Keira McArthur

…I just corrected my own typo two times, from 2021 to 2022, then again to 2023. Which tells me that 2021 is when I began the prep work.

At this moment I’m barefoot in a wingback chair charting the movements of the mice in my ceiling and the family downstairs (a thump, now tears). Pre-solstice sunlight travels through the plants and across the floor.

It’s late July 2023 and I’m cooking a show for delivery and response by October of this year.

It’s a thing I love about us, possibly why I love playing music that is never the same twice; humans change over time, especially when challenged to wake up and out of the comfort zone slumber.

It is the fourth anniversary of my arrival in Hamilton to begin my Arts Council residency here. I write this on the eve of the public opening for After Lockdown/ In the Neighborhood, a joint show with Eileen Earnshaw, most amazing theatre designer and creative wizard, at Centre3 Member’s Gallery on James Street North. We […]

mesmerized, I watch my plan dissolve again. By now though I’ve learned to move with the shifts, to let them show me where they want to go. So far it’s always been somewhere I’ve never been before.

I’m wondering why I always come to this place, helpless and dumb, to make compost of the poorly formed beliefs I bring to a piece that asks more of me than I’d thought. Here I am, staring.

After a scan of news from Palestine, Ethiopia, Egypt, Ukraine I wonder: do we learn how to better navigate our anxiety in the challenges of these times? Each in our own context, but also in solidarity, a communion of care. Does the portal of anxiety lead to courage. I wonder.

Morning coffees face the sunrise on the upper balcony of a dignified old Queen Anne house, one of two that have anchored Fifth Avenue E. this past century and a half.

Each person I’ve spoken with has had to dig deep to pivot their plans and priorities, deconstruct, then reconstruct their belief systems, even as they shift, then shift again.