Tanya Marquardt's "Stray"

Tanya Marquardt is an award-winning performer and the author of ten plays, which have been produced across Canada and the United States. Transmission was published in the Canadian Theatre Review, and Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep was the subject of an episode of NPR’s Invisibilia. A Hertog Fellow and graduate of the MFA creative writing program at Hunter College, Marquardt splits her time between Vancouver, British Columbia, and Brooklyn, New York.

Marquardt applied the “Page 99 Test” to Stray: Memoir of a Runaway, her first book, and reported the following:

From page 99:

...After Liz and Kristian had asked me to leave, I'd asked everyone I knew if I could stay with them. Garret's place was a no - there was no room and his father was still grieving the loss of his wife. Abby was a kind-of - her parents said I could spend the occasional weekend there if I needed to, but were noncommittal. I went back to Garret to see if I could stay for a couple of weekends a month and started to plan a piecemeal schedule - a night here, two nights there. I was trying to stay focused on the task, furiously committed to staying away from Mom. But as the deadline loomed, I stopped sleeping altogether, lying on the couch, thinking that maybe the painful springs weren't that painful and wondering where I would be sleeping next.

When I was a runaway, food, shelter, and a place to sleep caused me anxiety on a daily basis, and I was constantly in search of what most of my friends took for granted. In this paragraph I am attempting, and failing, to provide myself with some kind of structure, a modicum of security in the midst of my life at that time, which was chaotic and unpredictable. Here I let the sentences have a kind of runabout quality to them because I wanted to let the reader see how I was frantically trying to find a home, doubling back to people who had said no, begging and pleading and not getting anywhere. The language acts as to stand in for my emotional life when I was sixteen - high strung, in survival mode, with little support. Things change later, and obviously, since I am writing this, I did survive, and even thrive. Stray is about that survival, and about the process of discovering oneself and ones chosen family.

Visit Tanya Marquardt's website.

My Book, The Movie: Stray.

--Marshal Zeringue