The Occupation of Heather Rose
By Wendy Lill
(Talonbooks, Paperback, 9780889225930, 64pp.)
Publication Date: September 2008
Categories: Canadian
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Young, naive, and inadequately trained, urban health care/social worker Heather Rose flirts with the pilot as she wings her way north in a bush plane, to land in an isolated and remote northern/Native community, carrying her wholesome food guides, plans for fitness classes and community social activities with her.
Nine months later Heather Rose is "bushed"--utterly disillusioned by the growing horror of her new-found realization that what her culture has to offer this community amounts to less than nothing: total dependency. She returns, compelled, like Marlowe in Heart of Darkness, to tell her story. "Occupying" her missing supervisor’s empty office she illustrates her monologue of despair on a blackboard to an absent colonial authority for which the audience stands in as its silent and complicit witness.
Social activist, politician, and playwright Wendy Lill has received four Governor General's Award nominations for her many plays.
"...an honest, moving, carefully constructed document."--Winnipeg Free Press
"...an achingly honest reminder of the naively enthusiastic attempts that each of us has made to wade bravely into unfamiliar territory."--Toronto Star











