This is my final article of the 2014 Barkerville season. I started my second year of blogging for Barkerville back in May, as I eagerly anticipated a return to the streets as an historical interpreter after an eleven year absence. I had no idea how it would feel to be back out there, in my […]

Today in Barkerville a friend of mine (who plays Mrs. Bowron, a Barkerville schoolteacher) was contemplating a moth she had recently rescued in the schoolhouse. The insect was resting on her wrist as she pointed out to me its distinct colouring and the soft quivering of its wings. “She does that to stay warm,” she […]

  Most everyone knows the old show business adage “the show must go on!” I would argue, however, that only those people who work as live entertainers truly understand what the phrase means, because we’ve all been there. We have all pressed through illness, tragedy, and any manner of unforeseen circumstances to make sure that […]

  The September season is upon us, which means so many things in Barkerville. As soon as September rolls in, everything shifts. The weather takes on a bracing chill, even when the sun is out. Little pockets of leaves burst into brilliant yellow overnight, and by the end of the month all of them will […]

  This season has been filled with some lovely moments, many of which have revolved around the idea of memories. My professional association with Barkerville began twenty-one years ago but my earliest recollections of the place date back to the 1970s when, as a child, I visited our site for the first time with my […]

This evening my husband and I and our five year-old twin daughters went to the Lung Duck Tong, Barkerville’s renowned Chinese food restaurant. We had been invited as part of an appreciation dinner for everyone who had been part of last weekend’s Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, our annual celebration of our National Historic Site’s Chinese cultural […]

As I sit here typing this article my husband is across the street at the Sunset Theatre, performing a solo stage show that I wrote for him. The play is called The Fred Wells Show, and it is about the man who gave his name to the town we live in. When I wrote the script […]

  Here is a little secret that I suspect is true of most tourism-based sites: at some point during our season we just get damn tired, and we also get a little bit sad. For as long as I have worked in Barkerville the onsite staff and interpretive contractors have referred to this condition as […]

I am both an artist and an academic. To me, these two descriptors come from a common place of motivation. As a writer, an actor and an interpreter I am driven by a need to get closer and closer to answering questions that inspire, or sometimes even haunt me. The scholar in me is also […]

  Today was a big day for the street interpreters in Barkerville. Today we made a little bit of history as we took the stage at the Theatre Royal for the first official and fully-realized street/theatre crossover. For more than a decade now, Newman & Wright Theatre Company has graced Barkerville with musical variety shows […]