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    A Brush with Life
    Unavailable
    A Brush with Life
    Unavailable
    A Brush with Life
    Ebook161 pages2 hours

    A Brush with Life

    By Steven Mayoff

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A Brush With Life is a novella that explores the creative process with a twist of magic-realism. The story concerns a reclusive representational artist named Gordian Fray, who discovers that whatever he paints soon fades from his canvas only to reappear as a solid and three-dimensional object. When he realizes these images are indestructible, he paints a self-portrait that will never grow old or die. He allows his doppelgänger to take over his life, while he lives vicariously through it and quickly becomes subservient to it. Enter Gordian's former love interest Anna Trang and a bizarre triangle soon develops that ultimately pits creator and creation against each other. Gordian draws the line (so to speak) at granting his doppelgänger, now known as Gord Fry, his one wish: to paint a portrait of Anna to be his life partner who will also stay eternally young. Gordian is horrified at what he has already created, while also being fascinated by it. While the life-like portrait rises in the world, the artist’s actual life goes to ruin, and yet the two are totally dependent on each other.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSteven Mayoff
    Release dateJul 26, 2020
    ISBN9781777300708
    Unavailable
    A Brush with Life
    Author

    Steven Mayoff

    Steven Mayoff was born and raised in Montreal, lived in Toronto for 17 years, and has made Prince Edward Island, Canada his home since 2001. He writes full time and his fiction and poetry have appeared in literary journals across Canada and the USA, as well as in Ireland, Algeria, France, England and Croatia.He has had four books published: the story collection Fatted Calf Blues (Turnstone Press, 2009) which won the 2010 PEI Book Award for Fiction; the novel Our Lady Of Steerage, (B&B, 2015) which Nova Scotia writer and reviewer Ian Colford called a “wise and astute first novel”; the poetry chapbook Leonard’s Flat (Grey Borders Books, 2018), and the full-length poetry collection Swinging Between Water and Stone (Guernica Editions, 2019).Steven has collaborated on three short radio plays (with Paula Wing) for CBC - Call Waiting (2001), Afterlife (2002) and Phone Booth (2003) – and a stage play Bully (with Stephen Guy-McGrath), which was produced at The Theatre Centre in Toronto in 2001. His full-length play, A Promise To Repair, received a workshop production by The Cape Breton Stage Company in 2012.He wrote the libretto for a rock musical Dorian with composer Ted Dykstra. It received numerous workshops and a successful workshop performance at the Tarragon Extra Space in 1996. He also wrote lyrics for the musical Swingstep, which was produced at the Ford Centre in Toronto in 1999. For this he was nominated for a Dora Mavor Moore Award. Other libretto work includes a one-act chamber opera Milk Bar with PEI-based composer Jim O’Leary. The opera was performed at Mount Allison University in 2014 and received a glowing review in the Mount Allison newspaper The Argosy, which said “O’Leary and Mayoff together created a score and script that complemented each other perfectly. Weighing the comedic with the critical, and the atonal and the tonal, the performance struck the right balance between an entertaining, yet meaningful story and a beautiful and conceptually interesting score.”Mayoff’s short screenplay, The Dim Sum of its Parts, won the 2009 WILDsound One-Page Screenplay Contest. It was made into a short film for YouTube and received over 400,000 viewings.He also adapted his novella, Fatted Calf Blues, into a feature-length screenplay. In 2011 the script was further developed to a second draft in an adaptation workshop with story editor Ken Chubb at the Screenwriters’ Bootcamp in Charlottetown. In 2012 he was invited to the prestigious Praxis workshop in at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver to work with advisor John Frizzell toward a third draft and in 2013 brought the next draft to the Praxis Summer Readings, where his screenplay was read aloud by professional actors to an audience and panel of advisors.Mayoff has been a participant in a number of writing workshops including Seawords in PEI with Anne Simpson for poetry and fiction in 2008 and The Great Blue Heron workshop in at St. Francis Xavier University with Alistair McLeod for fiction in 2007 and 2009, as well as Daniel MacIvor for playwriting in 2010. He has attended opera workshops at Tapestry New Opera Works with Wayne Strongman and Michael Albano in Toronto in 2004 and Tone + Text in Vadstena, Sweden in 2013 and 2014.Finally, Mayoff has judged numerous short story competitions including the Atlantic Writing Contest for the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia in 2011, the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick Writing Contest in 2010 and 2014 and the PEI Writers’ Guild Battle Tales in 2016, 2018 and 2019. He also was a first reader for the CBC Canada Writes Short Story Contest in 2011.

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