bagpipe performance by Jana Gillis
Spoken word Poetry by Leslie Butt
Walk to Harbourside Park (5 min)
Susan Kelsey performs an excerpt of her new play "Gold-Star Girlfriend"
Walk to St. Michael's Printshop (5 min)
Comedy Performance by Katy Warren
Clown Performance by Vanessa Cardoso Whelan
Walk to Atlantic Place (5 min)
Poetry & a Song by Allie Duff
Poetry by Violet Drake
HOT CHOCOLATE SOCIAL!
PlayConnect Reading with PGC Playwrights
Wednesday March 9, 3:00pm-4:30pm
A reading with four PGC playwrights reading excerpts of their plays.
Prajwala Dixit is an award winning storyteller working as a playwright, journalist, documentary filmmaker and author. Her work has been produced by Artistic Fraud, Resource Centre For The Arts, Arts and Culture Centre, White Rooster Theatre, PerSIStence and Eastern Front Theatre. Currently, she awaits the release of her children's book called The Tales of Dwipa with Breakwater Books and is finishing a short documentary called Love, Amma with The National Film Board of Canada while juggling writing for The Globe and Mail, The Independent, POV, Newfoundland Quarterly and Riddle Fence. An avid story gobbler through films and books, she calls Bengaluru and St. John's home where she lives with her husband and daughter.
She will be reading from Apaharan. In this multilingual retelling, five women from Valmiki's Ramayana, an epic Sanskrit poem with 24,000 verses, recant their version of the tale, boldly speaking about the wrongs they were subjected to by Rama, the protagonist of Ramayana and the crown prince of Ayodhya. The women and their stories address the audience in Newfoundland and Labrador, in the hopes of having their side of the story heard and spoken, something that the rest of the world has denied them. In doing so, they examine how the socio-cultural construct cast them out of the epic and into the shadow of Rama. Although Valmiki’s Ramayana has deep meaning as a cultural and religious text, ‘Apaharan’ examines Ramayana purely and simply as a rich work of Indian literature. The resulting play will be a work of fiction for educational and entertainment purposes only and does not intend to hurt the sentiments of any individual, community, sect or religion.
This project is jointly funded by the Canada Council For The Arts and The Arts and Culture Centre, St. John's.
Natalie Meisner she is a playwright, an award-winning multi-genre author who grew up on the South Shore of Nova Scotia and got her start in the indie theatre and spoken word scene of Halifax, NS. Since then she has worked across the country in theatre and the literary arts and currently serves as the 5th Poet Laureate of Calgary. Her work often deploys the power of comedy for social change. BADDIE ONE SHOE (Frontenac) is a collection of odes to renegade women who fight the powers that be with laughter. LEGISLATING LOVE: THE EVERETT KLIPPERT STORY (University of Calgary Press) illuminates the life of a beloved Calgary bus driver and the last Canadian to be jailed for homosexuality. Her play BOOM BABY won both the Canadian National & the Alberta Playwriting Award. SPEED DATING FOR SPERM DONORS (Playwright’s Canada Press) was a hit at Lunchbox & Neptune. Double Pregnant: Two Lesbians Make a Family (Fernwood) topped non-fiction lists and her first book for kids My Mommy, My Mama My Brother & Me (Nimbus) is about a two-mom biracial family finding community. Meisner is a wife and mom to two great boys and a Professor in the Department of English at Mount Royal University where she works in the areas of creative writing, drama and gender/ sexuality studies. www.nataliemeisner.com
She will be reading from LESBIANISH: Five short plays about Sexuality, Motherhood and Identity. This play was prompted by a comment gifted to me by one of my playwriting heros and a literary lion from the Maritimes, Daniel MacIvor. At Buddies in Bad Times Q 2Q panel discussion we were discussing, with much good humour and laughter the shifting nature of the labels that we call ourselves or others call us. I noted that the term lesbian felt a good fit for me at some points in life and sometimes it felt like an ill-fitting turtleneck made for someone else. I said I would call myself Lesbian-ish. And he noted what a great title that would be... and said I had better write it. When Daniel MacIvor tells you to do a thing... well I think you'd have to be a knucklehead not to.
