Bookmarked: Playwright Debbie Patterson recommends "The Little Shadows" by Marina Endicott

"I sometimes wonder if I could have made a whole career out of performing as a topless accordion player if I'd been born a few decades earlier. "

—Debbie Patterson, Playwright

Playwright Debbie Patterson is the new Carol Shields Writer-In-Residence at the University of Winnipeg.  She kicks off her four month term with a reading Wednesday January 18 at E-Gre Hall at the University of Winnipeg.

Patterson is known as a dynamic performer, a creative writer, a director and actor.  She studied at the National Theatre School of Canada, is a founding member of Shakespeare in the Ruins and also serves as Artistic Associate at Prairie Theatre Exchange in Winnipeg.

SCENE wanted to know what was at the top of Debbie Patterson's reading pile:

I have just read The Little Shadows by Marina Endicott and was completely captivated by the world she creates. This book is an historical fiction about three sisters who become vaudeville sensations.

It begins with the sisters, under the tutelage of their mother - herself a former vaudevillian, auditioning for a small time vaudeville house in Saskatchewan.

Throughout the book they travel to various vaudeville houses in Western Canada and the American midwest, including a lengthy stint in Winnipeg. Endicott's descriptions of Winnipeg at another point in history were a high point for me.

There's a chunk of the book that takes place in the Qu'Appelle valley on the shores of Lake Katepwa. My husband's family has a cabin on that lake so I was especially captivated by the descriptions of this area in the 1940's.

As a performer, I loved the descriptions of the experience of performing. The sisters begin their career in a desperate state, relying on the kindness of strangers to get by. But as they mature as performers they begin to understand the difference between the charitable audience listening to the pretty girls out of kindness and the engaged audience wrapped up in an experience out of pure delight.

I enjoyed reading about the mechanics of the visual illusions created by some of the performers. I love the purity of it. With so much digital manipulation of performances now, CGI in films and auto-tune in music, I find the heart of performances - the authentic voices and bodies of the performers - get hijacked or stepped on.

I've always been fascinated by the vaudeville scene. I love the idea of highly specialized performers spending their lives perfecting some obscure skill and touring the circuit with it. That world is lost to us, but I sometimes wonder if I could have made a whole career out of performing as a topless accordion player if I'd been born a few decades earlier.

The Little Shadows Book Cover (Random House)