Warning–this is a dark scene from Motet, the darkest of my novels. Some listeners might find it disturbing.
“Steve in Toronto” opens in a loft on Queen Street in Toronto in 1977. I am playing Steven Beuhl. The amazing young Vancouver actress, Ranae Miller, is playing the punk rocker, Annie Epoxy.
If you want to know what happens next, listen to Episode 10 of The Canadian Fiction Podcast in which I read the rest of the story and talk about it afterward with podcaster Erika Thorkelson.
If I were writing Motet now, Annie Epoxy would have a far bigger role in it. Reading the book again for the first time after twenty years, I found her a fascinating, complex character who deserves far more stage time than I originally gave her.
Steven Beuhl was just as twisted as I remembered him. Writing him was one of the most difficult assignments I’ve ever given myself. I was deeply immersed in Jung at the time, and I saw the project as “getting in touch with my shadow.” In Jungian theory, people who never get in touch with their shadow remain as naive as children—are constantly surprised by cruelty, injustice, or just plain evil in the world—and Motet is about evil. The characters are tempted, and they give in, do the wrong things, and bring down horrors upon themselves.
While I was writing the “Steve in Toronto” sections of Motet—over fifty pages—I deliberately lived the most regular of lives. I got up at the same time every morning, worked until late afternoon, went for a run, ate a modest dinner, watched mindless television, and went to bed early. I didn’t socialize much, and I didn’t drink at all. If I hadn’t lived like that, I couldn’t have allowed myself to go into Steve’s craziness. It took me two weeks. When it was over and I could move from the creative phase of the writing to the editing phase, I was enormously relieved.
PRODUCING STEVE IN TORONTO
I began mixing sound in the late 60s on Boston’s radio station WBUR and then continued to write sound-based pieces through the 70s and on into the 80s for CBC radio, working with several fine producers, the last of them the incomparable Don Mowatt. With “Steve in Toronto” I picked up where I left off—but was amazed to discover how wonderfully far the technology had evolved since back in the day when we cut miles and miles and miles of shiny brown tape.
When I first asked Renae Miller to play Annie Epoxy, she’d had only two major stage roles—as the lead in Cinderella (Exit 22) and as Liesl von Trapp in The Sound of Music (Gateway Theatre). I thought that she might enjoy playing someone who was utterly different from those characters—and she did!
It took me a long time to produce “Steve in Toronto” largely because I had to learn the new technology. I mixed it three times. The first mix was terrible, the second not too bad, and the third is the one I’ve posted here.
I love mixing sound, and I hope to do more audio dramas.
©Keith Maillard, 2014
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