13 Writers: Biographies

The Writers Behind 13 Ways

of Looking at a Madman…Biographies

Adam Bayne
Adam is a young actor and writer from New Brunswick with a background in physical theatre and a passion for postmodernism. He trained at George Brown College in Toronto and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Drama from Mount Allison University in New Brunswick. He has performed in Winnipeg, Toronto, Halifax, New Brunswick and recently off-Broadway in New York. His plays Take Me Flying and Hostage have collectively had over 12 public performances.

Steph Bernston
Featured on the National Campus and Community Radio Association’s “Dig Your Roots” web site and was selected as one of 15 artists to appear on their accompanying compilation album. She participated in the association’s public broadcast in 2004, rhyming off 20 minutes of original material for independent radio stations across the country. Steph garnered third place in CBC’s third annual national “Poetry Face-Off”. She performed an original piece, Vertigo, for the CBC television short feature, “Artspots”. Steph mounted a production of her play, der-I’ve at the London Ontario Fringe Festival in 2004; it subsequently toured the East Coast as an open educational workshop. She recently appeared in Ottawa as one of 10 invited independent poets at the first annual Canadian Spoken Word Olympics. She appeared in DaPoPo’s Four Actors in Search of a Nation.

Evan Brown
No biography available at this time

Stephen Cloutier
Cloutier wrote the political theatre piece The Modern World: A Political Love Story for DaPoPo Theatre in 2003. As a poet, playwright and academic Cloutier is concerned with exploring political and social concerns that face our world. He brings a sharp political angle to the 13 Ways project. Cloutier graduated from the University of Leichester (UK) with a PhD in 20th Century British Literature. He currently teaches part-time at Saint Mary’s University.

Dustin Harvey
Harvey’s passion for theatre came from a desire to create something important in his community of Elmsdale, N.S., resulting in over a dozen plays he wrote and directed which featured young actors and were performed for audiences without charge. Harvey has worked with several theatre companies in Nova Scotia as well as in Calgary, St. John’s and Ireland. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre Studies from Acadia University and is a graduate of the post-graduate acting programme at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts in London, UK. Harvey appeared in DaPoPo’s Modern World: A Political Love Story.

Scott Hicks
Scott is an avid reader and writer of short fiction. While attending Mount Allison University in New Brunswick he was co-president of the creative writing group and co-editor two years running of the creative writing journal, Seven Mondays. He was recipient of Mount Allison’s Graham Atlantic Prize in creative writing in 1995 and 2000. At Concordia University in Montreal he attended the creative writing programme and has been published in journals in Toronto and Montreal. Currently, he runs a community creative writing group in Halifax.

Amanda Jernigan
Jernigan’s stories, poems and essays have appeared in a range of Canadian literary journals. She is a frequent contributor to The New Quarterly and Canadian Notes & Queries and is a consulting editor for both magazines. In 2002, she co-edited The New Quarterly’s special issue, “Wild Writers We Have Known: A Celebration of the Canadian Short Story and Story Writers”. In addition to her work as a freelance writer and editor, Amanda is working on a manuscript for Orders, her own first collection of poems. She appeared in DaPoPo’s Four Actors in Search of a Nation.

Fabien Melanson
Melanson studied Dramatic Arts at U de Moncton as well as Video and Television production at the New Brunswick Community College in Woodstock. In 1998 he produced his first play, L’Ile. The following year his video Cap Pele, Mon Coin De Pays placed among the top 10 out of 3,500 entries in a contest hosted by TV5 in honour of the Somet de la Francophone held in Moncton that year. Melanson has been working in film and television since 2000 both behind and in front of the camera. He has appeared in Samuel et la Mer, a mini-series which aired on Radio Canada. In 2004, he returned to the Maritimes from Vancouver, where he furthered his studies in acting and screenwriting. He appeared in DaPoPo’s The Modern World: A Political Love Story.

Kim Parkhill
Parkhill is a Halifax-based actor and writer, with a Bachelor of Nursing (University of New Brunswick) and an MBA (Saint Mary's University). She subsequently trained at Neptune Theatre School in the Pre-Professional Training Program and continues to be a student of experience. She has performed with numerous grass-roots theatre organizations, playing a wide range of roles from Shakespeare to sketch comedy. Most recently, she participated in the collective adaptation and performance of DaPoPo's RUR [Rossum’s Universal Robots] (2005) and The Sex Play (2006). Parkhill's one-act play, Warp & Weft, co-created with Lizon Richard, was produced for the 2004 Atlantic Fringe Festival. She is currently working independently on a new two-act play as well as studying creative writing with the Institute of Children's Literature.

Matthew Trafford
Matthew J. Trafford has been writing drama since age 13 when he won the grand prize in Young People Theatre’s “Wordplay” contest. He has also published poetry in Echolocation, Pottersfield Portfolio and the Dalhousie Review. His acting roles include the Narrator in The Little Prince and Lockitt in The Beggar’s Opera. He lived in Prague for six months, where he reviewed film for The Prague Daily Monitor. He recently performed in the Montreal and Toronto Festivals as the lead in Disgust, written by Montreal playwright Linda Besner. He is currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing at the University of British Columbia and is studying sign language in Toronto.

Garry Williams
Williams holds a Bachelor of Music with a minor in English from Mount Allison University in New Brunswick. Two of his scripts for dinner theatre have been professionally produced, along with three children’s musicals. He has led creative writing workshops for children and youth and guided theatre professionals in the collective writing process. Garry teaches at the Canadian Conservatory of Music and at Neptune Theatre School. He directed the 2005 Gilbert and Sullivan Society production of Patience and is currently directing their production of The Mikado. As artistic director of DaPoPo Theatre he directed Four Actors in Search of a Nation (2004), The Modern World: A Political Love Story (2005) RUR [Rossum’s Universal Robots] (2005) and The Sex Play (2006). Other directing credits include Fiddler on the Roof (2003), Annie Get Your Gun (2002), Twelfth Night (2001), The Dumb Waiter (1997), Assassins (1994), Black Comedy (1992) and Adaptions (1990).