Dear Friends of Gailey Road,
We hope this newsletter finds you well. Gailey Road has had an exciting year in 2025! We wanted to stay in touch and share some of our accomplishments with you.
We built community and inspired a new generation of Arts Researchers at Gailey Road’s Arts-based Research Workshop
In June of this year, thirty participants joined Gailey Road’s 4-day workshop to develop arts-based research skills in:
Verbatim Script Writing with Tara Goldstein and Jenny Salisbury
Song Writing with Kael Reid
Costume Design with Donna Jackson from Melbourne, Australia
The theme of workshop was Building Queer and Trans Identities, Communities, and Allyship. Participants spent four days learning the skills and then presented their work-in-progress on the last day of the workshop. The workshop was a collaborative project between Gailey Road and Donna Jackson’s theatre company Hubcap Productions, based in Melbourne, Australia.
Funded by a SSHRC Connections Grant, the workshop leadership team also included three Australian youth theatre artists, who Gailey Road got to know when The Love Booth was in Australia last year.
Amy Ferguson supported Donna’s costume design workshop.
Lev Lu and Shanti Steventon supported Kael’s song writing workshop.
Three Canadian graduate students also supported the four-day event.
Ray Naidoo and Siva Sivarajah supported Tara in organizing the event.
Chloe Thierstein supported Tara in assessing what the participants learned in the workshop and writing the final report.
In their final report about the arts-based research (ABR) workshop, Tara and Chloe concluded that the workshop was experienced as more than a research skill-building opportunity. It was experienced as a space of transformation, care, and affirmation. Participants not only learned how to do ABR, but they also experienced the value of doing research in ways that are collaborative, ethical, and personally resonant. As one participant put it,
There was a sense of community, vulnerability, and strength. With stories of people’s transformation, emerging care, empathy, and uniqueness within intersections in identity, culture, and experiences.
This kind of comment speaks to the workshop’s broader impact: arts-based research is more than just a method, it is a movement that enables and fosters queer and trans knowledge-making by disrupting dominant research norms and cultivates spaces rooted in care, ethics, and joy.
NEW BOOK: Léa Roback: Québec Social Justice Advocate by Tara Goldstein
Tara’s biography about her great aunt Léa Roback was published by Lived Places Publishing in June 2025.
Although Roback is well-known for her union and peace activism within Québec, she is lesser known in English Canada. When Tara began the project, no biography of Léa’s activist life and work had been written. Now, when our geo-political moment has produced polarized views and a lack of dialogue, Tara believes a story about her Auntie Léa’s ability to cross-borders — linguistic, religious, cultural, ethnic, and class borders — to work towards social justice needs to be documented and shared.
The biography was published as an open access book and a free e-copy is available from Lived Places Publishing.
To date, Lived Places Publishing has created over 20 book series including Activism and Social Movement Studies (the series which Tara’s biography is placed) Artists Studies, Asian Studies, Black Studies, Disability Studies, Forced Migration Studies, Gender Studies, Jewish Studies, Latinx Studies, Queer and LGBTQ+ Studies.
Lived Places Publishing publishes books that explore the intersection of social identity in particular times places. Launched in July 2021 by David Parker and Chris McAuley, the company has developed a “library-first purchasing model” that supports unlimited user access without restriction, interlibrary loan, and Open Access.
Kael Reid, who composed original music and lyrics for Gailey Road’s The Love Booth and Six Companion Plays in 2023 has a book coming out soon in the Queer and LGBTQ+ Studies series. David and Chris are also hosting an online Intersectional Lived Experience conference in October 2026. The conference will explore intersectional lived experience research and will feature speakers from all over the world.
We know many of our Gailey Road friends are researching and writing about intersectional lived experiences and may be interested in submitting a proposal for the conference. Calls for papers are open until August 1, 2026.
Story Merging: Lived Places Publishing
To accompany the publication of Léa Roback Quebec Social Justice Activist, Tara wrote a blog post for Lived Places Publishing about story merging, an approach she used in writing her biography. Tara used the approach to merge the biographical story of her great aunt Léa’s activism with a story about how Léa was an early influence on Tara’s own educational and theatre activism. In the post, Tara writes about how her aunt and grandmother’s love for theatre inspired Gailey Road Productions.
Celebrating the publication of Léa Roback: Quebec Social Justice Activist
To celebrate the publication, Tara was invited to talk about the biography at the Jewish Public Library in Montreal where she had conducted archival research for the project. To introduce her audience to Léa Roback’s life and activism, Tara read the first few pages of her book and was then interviewed about by archivist Sam Pappos about the process of writing the biography. Thank you to everyone who joined us in Montreal and online!
You can listen to the talk and interview, which took place on September 16, 2025, here:
Digital Story: The Modern Book Shop
In preparation for the Jewish Public Library talk, Tara and research assistant Mia Jakobsen created a new digital story about Léa Roback’s organization, The Modern Book Shop. The Modern Book Shop digital story is a companion to the first digital story Tara and Mia created about the 1937 Dressmakers Strike. You can view both digital stories here under the “News” section.
The Love Booth and Six Companion Plays article in the McGill Journal of Education
Co-Authored with Tara Goldstein, Jenny Salisbury, benjamin lee hicks, Bishop Owis, and Kael Reid.
We are so proud that this peer-reviewed article was included in a special issue on Research-Based theatre. In it, we celebrate the incredible community that came together to make both the Toronto Pride production and the podcast of Tara’s play The Love Booth and Six Companion Plays, celebrating the activism of early Queer Liberationist, especially Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin Lahusin.
To read our article in the McGill Journal of Education, click here.
To listen to the podcast of The Love Booth and Six Companion Plays, click here.
Co-Artistic Director Jenny Salisbury gave a keynote address about Trust and Performance, featuring her work with Gailey Road
On Friday, November 21, Jenny gave the keynote presentation at the symposium “A Critical Communal Questioning: Equitable Practices and Maintaining Rigour in the Expanding Field of Audience Studies” at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto, co-sponsored by the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Studies.
Jenny’s keynote, On Trust and Performance in Audience Research focused on Gailey Road and the care-based activism of research-based theatre.
Thank you for reading! We want to wish our Gailey Road friends a happy and healthy holiday season. Stay well and safe.
All the best,
Tara and Jenny
Co-Artistic Directors of Gailey Road Productions