Nicole Leona Smith is a writer, theatre creator, director, and producer who splits her time between her homes in Cambridge, Ontario, and St. John's, Newfoundland. Her work as a playwright has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Shaw Festival, and Canadian Stage. Nicole's most recent play-in-progress, Girls From Away, is a co-creation with Bernardine Stapleton about the hundreds of women who were recruited from central Newfoundland to Cambridge during WWII and was the subject of a national CBC Documentary by Heather Barrett. She is co-Artistic Director of the Kitchen Party Theatre Festival (KPTF) in Grand Falls-Windsor, Newfoundland, and founding Artistic Producer of Sonderlust, a theatre collective dedicated to the creation of original work and the staging of women's stories. She's held artistic residencies with the Arts and Culture Centres of Newfoundland and Spark Box Studio, and was recipient of a Metcalf Foundation Performing Arts Internship in Artistic Production in 2017.
Nicole has a BA in Theatre Studies and Psychology from the University of Guelph and is a recent graduate of Humber School for Writers, where she had the honour of studying under Camilla Gibb. Her writing has been published in a handful of literary journals, and she is the 2021 recipient of the New Quarterly's Peter Hinchcliffe Award for Short Fiction for her story Something Really Unbelievable. Nicole is currently at work on her first novel. She is a member of the Playwright's Guild of Canada, the Writer's Union of Canada, and Playwright's Atlantic Resource Centre, and she's directed or assistant directed for Sonderlust, KPTF, Persistence Theatre Company, and the St. John's Shorts. Nicole has served on juries for the Ontario Arts Council, the New Quarterly, and Pat the Dog Theatre Creation, and she sits on the Board of Directors of the Women's Work Festival in St. John’s.
She will be reading from Euphemia which was commissioned and produced by Green Light Arts in August 2021 as part of their summer show, We Could Be. It’s a short piece about everyday magic, dedicated to anyone who is too much, not enough, lonely, suffocated, overwhelmed, longing, looking, grateful, satisfied, angry, hungry, scared, tired, standing, falling, wasting, bursting, screaming, yelling, quiet, sleeping, dreaming, daring, wide awake. To you and to me, and to all of our selves at once. To all of ourselves together.
Shannon Bramer is a poet and playwright. Trapsongs: three plays was published in 2020 (Book*hug Press) and is dedicated to the Women’s Work Festival, where all of Shannon’s plays have been workshopped and developed. Her recent work includes two illustrated collections of poetry: Climbing Shadows (illustrated by Cindy Derby) and Robot, Unicorn, Queen: poems for you and me (forthcoming in 2023).
She will be reading from The Hungriest Woman in the World. In the tragicomedy, Aimee, a former artist, invites her preoccupied, workaholic husband, Robert, to the theatre to see a play about a sad octopus. His refusal sends her on a dark and playful journey into the topsy-turvy world of theatre itself.
Wednesday March 9, 3:00pm-4:30pm
A reading with four PGC playwrights reading excerpts of their plays.
Prajwala Dixit is an award winning storyteller working as a playwright, journalist, documentary filmmaker and author. Her work has been produced by Artistic Fraud, Resource Centre For The Arts, Arts and Culture Centre, White Rooster Theatre, PerSIStence and Eastern Front Theatre. Currently, she awaits the release of her children's book called The Tales of Dwipa with Breakwater Books and is finishing a short documentary called Love, Amma with The National Film Board of Canada while juggling writing for The Globe and Mail, The Independent, POV, Newfoundland Quarterly and Riddle Fence. An avid story gobbler through films and books, she calls Bengaluru and St. John's home where she lives with her husband and daughter.
She will be reading from Apaharan. In this multilingual retelling, five women from Valmiki's Ramayana, an epic Sanskrit poem with 24,000 verses, recant their version of the tale, boldly speaking about the wrongs they were subjected to by Rama, the protagonist of Ramayana and the crown prince of Ayodhya. The women and their stories address the audience in Newfoundland and Labrador, in the hopes of having their side of the story heard and spoken, something that the rest of the world has denied them. In doing so, they examine how the socio-cultural construct cast them out of the epic and into the shadow of Rama. Although Valmiki’s Ramayana has deep meaning as a cultural and religious text, ‘Apaharan’ examines Ramayana purely and simply as a rich work of Indian literature. The resulting play will be a work of fiction for educational and entertainment purposes only and does not intend to hurt the sentiments of any individual, community, sect or religion.
This project is jointly funded by the Canada Council For The Arts and The Arts and Culture Centre, St. John's.
