The University of Maine is pleased to announce the publication of Piecework / Travail à la pièce, a bilingual collection of two plays by Vermont playwright and performer Abby Paige.
Written for solo performance by the author, the two plays featured in Piecework / Travail à la pièce explore the Franco American experience and the long, often invisible history of the borderlands between francophone Canada and northern New England. To celebrate the book’s publication, Ms. Paige will present a launch event featuring music, readings, and performances.
Abby Paige is a writer and theater artist whose work often explores the boundaries between people, languages, nations, and generations. She is the author of two chapbooks of poetry, Clean Margins, (Winner, Harbor Review Editors’ Prize, 2020), and Other Brief Discourses (above/ground press, 2013). Her poems and prose have appeared in publications in the U.S. and Canada, including the Best Canadian Poetry 2020 Anthology. She serves as Drama and Book Review Editor for the Franco American literary journal Résonance. In the tradition of performers such as Lily Tomlin, Sarah Jones, and John Leguizamo, Paige is known for her versatility and her tendency to use laughter to break audience’s hearts
Piecework / Travail à la pièce is the second title in the Éditions Réveil series, an imprint established by the University of Maine Press and the Franco American Centre of the University of Maine at Orono in 1996, dedicated to the publication of works by and about Franco Americans. The first book in the series was Un Jacques Cartier Errant / Jacques Cartier Discovers America: Three Plays, by Grégoire Chabot in Franco American French with English translations by the author. For the new book, Chabot and Paige worked closely on translations of her English and bilingual texts before his death in 2021. French writer and translator Agathe Anne stepped in to help complete the translations in 2023.
