Of course, all the time I had been working on the play and the musical I had been continuing to teach, act, and direct. It was one of these events that truly set the stage for the epic.
I asked my son Kevin, a professional actor, to do a one-man show based on an adaptation of the first two books of The Iliad by the poet Christopher Logue, which had been done in this fashion at England’s National Theatre. He agreed, we rehearsed it, and then the two of us toured three fringes—Winnipeg, Saskatoon, and Edmonton.
When we got to Winnipeg I had run out of Science Fiction to read—it has been a passion of mine from an early age—I found an old bookstore at the end of the park in which the fringe was partly situated. What happened there is recorded in the Prologue to the trilogy. I found Emund Spenser’s Collected Poems and a forty-year tinge of guilt over not having read all of his Fairie Queene when I was in English Honours forced me to buy the book.
And in the next blog I will come to the spark that ignited the creation of the epic trilogy.