Natalie Meisner she is a playwright, an award-winning multi-genre author who grew up on the South Shore of Nova Scotia and got her start in the indie theatre and spoken word scene of Halifax, NS. Since then she has worked across the country in theatre and the literary arts and currently serves as the 5th Poet Laureate of Calgary. Her work often deploys the power of comedy for social change. BADDIE ONE SHOE (Frontenac) is a collection of odes to renegade women who fight the powers that be with laughter. LEGISLATING LOVE: THE EVERETT KLIPPERT STORY (University of Calgary Press) illuminates the life of a beloved Calgary bus driver and the last Canadian to be jailed for homosexuality. Her play BOOM BABY won both the Canadian National & the Alberta Playwriting Award. SPEED DATING FOR SPERM DONORS (Playwright’s Canada Press) was a hit at Lunchbox & Neptune. Double Pregnant: Two Lesbians Make a Family (Fernwood) topped non-fiction lists and her first book for kids My Mommy, My Mama My Brother & Me (Nimbus) is about a two-mom biracial family finding community. Meisner is a wife and mom to two great boys and a Professor in the Department of English at Mount Royal University where she works in the areas of creative writing, drama and gender/ sexuality studies. www.nataliemeisner.com
She will be reading from LESBIANISH: Five short plays about Sexuality, Motherhood and Identity. This play was prompted by a comment gifted to me by one of my playwriting heros and a literary lion from the Maritimes, Daniel MacIvor. At Buddies in Bad Times Q 2Q panel discussion we were discussing, with much good humour and laughter the shifting nature of the labels that we call ourselves or others call us. I noted that the term lesbian felt a good fit for me at some points in life and sometimes it felt like an ill-fitting turtleneck made for someone else. I said I would call myself Lesbian-ish. And he noted what a great title that would be... and said I had better write it. When Daniel MacIvor tells you to do a thing... well I think you'd have to be a knucklehead not to.
Nicole Leona Smith is a writer, theatre creator, director, and producer who splits her time between her homes in Cambridge, Ontario, and St. John's, Newfoundland. Her work as a playwright has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Shaw Festival, and Canadian Stage. Nicole's most recent play-in-progress, Girls From Away, is a co-creation with Bernardine Stapleton about the hundreds of women who were recruited from central Newfoundland to Cambridge during WWII and was the subject of a national CBC Documentary by Heather Barrett. She is co-Artistic Director of the Kitchen Party Theatre Festival (KPTF) in Grand Falls-Windsor, Newfoundland, and founding Artistic Producer of Sonderlust, a theatre collective dedicated to the creation of original work and the staging of women's stories. She's held artistic residencies with the Arts and Culture Centres of Newfoundland and Spark Box Studio, and was recipient of a Metcalf Foundation Performing Arts Internship in Artistic Production in 2017.
Nicole has a BA in Theatre Studies and Psychology from the University of Guelph and is a recent graduate of Humber School for Writers, where she had the honour of studying under Camilla Gibb. Her writing has been published in a handful of literary journals, and she is the 2021 recipient of the New Quarterly's Peter Hinchcliffe Award for Short Fiction for her story Something Really Unbelievable. Nicole is currently at work on her first novel. She is a member of the Playwright's Guild of Canada, the Writer's Union of Canada, and Playwright's Atlantic Resource Centre, and she's directed or assistant directed for Sonderlust, KPTF, Persistence Theatre Company, and the St. John's Shorts. Nicole has served on juries for the Ontario Arts Council, the New Quarterly, and Pat the Dog Theatre Creation, and she sits on the Board of Directors of the Women's Work Festival in St. John’s.
She will be reading from Euphemia which was commissioned and produced by Green Light Arts in August 2021 as part of their summer show, We Could Be. It’s a short piece about everyday magic, dedicated to anyone who is too much, not enough, lonely, suffocated, overwhelmed, longing, looking, grateful, satisfied, angry, hungry, scared, tired, standing, falling, wasting, bursting, screaming, yelling, quiet, sleeping, dreaming, daring, wide awake. To you and to me, and to all of our selves at once. To all of ourselves together.
Shannon Bramer is a poet and playwright. Trapsongs: three plays was published in 2020 (Book*hug Press) and is dedicated to the Women’s Work Festival, where all of Shannon’s plays have been workshopped and developed. Her recent work includes two illustrated collections of poetry: Climbing Shadows (illustrated by Cindy Derby) and Robot, Unicorn, Queen: poems for you and me (forthcoming in 2023).
She will be reading from The Hungriest Woman in the World. In the tragicomedy, Aimee, a former artist, invites her preoccupied, workaholic husband, Robert, to the theatre to see a play about a sad octopus. His refusal sends her on a dark and playful journey into the topsy-turvy world of theatre itself.
