Writing
My novel, The Work, was published by Stonehouse in November 2019.
Some reviews:
It’s called The Work but reading Maria Meindl’s debut novel couldn’t be farther from a slog. The story hovers over the shoulder of stage manager Rebecca Weir, who works for an experimental theatre company that may or may not be a cult. As the eclectic and shifting cadre of artists devote themselves to breath work and movement exercises and overly-intimate relationship dynamics, Meindl steps deftly between forms—the time-hopping but relatively traditional prose narrative is delightfully juxtaposed with personal professional websites, IMDB entries, Rate My Professor quotes, confessional emails from a character to a doctor, and more. Such tricks could feel gimmicky but in Meindl’s skilled hands these diverse forms both develop the characters and control the pace of the book, like well-placed and meaningful pauses in a swelling monologue you can’t help but get swept up in.
Maria Meindl’s debut novel, The Work, tells a decades-spanning story about the power of art to captivate, sustain and destroy.
AARON SCHNEIDER in The Temz Review
The Work is a finely sketched portrait of a specific milieu in 1980s Toronto. It finds echoes beyond its time frame in the current contexts of #MeToo, workplace politics, and the fragmentation of patriarchal culture.
SHAZIA HAFIZ RAMJI in Quill and Quire.
The Work is a dazzling exploration of a life and love in theatre – the struggle to not only create but embody work that matters while making sure the lights stay on, the building stays upright, and everyone eats. Maria Meindl has captured the practical magic and personal strain it takes to put on a play, and introduces us to a captivating cast of characters in the process. A truly fascinating novel.
A powerful novel, one that brilliantly charts the allure of charismatic figures and the need, for better or worse, that drives us to them. Maria Meindl takes us into both the darkness and the light, in a world where the two often shade into each other almost indistinguishably.
“All her life she’d been yearning to yearn”. Why do we fall in love with the wrong people, and keep yearning for them, even when they seem to be destroying us? Why does love have to be so much work? Edgy, fast-paced and darkly funny, Maria Meindl’s The Work is a deep dive into a toxic passion and its intriguing aftermath in Toronto’s bohemian theatre scene of the 1980s. Stage manager Rebecca Weir –– strong, fearless, uncompromising and sensuous –– is ambushed by her passion for Marlin, a maverick director and founder of an avant-garde approach to theatre called “The Work”. Turns out, Marlin, too, is “work”: a moody, arrogant and emotionally abusive manipulator. Also, quite possibly, a genius. Rebecca’s obsession with both Marlin and The Work shapes her, embedding her into the wildly divergent lives of Marlin’s friends, family, lovers, collaborators, investors and enemies. The Work is a By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept for Toronto’s Queen Street generation of artists.
From
Outside the Box: The Life and Legacy of Writer Mona Gould, the Grandmother I Thought I Knew. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011
At the end of the day I gathered a pile of dust from the counter of the study carrel with a wet paper towel, swept it into my hand and threw it in the garbage. The dust had sat in Mona’s various apartments and gone into the boxes when she moved, settled on top of other dust from other apartments and traveled with her to the next place. Molecules of Mona surrounded me. Her familiar smell was on my hands when I left the place. Sometimes, I found one of Mona’s white hairs. Sometimes, I found one of my own white hairs.
Some reviews:
Outside the Box is a story of inheritance, of coming to terms with where we’ve come from and who we are. In exquisite prose and with a fascinating mastery of chronology, Meindl makes this her own story as much as Mona’s, the story of how becoming settled in her own life and happiness required her to make peace with her family’s past, to unpack the metaphoric baggage that was as heavy as all those boxes and boxes her grandmother had left her.
As an archivist, Meindl gives us Mona, a woman seemingly forgotten. She also shows us Mona's struggles as an independent female Canadian writer. Meanwhile, she entertains us with both the pleasures and the "why bothers?" of luxuriating in another woman's lettered past.
NOREEN SHANAHAN in Herizons
Meindl has written a fascinating history of her grandmother’s brave attempts at living the life of a poet, and her own thoughts on life and freelancing.
"Not content merely to provide an account of Gould's life and times, Maria Meindl probes the complexities of her own relationship with this remarkable woman. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and found it rewarding on multiple levels."
"Encompassing literary, social, and women's history, personal memoir, and media studies, Outside the Box is honest, revealing, and original."
"How to balance the subject with one's own history? How to position oneself in the story? I think [Meindl] does it brilliantly and that it is one of the great accomplishments of this beautifully written book."
"Her remarkable life has just been celebrated in a biography written by her granddaughter, Maria Meindl, Outside the Box: The Life and Legacy of Writer Mona Gould, the Grandmother I Thought I Knew (McGill-Queen's University Press)."
The London Free Press