Welcome to my website—or, welcome back, if you’ve passed this way before and are checking in again.

About a year ago, as we all relaunched our lives post-pandemic, I relaunched this site, with an account of the work I’d managed to accomplish over the long period of Covid restrictions, when so many of us felt we’d been grounded, in so many ways. Especially in that first pre-vaccine year, when the pandemic imposed severe limits on socializing indoors, on travel, on live entertainment—on pretty much every aspect of life-as-we-knew-it.

For writers, and others who need uninterrupted time alone to create, there were positive aspects to those limitations. Never before had many of us (me included) had so few excuses not to write—and such incentive to write and write and write. One project of mine in particular felt attuned to the temper of a time of isolation, introspection and necessary withdrawal: A play titled “O, Happy Solitude.”

O, Happy Solitude

“O, Happy Solitude” imagines the reclusive final years of playwright Maurine Dallas Watkins, who became famous in the 1920s for her play “Chicago.”. But by the 1950s, she had withdrawn from public entirely. When she appeared at all, she kept her face completely obscured under thick veiling.

I’m no recluse. Still, those several pandemic years (feeling like several centuries) of social isolation and being masked in public gave me some inkling of what it would feel like to retreat utterly from the world, like Maurine Watkins in the later decades of her life.  In “O, Happy Solitude,” I speculate on what might happen, were this retired and retiring writer confronted by a young admirer, determined to unearth the reason behind the playwright’s self-imposed exile.

In August 2022, “O, Happy Solitude” was presented as an hour-long staged reading directed by dramaturge Bob White at the Meighen Forum in Stratford, in conjunction with the Festival Theatre’s production of Bob Fosse’s musical based on “Chicago.” (For which adaptation, Watkins strenuously refused to grant permission in her lifetime.)

The response to the Meighen Forum reading of “O, Happy Solitude” was very positive, and Bob and I felt the play could be expanded into a full-length drama. Over this past winter, as I did that work, I came to believe even more strongly that Maurine Watkins, with all her coverups, both literal and figurative, is a character both startlingly unique and at the same time highly recognizable—particularly  in the era of celebrity culture in which we now live. For that reason, Bob and I are hopeful that further development of the script, in collaboration with actors, will result in a full production.

Of course, the prolonged shutdown of live performance spaces during Covid has created a backlog of projects across the board. Even now that most theatres are back on track, wait-times for responses on future collaborations are still longer than normal.

Fortunately, the opportunity to travel is also back, and so I am lucky to be at work on other projects involving far-flung research. Instead of letting my fingers do the walking through the pages of books and endless Google sites, as I did during Covid, I’ve been able to go some of the historical locations featured in my writing, and to enrich that writing with onsite research.

Looking For Etta

Even before the pandemic prompted me to envision the reclusive life of Maurine Watkins as a subject of a play, I was already working on a novel about her, during and after her creation of “Chicago.” Because Watkins was such a secretive person about whom little personal is known, my novel is, necessarily, something of a speculative biography. Much of it centres on the ten years she spent as a scriptwriter in Hollywood, in the early years of talkies and through the 1930s, grinding out largely formulaic scripts for forgettable pictures, some of which have long since disintegrated into silver nitrate powder.

And the official list of her credits doesn’t encompass films she might have worked on, but which, for one reason or another, may never have been produced, much less released. For my novel, I’ve conjured up one such possible unproduced screenplay, a Western about female outlaws. Such a roster of lady bandits may have included Etta Place, the legendary bank-robbing accomplice of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I’ve also postulated that Etta Place could have been the inspiration for Molly Wood, the fictional heroine of The Virginian, Owen Wister’s archetypal Western novel. The Virginian was, in fact, filmed at Paramount Pictures for the first time as a talkie, in 1929. That was also the year Maurine Watkins began working on her first screenplay for Fox studios. She could plausibly have met Wister.

During Covid, much of the research that fueled my speculations about these characters resided either online or between book covers. But once the travel restrictions eased last year, I was able to undertake an actual Western odyssey to cover some of the ground trodden by Etta Place and the legendary Wild Bunch, as well as by Owen Wister, and—at least in her mind—Maurine Dallas Watkins.

For more about the Wild West, click this link:

Meanwhile, in another part of the fictional forest….

Readers of my previous work will know that, for me, animal characters occupy as prominent a place in the literary firmament as humans. Dogs in particular fascinate me, as they do many writers. Perhaps because, in their fifteen-thousand-year association with humans, dogs are surely the most beloved but also the most mistrusted of all our animal companions.

