Behind the Project: Greetings

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When Theatre New Brunswick’s Artistic Director Natasha MacLellan called me up late last summer, she began by saying, “I’m not quite sure what I’m asking you to do.” She said that she wanted to try something different for the Christmas slot in the TNB season, and starting by telling me that, during Covid, TNB had sent out a series of narrative postcards that had proved popular, and she asked if I was interested in coming up with a writing project that would involve not the stage but the mail. “Maybe Christmas cards?” she said, “Maybe something to do with the twelve days of Christmas?” It was a crazy idea that really appealed to me; I told her I’d think about it and get back to her in a week or so.

Just a few days before, I’d been given a shopping bag full of documents that had belonged to an old friend who, like me, had grown up in Shediac. Bev Taylor was the oldest sister of my childhood pal Richard, so much older, in fact, that she was off studying nursing in Montreal while we were still in primary school. Bev and I didn’t really get to know each other till I was in my forties and she was in her sixties; we hit it off when we met then, and afterwards would get together a couple of times a year and talk about our families, about the people we’d known in Shediac and Moncton, about New Brunswick. My dad had died so long before that she was the only friend of my adulthood who’d known him. Bev was wise and fun and a passionate supporter of the arts: anyone from Moncton who went to concerts, plays, events at the Frye Festival, Met Opera broadcasts or art exhibits would have known her. She came to see every production of mine in the Maritimes and every exhibit of my partner Doug Guildford’s art work. 

Bev died of Covid last year in July. The next month her daughter Lisa dropped off that shopping bag. Its contents were related to our lives in Shediac: local history books and pamphlets, a scrapbook of newspaper clippings: documents from her past and mine. And there was also a manila folder stuffed with old papers and photographs.

That folder stopped me in my tracks. It contained pretty much all that remains on earth as a record of the woman who had lived next door to Bev’s family in Shediac: a woman named June Roberts who was, as we used to say back then, an old maid and a career girl—she worked at the Bank of Montreal. In that folder were letters from relatives dating from 1905, photographs of June as a young girl in her garden, newspaper obits, funeral home receipts, greeting cards, property deeds, letters from the bank when she’d retired after forty-six years of service. I remembered this woman from my childhood: when I opened my first bank account (I would have been around ten) she was the teller who smiled down at me and handed me my first bank book. And I remember her house—I’d never been in it, but I used to play around it. We boys would sneak into the barn where there was an ancient bicycle with wooden tires. Decades ago, every house on that street but one was torn down and paved over; and now, here on my desk, was a photograph of her house with that wooden bicycle leaning against a tree in the front yard. She’d lived in that house her entire life, looking after her invalid mother and then, in the decades after that, had gone fairly batty. When she died, her house was overrun with not just cats but with the remains of cats: “Over ninety of them, living and dead,” Bev told me. A sad ending right out of a Southern Gothic. When I asked Lisa why her mother had kept all of this she replied, “I have no idea why she kept much of that but she was very sentimental and June had no family so I think it was her way of honouring her to not just discard it.”

I had been going through this little pile of a life, thinking about the things we leave behind and what they can say about us, when Natasha called. The project started taking shape in my head before I even got off the phone.

So, starting from Natasha’s idea of Christmas cards and the twelve days of Christmas, what I proposed were twelve mailings, each one associated with a specific Christmas, starting in 1924 and ending in 2024. For the most part, they will be cards with enclosures (letters, children’s notes, drawings, newspaper clippings) that tell the story of four generations of a New Brunswick family over a century. As they progress, they become a history of a hundred years of Christmas greetings, and look at how that custom has evolved over time. The texts of the letters move from handwriting in pencil and pen, to typewriters (upright then electric then electronic), and finally to computers. Through references to specific events, World War II, elections, the Mactaquac Dam, Centennial Year, and so on, the mailings also tell a history of the province, and the newspaper clippings show how social events (wedding announcements, obits etc) were conveyed over time.

I decided that one of my characters would be named June and that she would have a mysterious life completely unlike that of the woman whose documents had led me to the conception of Greetings. Readers will piece together bits of information as they go; I want to make this a similar experience to going through a box of old family papers and making connections. Each document is a clue. We first hear of “my” June in 1924 when she’s not yet five. Unlike her namesake, she will run away from the house with the wooden bicycle in the barn. Why? What happens to her? Will she come back?

Greetings: One Hundred Years of Family Life — birthdays, funerals, wars, and feuds; engagements, breakups, elopements, elections, school days, and holidays; tears, queers, debts, and secrets; I love yous, I hate yous… and all the news in between — in Twelve Letters is dedicated to my friend Bev Taylor and to her daughter Lisa Chance who brought that remarkable manilla folder to me.

 

Greetings would not have been possible without

the involvement of the following people:

 

Creative Team

Don Hannah – Writer

Goose Lane Editions – Production Partner

Andrea Evans – Project Designer

Jared Carney – Communications, Publicity, Web Design

Zinnia Maher-Watson – Production Assistant

Finn Boehm – Production Assistant

 

Letters and Cards

Natasha MacLellan

Joanna Bryson

Andrea Evans

Sherry Kinnear

Sharisse LeBrun

Naomi McGowan

Claude Fulton

Clement Fulton

Matt Carter

 

Writer Thanks

Peter Ennison

Doug Guildford

Janet Guildford

Clarissa Hurley

Martin Kinch

Emily Leadbeater

Suzanne Morton

 

Special Thanks

Allegra Printing

6 Colour Copy

GM Canada

Ross Drugs

Crosby Foods

Moosehead Breweries

Briggs and Little

NB Archives

Moonsteam Design Studio

Beaverbrook Art Gallery

 

Theatre New Brunswick

Natasha MacLellan

Joanna Bryson

Jared Carney

Andrea Evans

Naomi McGowan

Jamie Atkinson

Sherry Kinnear

Sharisse LeBrun

Trent Logan