#WriterWednesday with Dwayne Brenna

Things you need for your writing sessions: A good night’s sleep.

Things that hamper your writing: Being anywhere else but in my study in Saskatoon.

A few of your favorite things: baseball caps

Things you need to throw out: baseball caps

Something you’re really good at: I’m a pretty good cook. If you come to my house, I’ll make you an excellent gazpacho.

Something you’re really bad at: I’m a horrible singer, the sort that choir directors ask to mouth the words when it comes to performing in concert.

Favorite music or song: Springsteen’s “Born to Run”

Music that drives you crazy: Improvisational jazz.

Last best thing you ate: My grandmother’s homemade bread.

Last thing you regret eating: I once ate some jalebi at a restaurant in New Delhi, and the result was a prolonged bout of food poisoning.

Favorite places you’ve been: Greece.

Places you never want to go to again: The dentist.

Most daring thing you’ve ever done: I refused to hand my iPad over to a machine gun toting soldier in a foreign country once.

Something you chickened out from doing: Going on the tea cup ride at the fair with my sons. I invariably throw up when moved in tight repetitive circles.

The nicest thing a reader said to you: That reading my book LONG WAY HOME, which is set during the driest year of the Great Depression, made them thirsty.

The craziest thing a reader said to you: That too many people are writing novels these days.

Besides writing, what’s the most creative thing you’ve done: I was an actor at the Stratford Festival of Canada.

A project that didn’t quite turn out the way you planned it: Any carpentry project I’ve ever done.

Some real-life story that made it to one of your books: In THEORIES OF EVERYTHING, there’s a story entitled “The Sewing Machine.” It’s uncharacteristic of the rest of the book in that it is set during the Great Depression. In 1936, my grandmother was visited by the repo man. He wanted to repossess her Singer sewing machine. She rolled up her sleeves and told him he’d have to be a bigger man than she if he was going to take that machine. He left the house without the sewing machine.

Something in your story that readers think is about you, but it’s not: In my book STEALING HOME, there’s a poem about a guy making love to his girlfriend on the mound of a baseball diamond at night. Readers have brought this up with my wife, suggesting that she must be the girl in the poem. In fact, the incident was narrated to me by a fellow baseball player who shall not be named and who performed the act with his own girlfriend back in the day.

About Dwayne:

Dwayne Brenna is the award-winning author of several books of humour, poetry, and fiction. Coteau Books published his popular series of humourous vignettes entitled Eddie Gustafson’s Guide to Christmas in 2000. His two books of poetry, Stealing Home and Give My Love to Rose, were published by Hagios Press in 2013 and 2015 respectively. Stealing Home, a poetic celebration of the game of baseball, was subsequently shortlisted for several Saskatchewan Book Awards, including the University of Regina Book of the Year Award. His first novel New Albion, about a laudanum-addicted playwright struggling to survive in London’s East End during the winter of 1850-51, was published by Coteau Books in autumn 2016. It subsequently won the Muslims For Peace and Justice Fiction Award at the Saskatchewan Book Awards and was one of three English-language novels shortlisted for the prestigious MM Bennetts Award for Historical Fiction. In 2022, Pocol Press published his second novel Long Way Home, about a barnstorming baseball team travelling through the American Midwest in the eventful summer of 1934. A book of short fiction, entitled Theories of Everything, was published by Shadowpaw Press in March 2025. His short stories and poems have been published in an array of journals, including Grain, Nine, The Cold Mountain Review, and The Antigonish Review. Brenna has taught theatre and creative writing at the University of Saskatchewan.

He has acted at the Stratford Festival and has appeared on television in various nationally and internationally broadcast programs including For the Record, Judge (CBC Toronto), The Great Electrical Revolution, and The Incredible Story Studio (Mind’s Eye). His movie credits include The Wars, Painted Angels (with Kelly McGillis), Black Light (with Michael Ironside), and The Impossible Elephant (with Mia Sara). A series of character-based vignettes called The Adventures of Eddie Gustafson, written and performed by Brenna, had a five-year run on CBC Radio.

Brenna is also the author of several books on theatre research, including Scenes from Canadian Plays (Fifth House) and Emrys’ Dream: Greystone Theatre in Words and Photographs (Thistledown). His book Our Kind of Work: the Glory Days and Difficult Times of 25th Street Theatre (Thistledown 2011) was subsequently nominated for a Saskatchewan Book Award in Non-Fiction. Brenna’s entertaining academic text Nights That Shook the Stage, about forty pivotal events in theatre history, was published by McFarland Books in 2023. It was subsequently shortlisted for two Saskatchewan Book Awards. He has contributed articles on theatre to Canadian Theatre Review, Theatre Notebook (London UK), The Dictionary of National Biography (London UK) and the Czech journal Theatralia.

His stage plays have been produced at Dancing Sky Theatre in Meacham, 25th Street Theatre in Saskatoon, and the Neptune Theatre in Halifax. In 2022, Brenna’s apocalyptic full-length drama The Promised Land received an Honourable Mention in the Scripts on Fire Playwriting Contest. Also in 2022, Brenna was a recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal.