The last year has been a busy one for Taylor Marie Graham.
The last time we spoke to the Cambridge playwright she was getting her children's opera Frog Song ready for audiences in Stratford and her dark drama Corporate Finch was about to hit the stage at the Impact 23 festival in Kitchener.
In the months that followed, she completed her MFA and PhD in theatre studies at the University of Guelph and became a professor of theatre studies at Western University.
Being so busy hasn't afforded Graham much time to immerse herself in the culture of the city she's called home for the last seven years.
And for a playwright that relies heavily on her surroundings to get her imagination in gear, it likely means a play set in Cambridge or inspired by Cambridge characters won't be coming from Graham anytime soon.
She laughs at the suggestion, saying its inevitable that some day she'll be inspired by someone or something she experiences on her walks around town and by the river.
But for now, her focus is on the work that's already received wide praise.
Still riding the wave of the success of Corporate Finch, Graham will be in Edmonton this week to see the play performed at the International Fringe Theatre Festival just before the one-act urban horror hits print as part of an anthology of Canadian plays.
Recently published Cottage Radio & Other Plays is a collection of some of Graham's work dating back to 2014, all inspired by her upbringing in Huron County.
Cottage Radio is set in Goderich around the time of the 2011 tornado that tore through the town.
Graham says it's a story about a family coming together after the storm and having to deal not only with the aftermath caused by the tornado, but also the emotional storm that's existed in their family for a long time.
On her website she describes White Wedding as a large-cast comedy set at a wedding reception in an old high school, where friends and lovers sneak off to reconnect and swim in nostalgia.
It was originally performed in Artscape Youngplace in Toronto, an old school converted into art studios that still looks like a high school.
"We did it in the hallway upstairs as if there was a wedding reception going on downstairs," Graham says. "So this is kind of the place that everybody had like these intimate moments upstairs and the audience sat in the hallways as if they were kind of listening in."
Post Alice weaves a true Huron County mystery into an evening of stories, song, and secrets shared by four women who are all reminiscent of author Alice Munro’s most memorable protagonists.
The women gather around a fire and begin to wonder what really happened to Mistie Murray, a teenager who disappeared in the mid-90s.
The play delves into true crime territory but also offers a reflection on Huron County's colonial past and the brutal land swaps perpetrated by The Canada Company against Indigenous people.
"It's essentially about four women kind of coming to terms with that and in a small way just sort of an opening up to the fact that they don't know everything about the land that they're on."
Graham was on a path of discovery in her own way while writing the play, finding out through her research that Mistie Murray had Mi'kmaq heritage, making the 16-year-old's disappearance and suspected murder part of the national tragedy of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.
"At that time I was thinking about post Alice Munro in terms of colonialism. I was asking questions like, what is Huron County Post Alice?"
Growing up not far from Munro's hometown, Graham says the author was a huge inspiration to her as a writer.
But in light of what has transpired over the last few months, Post Alice and her own feelings about the author have taken quite the journey, starting with Munro's death in May and recent revelations made by her daughter Andrea Skinner.
Last month Skinner revealed that her late stepfather Gerald Fremlin began sexually abusing her when she was nine and her mother knew about it.
Learning that dark family secret and how the literary icon kept it to herself has been difficult to process.
"Yeah, it's really complicated. There's a lot of layers to how I'm feeling about it," Graham says.
"She's always been quite, you know, this huge historical literary figure, but I always think you have to question your heroes so that's why I also was asking about her stories," she says.
"I mean, it's a universal problem obviously, right? Families keeping secrets. Post Alice is about secrets finally emerging."
Now that her plays are available to a wider audience in print, Graham hopes there are still a few people out there who enjoy reading them as much as she does.
"You get to become the director. You get to make all those decisions, those visual decisions. You get to decide with the actors sound like, you get to decide what the lights look like, you get to design the set," she says.
Theatre is amazing because the performance only exists in that one moment.
"It's just really like an ephemeral thing, right? You're there in that moment experiencing it together, but then it's gone. But you know, theatre can exist in your house."
Cottage Radio & Other Plays is available through Talonbooks.
