Daniel David Moses is a playwright, poet and an author of fiction and non-fiction. His play The Almighty Voice and His Wife (Playwrights Canada Press), which has been called "part of the canon of great Canadian drama", was recently issued in a second edition. Today Daniel David Moses talks with Open Book for our Kingston WritersFest interview series.
Kingston WritersFest is one of Ontario's most popular literary events, drawing guest authors from around the world as well as from the dynamic and well-established Kingston literary community.
Visit Open Book: Ontario throughout the month for more interviews with KWF authors!
Open Book:
Have you been to or lived in Kingston before? If so, what are some of your favourite spots? If not, what are you most looking forward to about visiting?
Daniel David Moses:
I’ve lived in Kingston these past eight years and my 'favourite spots' have come into focus during that period. They are those places in the downtown where the few streets that open up over the river allow me to catch a view of Wolfe Island and its recently erected windmills. As beautiful in their cycling as they are as human constructions connected to nature, it’s their embodiment of a better future on the horizon that heartens me.
OB:
Tell us about what you’ll be reading at this year’s festival.
DDM:
Probably a few of the poems from a series I wrote about growing up in the Grand River Valley on the Six Nations Reserve — I produced a CD of them called River Range, Poems, with music by David Deleary — or perhaps some new revisions of poems from a collection that will be out from Exile Editions next year.
OB:
What are some of your favourite memories from past readings, from this event or others?
LL:
Maybe twenty years ago, during the time when the issue of 'voice appropriation' was coming awkwardly into articulation, a panel of us, say four or five First Nations writers, were answering questions from the audience (perhaps this was in Vancouver?) and someone inquired what we thought about the work of a certain non-Native writer who wrote 'Indian stories' (I’m using the quotation marks editorially). We were all of us apparently tired of talking about the issue or that writer in particular, I have to assume, because each of us in turn passed the question on down the line until it just floated offstage into the darkness of the wings…
OB:
What’s the best advice about public readings you have ever received?
DDM:
I can’t recall who told me this. I just remember it was an older man and that he was a bit gruff — I was still green, so perhaps it was Irving Layton, way back when I was a student — but that I decided finally he was right: "If you’re not feeling well, don’t tell the audience. Your job is to communicate your work as clearly as possible and getting the audience to feel sorry for you will just be a distraction. If you’re really that sick, you should stay at home in bed."
OB:
Tell us about one or two of the best Canadian books you’ve read recently.
DDM:
Pigeon, the poetry collection by Karen Solie, and Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul, the novel by David Adams Richards.
OB:
What are you most looking forward to about this year’s Kingston WritersFest?
DDM:
Running into other local writers who never seem to escape their keyboards and houses at the same time of day I do. I know they're out there but I never get to hear how they’re doing and about how their work’s going.
Daniel David Moses "a coroner of the theatre who slices open the human heart to reveal the fear, hatred and love that have eaten away at it. His dark play... can leave its audience shaking with emotion." (Kate Taylor, The Globe & Mail, about The Indian Medicine Shows). Moses, a Delaware from the Six Nations lands on the Grand River, lives in Toronto, where he writes, and in Kingston, where he teaches in the Department of Drama at Queen’s University.
For more information about The Almighty Voice and His Wife please visit the Playwrights Canada Press website.
Buy this book at your local independent bookstore or online at Chapters/Indigo or Amazon.
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