In 1974, thirteen-year-old Janice Derbyshire was raped by a group of seventeen- and eighteen-year-old boys in a pickup truck. No one came to help her. She was left “dishevelled and confused” behind a “faded-green grain elevator in southern Alberta.” Twenty-eight years later, Janice is no longer Janice. They are Joshua Dandelion, or JD, a “genderqueer, lesbian woboy who can make the sun stop in its tracks and is seen as a weed but has incredibly useful properties.” They are also hearing voices, barely clinging to sobriety, and relying on a convoluted cocktail of prescription drugs to deal with the traumatic memory that threatens to crush them. This all makes for an “emergency”— an anagram of which gives the Vancouver-based comedian and playwright JD Derbyshire the title of their debut novel.
Adapted from Certified, their participatory stage show, Mercy Gene is a...
Ellie Eberlee divides her time between Toronto and New York.