When aspiring stage-manager Rebecca Weir falls for the married director of the SenseInSound theatre company, she initiates a love triangle-and a working collaboration-which go on for two decades. Beginning in Toronto in the early 1980s, The Work traces the rise and fall of SenseInSound. The director has the status of a guru within the company, and his disciples call their method The Work. Is he pushing people to creative heights or abusing his power? Is The Work a cutting-edge artistic practice, a road to personal healing, or a cult? And as his top deputy, is Rebecca complicit, or merely loyal? A historian trying to write about the company, many years later, has little to go on but internet searches-that is, unless the women behind the man find a way to speak out.

Maria Meindl is the author of Outside the Box: the Life and Legacy of Writer Mona Gould, the Grandmother I Thought I Knew from McGill-Queen’s University Press, winner of the Alison Prentice Award for Women’s History. Her essays, fiction and poetry have appeared in many publications including The New Quarterly, The Temz Review, The Literary Review of Canada, Descant and Musicworks, as well as in the anthologies, At the End of Life: True Stories About How We Die and The M Word: Conversations About Motherhood. She has made two radio series, Parent Care, and Remembering Polio for CBC Ideas. In 2005, Maria founded the Draft Reading series, which offers a forum for unpublished work by emerging and established writers. She teaches movement in Toronto.

Maria Meindl's profile page