The first summer of my relationship with my now-husband—an enchanted summer, naturally—he was acting in New York City, playing Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Jack in The Importance of Being Earnest. I was a country girl from Northern Ontario who’d seen only one professional play in my life (and that was one in which he starred, the first time I ever laid eyes on him).

I’d packed all my belongings into my backpack and shouldered my guitar—in a backpack carrying case, naturally—and taken the train from Toronto to New York to be with this man. And thus began my immersion in the world of actors.

Plays seen again and again; pubs afterward to analyze the plays, the process, the director’s vision or lack of it; gruelling tours, vans and hotel rooms and shows in Asheville and Atlanta and small-town Tennessee; long-distance relationship as a matter of course; the constant uncertainty of when the next job will be and where it will be and how the bills will be paid; filming in Times Square in an Armani suit one day—or performing at the White House, or being feted by luminaries—and the next day, you’re unemployed with no idea if you’ll ever work again.

And always, always, the art. The transcendent music of Shakespeare’s language, the story illuminated on a stage.

In the last two decades, I’ve often been the one non-actor at a table of actors. Struggling, especially in my insecure twenties, to contribute to conversation that is all about making the show. Struggling with the invisibility and solitariness of my own art form, and envying the legitimacy of the actors’ presence in a company, their employment by a theatre, their designated role. Their collaborative, co-creative work.

What did I have? A notebook, a pen, a deep desire to write novels. (Also, back then, very little confidence or knowledge of how to do it.)

This summer it’s 20 years since I took that train to NYC, and I’ve since married the actor and lured him to Canada, where he is now the artistic director of the St. Lawrence Shakespeare Festival. We can call it a loving nod to our 20th anniversary or at least serendipity that the plays he chose for this year’s festival season are A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Importance of Being Earnest. The same two plays I watched him in that first enchanted summer together 20 years ago.

This year’s acting company arrived in town to begin rehearsal two weeks ago, and last night I hung out once again in a room full of actors. These days I’m considerably more comfortable in the theatre world and in my own artistic practice, and I’ve also long since found literary community and spent plenty of time at tables with other writers. 

This summer, with my debut novel’s publication on the horizon, when I get the inevitable question in theatre circles of whether I too am an actor, I’m deriving some amusement from saying, “No, I just embed myself in their lives and steal their experiences for my own art.”

Because that, it turns out, is kind of what I’ve done. My husband jokes that our relationship is the most dedicated project of immersive research ever, because the novel that’s coming out next year is about actors. The Mother Act wouldn’t exist without Richard, without the life I didn’t quite realize I was entering when I boarded that train.

There have been challenges in our life together, times when being with an actor (sorry, darling) has felt like a terrible life choice. The long separations, the instability and uncertainty and financial precarity, the difficulties of balancing two demanding creative vocations that did not always feel like they gave back enough to justify the sacrifices. I’ve reflected more than once on the phone call early in our relationship when a garbage truck clunked in the background on Richard’s end and he remarked that the trash collectors probably made more than he did, and I laughed. Obviously he was joking. I was in love with an actor—so much more glamorous than being in love with a trash collector! 

He was not joking.

If I had married a lawyer or a doctor or a trash collector, would my life and my artistic path have been easier?

I’ve noticed a pattern in my own writing and in my coaching with other writers: your biggest challenges, the things in life that can feel like they’re keeping you from the flow and ease you dream of in your practice—that’s your material. That’s your creative gift.

Not that I would say being with an actor is my biggest challenge. Mothering, though, and a deeply restrictive patriarchal religious upbringing? Those have definitely been two of the hardest things I’ve had to swim through, things that have felt some days like they’ve kept me from doing and being and becoming what I most need to do and be and become. They also happen to be two other cornerstones of The Mother Act. 

My material. My creative gift. 

If you’re local to Eastern Ontario, come see A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Importance of Being Earnest at the St. Lawrence Shakespeare Festival this summer. They really are enchanting plays. Being with actors actually is, a lot of the time, pretty awesome.

Posted with love and thanks to my husband, whom I just asked to read this to make sure I wasn’t saying anything too bad about him (such as “being with an actor has felt like a terrible life choice”), who said, “I’m not going to censor you!”