When Margaret learns of the death of her former husband, she recalls their earliest days together as Ph.D. candidates, beginning a journey through her past. Told through the sensations of Wallace Stevens's poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," the subject of her uncompleted thesis, Margaret evokes beautiful, ordinary and painful sexual memories from before, after and during their marriage. Stevens, a guiding voice in her head for twenty-five years, cajoles Margaret into unearthing the reasons she never became the poet, scholar, wife or mother she thought she would be. Bold and poetic, It is Solved by Walking is an intimate portrait of a writer making her way back to poetry one step at a time.

Plays by Catherine Banks include Bone Cage; Eula's Offer; The Summer of the Piping Plover; Three Storey, Ocean View; and Bitter Rose. Bitter Rose has aired on Bravo! Canada. Her work has been performed in Manitoba, Toronto, Calgary, and St. John's at the LSPU Hall. Three Storey, Ocean View won the Silver Medal in the 1995 du Maurier National Play Competition and was nominated for a Merrit Award for best new play in 2000. Bone Cage was awarded the Special Merit prize in the 2002 Theatre BC New Play Competition and was showcased at the National Arts Centre's On the Verge in 2005. Her work is poetic, darkly humorous, courageous and beautifully theatrical. Some of her characters, Lud in Three Storey Ocean View and Clarence in Bone Cage, have been described as Atlantic Gothic. Always a writer, Catherine started professional life as a special education teacher. She began writing plays while raising her children, Rilla and Simon. She currently lives and writes in Sambro, Nova Scotia.

Catherine Banks' profile page

• Winner, Governor General's Literary Award

A beautifully written and bountiful play.

The Calgary Herald