On the joys of multi-hyphenate life

Dear friends,

Kirk and I are back! We had an amazing tour of The Knitting Pilgrim, first to BC in April, and then to the UK in May.

Kirk on one of the five ferry crossings of The Knitting Pilgrim April 2025 BC Tour

And then in the UK…

Kirk performing in Bradford Cathedral—a gorgeous place for us to bring the show. (Photo Credit: Phil Lickley, Bradford Cathedral)

Here is a different shot of Kirk chatting with the Bradford Cathedral audience as they entered and got settled with their knitting. It also captures our projection operator, Mark Lisgo, who made our tour run smoothly, helping with everything AV-related, not to mention driving the tour van all the way from Derby, England, to Portgordon Scotland, to London, and home again.

After our last show at the beautiful Southwark Cathedral on May 17, Kirk and I had two weeks to wait until his community-knitted Patchwork Pride Project would be installed on the façade of Canada House in London.

We decided to go to Paris to visit my family there, and also to do some research for an upcoming project. Which might have something to do with France. Which might also have some news. And which I’m for sure being coy about, because I can’t talk about it just yet.

Then we returned to London to install The Patchwork Pride Project on Canada House, where it stayed up during all of June for Pride Month.

Canada House, Trafalgar Square, London

We created a series of travel vlogs which you can find on both our social media feeds. They cover our time in the UK. The tour was an incredible experience, tiring but wonderful.

My Instagram account is here.

Kirk’s Instagram account is here.

We returned home to Toronto June 4 to find a VERY overgrown front yard (I loathe the invasive dog strangling vine that is determined to try to, as its name implies, choke the garden—anyone feel me on this?). We have also had to do the wrap-up and accounting for the BC/UK tour (oh, the mounds of paper) and start in earnest on pre-production for the tour of our next show, Spycraft.

Spycraft will have its world premiere touring Ontario, Oct 30-Nov 30, 2025. You can keep up with where the show will be close to you, and how to buy tickets, here.

Spycraft tells the story of an easily overlooked yet crafty Canadian factory worker who helps Winston Churchill’s WWII intelligence agency spy on the Nazis in occupied France by knitting code into ordinary garments. It’s a cracking, suspenseful story that also tackles issues of identity, the Holocaust, and the rise of Antisemitism today. 

We’re excited, and a little overwhelmed, and a lot interested, which I suppose is the best quadrant for a creative life. Well. Not the overwhelmed part. But Mark Manson, an author and blogger who Kirk has followed for a while, says: “Your fear occurs in proportion to the importance of the task. The more something scares you, the more necessary it is to your growth.” So off we go. Growing.

Aside for continuing to care for the script—a process that will unfold right up to opening night and likely beyond, and producing the play, Kirk is also designing the knitted costumes and knitted props for the show, so the house is already covered in test swatches of coded knitting, 40s knitting patterns, more books about WWII, the Resistance, and Winston Churchill’s SOE, code breakers and code makers.

Kirk is collaborating closely with Nick Blais, who is designing the set (part of which will be knitted, so get ready for that), the non-knitted costumes and props, and the lighting.

In the meantime, things progress on book projects and screenplay projects too, some of which are close to being announced. More on that soon.

So, lots of creative balls in the air.

The Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize

I was absolutely over the moon to be a finalist for the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize in the Romance category for At Last Count.

I didn’t win, but it was so fancy to be feted at the Gardiner Museum on June 17, and to have the book recognized like that, three years after publication.

Kirk was my date (obviously). He looked pretty cute in a Kaffe Fassett vest he knitted.

Here I am with the book’s publisher, Norm Nehmetallah, from Invisible Publishing.

Foolishly, I missed getting a photo with my book agent, Amy Tompkins from Transatlantic Literary Agency—but she was there too.

At Last Count is also on my brain, because I was recently accepted into the Writers Guild of Canada Market Access Program, which will help me attend Content London in December to try to sell the TV adaptation of the book. I’d always pictured it as a Canada-Ireland co-production, so Content London is the perfect market to sell the property.

I was lucky enough to receive CMF Early Development funding in 2022/23 to develop the book into a tv bible and pilot, and got wonderful feedback on that work. One of the important notes I received at the time was that an Irish broadcaster would want to see more Ireland in the show I was creating. So that rewrite process of the TV series materials is happening as we speak, to get them ready to shop later this year.

I’m going to try to do better at keeping you up to date on all these shenanigans in film, TV, books and theatre. The joys of multi-hyphenate life! Writing these projects is always just the beginning—they have a long tail of shopping around, producing, accounting, marketing, you name it.

Please stay tuned for more news.

Claire