Previously, I explored that uneasy dichotomy between us and them in a non-fiction book, The Dog by the Cradle, the Serpent Beneath. The title is drawn from the compelling medieval story of a loyal dog misunderstood in life, but glorified after death. For more about that origin story, here is a portion of a talk I gave as part of Moses Znaimer’s IdeaCity series:

 

Master of the Dog

My current work in progress—a two-volume novel entitled Master of the Dog—  begins in the same 13th-century milieu as the legend of the “holy greyhound” I explored in my non-fiction book.  The first volume of the novel describes a world inhabited by draconian priests and devout pagans. A time when worship at the shrine of a slain greyhound would have been no more—and no less—controversial than the Church’s deadly crusades against fellow Christians, such as the Cathars and the Waldensians, who’d set up their own non-conforming sects.

In Master of the Dog, it’s a world that also includes a restless, ambitious silversmith’s son from London and a nameless dog he rescues from being skinned at a tannery. Together, they travel first to Montpellier, and later throughout much of the rest of France and western Europe in the company of a magnetic Spanish cleric named Dominic de Guzmán.

In order to enrich my sense of that era and that milieu, I recently visited the ancient city of Montpellier, which I’ve designated as the place where my fictional protagonist would first meet Dominic, real-life founder of the Order of Preachers, later known as the Dominicans.

I also traveled to Toulouse, in order to have a look at one of the historical locations in my fictional narrative:  7 Place de Parlement, the address of the house that Dominic’s friend and admirer, Peter Seila, offered to the charismatic priest, as his first monastery. The house itself has been rebuilt and repurposed numerous times over intervening centuries, Nowadays, the old door is nestled into the brick façade of the Institut Catholique de Toulouse, with a print shop conveniently next door and oblivious pedestrians hurrying by. But the old doorway remains, with a plaque commemorating Dominic’s arrival in the spring of 1215 with his “premiers compagnons.”

I’ve been living for years in imagination with these people. So it felt nothing short of astonishing to stand in the actual doorway at which the “real” Saint Dominic, had actually arrived  more than 800 years before.

For more about the collision of past and present in France, click this link.

Master of the Dog, Volume Two

Volume Two of my novel Master of the Dog moves beyond the Middle Ages, to follow the lives of a number of artists, from the plague years in the British Channel Islands, to the studio of William Hogarth and his pug dog in 18th century London, to the estate near Fontainebleau where Rosa Bonheur, renowned in the latter half of the 19th century, turned out her masterly depictions of all manner of animals, including dogs.

The idea to follow the first volume of the novel with a cavalcade of canine artists originated in the Print and Drawing room at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Some years ago, I spent many happy hours there, among sketches and engravings of dogs done by artists as diverse as Albrecht Dürer, Eugène Delacroix Alex Colville, and of course, William Hogarth.

Here’s more about that research, in a presentation I did at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.
WATCH THE PRESENTATION HERE

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You can purchase most of my works via my BOOKS AND PLAYS page.

BIO

Erika Ritter is a novelist, playwright, essayist and former CBC Radio host and broadcaster. She is the author of a novel, The Hidden Life of Humans, a non-fiction work on human-animal relationships, The Dog by the Cradle, The Serpent Beneath, and three collections of essays: Urban Scrawl, Ritter in Residence, and The Great Big Book of Guys: Alphabetical Encounters With Men. Ritter hopes soon to publish a quartet of novels, Talking to Time, one of which features playwright Maurine Watkins as a major character, as well as a two-volume novel, The Master of the Dog. Her produced stage plays include A Visitor From Charleston, The Splits, and Automatic Pilot. A new short play “O, Happy Solitude,” also about Maurine Watkins, had a public reading at the Stratford Festival in August 2022 and has since been extended to a full-length work.

COMPLETE BIOGRAPHY

REVIEWS

About THE DOG BY THE CRADLE, THE SERPENT BENEATH…

“Ritter’s new book, The Dog By the Cradle, the Serpent Beneath, is a far-reaching exploration of the paradox underlying our relationships with animals. Her devotion to gaining insight into that tortured relationship is quite amazing.” – THE GLOBE AND MAIL

“….a passionate, thought-provoking addition to the canon.” – QUILL AND QUIRE

“(Ritter’s) informal exploration—weighty and whimsical—of the contradictory way we treat animals… is well-researched and thought-provoking…” – THE MONTREAL GAZETTE

About THE GREAT BIG BOOK OF GUYS: ALPHABETICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH MEN…

“Even though no two stories are alike….we remain riveted, unable to look away from whatever Ritter is entreating us to see. Part memoir, part inspirational handbook for the cynical, part divine comedy, The Great Book of Guys is marvellously entertaining from start to stop. Comparatively few titles can make the same claim.” – KIM HUGHES