About Maria Meindl

Maria is the author of The Work. Her first book, Outside the Box from McGill-Queen’s University Press, won the Alison Prentice Award for Women’s History. Her essays, fiction and poetry have appeared in many publications including The Literary Review of Canada,  Descant and Musicworks, as well as in the anthologies, At the End of Life: True Stories About How We Die and The M Word: Conversations About Motherhood. She has made two radio series, Parent Care, and Remembering Polio for CBC Ideas.

From 1993 to 2010 she ran The Writing Space Press with Diana Kiesners. She was a member of the editorial board of Descant magazine from 1995 to 2001. In 2005, Maria founded the Draft Reading Series which specializes in unpublished work by emerging and established writers.

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From the publisher of The Work

When aspiring stage-manager Rebecca Weir falls for the married director of the SenseInSound theatre company, she initiates a love triangle –– and a working collaboration –– which go on for two decades. Beginning in Toronto in the 1980s, The Work traces the rise and fall of SenseInSound. The director has the status of a guru within the company, and his disciples call their method The Work. Is he pushing people to creative heights or abusing his power? Is The Work a cutting-edge artistic practice, a road to personal healing, or a cult? And as his top deputy, is Rebecca complicit, or merely loyal? A historian trying to write about the company, many years later, has little to go on but internet searches –– that is, unless the women behind the man find a way to speak out.

Praise

“A powerful novel, one that brilliantly charts the allure of charismatic figures and the need, for better or worse, that drives us to them. Maria Meindl takes us into both the darkness and the light, in a world where the two often shade into each other almost indistinguishably. ”

Nino Ricci, author



“Maria Meindl has captured the practical magic and personal strain it takes to put on a play, and introduces us to a captivating cast of characters in the process. A truly fascinating novel.”

Rebecca Rosenblum, author

“All her life she’d been yearning to yearn”. Why do we fall in love with the wrong people, and keep yearning for them, even when they seem to be destroying us? Why does love have to be so much work? Edgy, fast-paced and darkly funny, Maria Meindl’s The Work is a deep dive into a toxic passion and its intriguing aftermath in Toronto’s bohemian theatre scene of the 1980s.”

Terri Favro, author