We’re delighted to be interviewing author and lyricist Steven Mayoff, whose most recent novel, The Island Gospel of Samson Grief, is coming out this fall with Radiant Press. Masterfully disrupting the idyllic picture often painted of Prince Edward Island, The Island Gospel According to Samson Grief is a darkly funny and thrilling story of spiritual dissonance and cultural satire in Canada's most wholesome province.
There’s much to unpack in Mayoff’s stunning and layered novel, but our question is actually about how his novel echos themes in his concurrent creation, Dion: A Rock Opera—a musical reimagining of the ancient Greek tragedy The Bacchae by Euripides, for which Mayoff is the lyricist and Ted Dykstra is the composer. Dion: A Rock Opera is the first original production developed by Toronto’s prestigious Coal Mine Theatre and will receive its world premiere on its stage in February 2024.
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Q: You are a lyricist as well as an author and your latest play is opening in Toronto next year. There are some thematic similarities in these works. Namely, the shared theme of political autocracy versus spiritual agency. Was this a coincidence, or would you say one work informed the other? Or maybe they were created in a symbiotic sort of synergy? We're fascinated!
A: My novel The Island Gospel According to Samson Grief was written roughly from 2016 to 2020. The musical theatre piece Dion: A Rock Opera was created by myself and composer Ted Dykstra from 2020 to 2022. There was definitely some overlap in terms of events that informed both works, mostly dealing with the political upheaval that was happening in the U.S. during the Trump administration.
The novel had a very long gestation period that started quite soon after I moved to PEI in May 2001. Having lived in Montreal and Toronto most of my life, the contrast of living in a small and relatively secluded rural community gave me the illusion of somehow being hidden from the world. But after the 911 attacks, that illusion was shattered and, like many, I realized there was nowhere to hide from the changes our world was going through. When I discovered that there was no synagogue on PEI, despite having a small but active Jewish community, the wheels soon began to turn. I knew the story would be about a reclusive painter, who is enlisted by figments of his imagination, in the form of Judas, Fagin, and Shylock, to build PEI’s first synagogue at the behest of a deity known as the Supreme One.
By the time of Donald Trump’s surprising rise to power, I was well into the novel. Much of the MAGA movement is made of evangelicals who think God put Trump in the White House. I started to think: if that was true, to what end? This started me on the thematic path of political autocracy versus spiritual agency and helped me develop the sinister turn the story takes later in the novel.
I’ve known Ted Dykstra since 1981 and for much of that time we have collaborated as lyricist and composer. During the Covid lockdown in 2020 Ted asked me if I would be interested in turning the Greek tragedy The Bacchae by Euripides into a rock opera. The play is about Pentheus, the king of Thebes, returning home to find that Dionysus, who is half mortal and half god, has taken the women of Thebes and made them his followers. This leads to a feud between Pentheus and Dionysus and a battle of wills. In our version Dionysus, who we call Dion, entices not only the Theban women, but all of society’s disenfranchised groups to follow him, thus starting a movement of social rebellion. After reading the play a few times, my research included watching university lectures on The Bacchae on Youtube, which helped my understanding of the play. But I found an interesting parallel when I saw how disastrously Trump was mishandling the Covid crisis. I thought, if our rock opera portrayed Pentheus as a Trump-like figure then it only stood to reason that Dion was a force of nature, similar to Covid. That idea greatly influenced the language I used in my lyrics, as well as pushing a theme of Nature versus Civilization.
The Gospel According to Samson Grief by Steven Mayoff. Will be available wherever books are sold this fall 2023.
More about the book:
Samson Grief, a reclusive painter from Prince Edward Island, is confronted by three red-haired figments of his imagination in the form of Judas Iscariot, Fagin, and Shylock. They claim to be messengers of “The Supreme One”, a genderless deity who has decreed PEI to be the new Promised Land, who also wants Samson to build the Island’s first synagogue. Scared, confused, and seriously doubting his sanity, Samson eventually, though grudgingly, accepts the challenge amid increasingly bizarre obstacles in a new dystopian world.
Steven Mayoff. Image credit: Thelma Phillips.
More about Steven:
Steven Mayoff (he/him) was born and raised in Montreal. His fiction and poetry have appeared in literary journals across Canada, the U.S., and abroad. He is the author of the story collection Fatted Calf Blues, winner of the 2010 PEI Book Award for Fiction; the novel Our Lady of Steerage; and two books of poetry Leonard’s Flat and Swinging Between Water and Stone. Steven lives in Foxley River, PEI.