Light-Carved Passages2020

In Seeking Shade, ordinary situations are imbued with extraordinary emotion as women and men explore identity and independence, navigate complicated relationships and confront the fallibility of mind and body. A reckless young woman dances through the Second World War—and through the lives of many a man in uniform. A graduate student considers a popular film and revisits a past tragedy as she watches flames devour her apartment building. A hardworking man struggles to come to grips with his own helplessness at three stages of enforced quietude. A wife and mother questions her health—and her sanity—when she is plagued by phantom pains and visions of ghostly twins. Through these and other stories, Frances Boyle leaves readers with a retinal impression, ‘a shadow left by a flash’, reminding us that the ways we communicate—through art, through literature, through dance, through performances theatrical and otherwise—shape our lives and the stories that we tell.