(See? See what I did there?) I’m blogging today about three works that made me think a bit more about how expectations and knowledge can affect the way I experience stories.  Yeah, you’ve been warned.

Welcome to my mix of public thanks, travelogue, and short reviews. The joy of the Internet is, there’s still time to click “back” on your browsers. Going… going… gone. So, first: THANK YOU to all who joined us for our awesome Stratford adventure, but particularly to our generous drivers, Juliana and Dave, and to my [...]

Normally, I don’t do two entries of short reviews in a row, but this first one is the reason.

But first… (teaser beneath the cut):

Confession time: my knee-jerk reaction upon hearing a piece of literature, a movie, a play, or another work of art* is “Canadian” is to run for the hills. Sure, I like Anne of Green Gables and Robertson Davies as much as the next Canuck, but I’ve been served far too many unpalatable concoctions under the [...]

The first thing you learn when you’re a drama major is that people consider your field the lowest branch of academia. “Even” a drama student would know this; or seriously? Where do you plan to work with that degree – McDonald’s? But as any drama student who cares can tell you, there are lots of [...]

But first, two things to look forward to: Diana Wynne Jones has a new book coming out this year: Enchanted Glass. About what? I don’t know, but I’ll buy it and read it and pat it and love it and call it George! Second… uh, well, Andrew Lloyd Webber is producing/composing a sequel to Phantom [...]

Once, in one of my Drama classes, we got into a discussion about blackface. A lot of drama students are interested in musical theatre, and one of the ancestors of American musicals as we know them today is the minstrel show, in which white actors (and sometimes African-American ones, too) smeared their faces with black [...]

One thing I learned last Saturday is that playwrights Peter and Anthony Shaffer are identical twin brothers. How cool is that? (And also, how much would it suck when your professional artistic rival is the guy to whom you’ve been compared all your life? Peter Shaffer is most famous for Amadeus, the play in which [...]

OK, so I was all set to post my review of Diana Wynne Jones’ new novel House of Many Ways, which I really liked except for the inborn-evil lubbockin, which Sarah Rees Brennan talks about in a way more entertaining and lucid paragraph than I could fashion. (Actually, to be honest, my “review” sort of [...]