Arts & Entertainment - Behind the Curtain (or: Who is This TJ Dawe guy, Anyway?)

I was born in Vancouver, BC in the mid-seventies to two Catholic educators. I went to church, got good grades and read Mad Magazine. I watched Star Wars dozens of times without it ever occurring to me to rent American Graffiti, much less Kurosawa.

At seventeen I stumbled onto good literature. I started listening to music none of my friends did, and no radio stations played. Some impulse led me to rent black and white movies, and a few foreign films.

At eighteen I went to the University of Victoria and studied theatre. I got cast in a play that toured five Canadian fringe theatre festivals and four years later I hit the road with a one man show of my own. I've been writing, directing and performing new work ever since. I've had five plays published and have participated in more than eighty theatre festivals around the world. I'm still doing them.

In university my reading habit snowballed. Each good writer led to many others. Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell got me thinking of Star Wars as cultural mythology. Zen Buddhism, Taoism, existentialism and other isms crept in as my Catholicism flaked away.

In 2004 my friend (and fellow Beams and Struts contributor) Juma Wood turned me on to Ken Wilber's work. The next year he got me into the Enneagram. Now I have a hard time getting through a conversation without bringing either one up – or both.

I kept a loose mental checklist of the movies “everyone” had seen and got watching them. I'm still working on it. I'm doing that with TV shows now too. And books. Been going at it with books for a long time. I expect this'll last the rest of my life.

In 2005 I noticed patterns in my own tastes. Favourite writers, musicians, directors. What they have in common, their recurrent themes, what those themes say about me. I wrote a show on the subject entitled Totem Figures, using the analogy of having one's own Mt. Rushmore. Now I do podcasts interviewing people, using this lens to look at their lives.

In 2007 I started reading genre stuff – science fiction, fantasy, mysteries, crime fiction and comic books. Even things that aren't up my alley became interesting – if nothing else, they reveal the priorities of the audience.

What are the recurrent themes in my plays? Shitty jobs. Unrequited love. Growing up. The difference between how you expect something will be, and how it ends up being, and having to deal with that difference. Doing something meaningful with your life instead of following the herd. The sublime hidden in the commonplace.

What are my interests for these essays? Patterns. Connections between disparate things. How our tastes and inclinations reveal our inner lives – as individuals and as a culture. The symbolism and greater levels of intelligence in popular entertainment that go unnoticed. The disguised levels of autobiography in any work of creation.

What's my definition of a well argued point? Examples, examples, examples. Back everything up. Provide references. Let anyone look things up for themselves and come up with their own conclusions. Disagree if you like, but come up with stronger counter-examples.