In a Perth County farmhouse some time during the 1930s, a boy named Owen decides to spend the summer putting on plays with the help of his cousins, his grown-up relatives and the neighbourhood children. One of the plays they put on is their adaptation of a Victorian novel, The Saga of Caresfoot Court. In James Reaney’s Listen to the Wind, we watch a double story unfold: we see Owen fighting illness and trying to get his parents back together again; and we see Angela Caresfoot treading her way through a world of evil manor-houses and sinister Lady Eldreds. The two stories intertwine and illuminate each other.

James Reaney was born on a farm in South Easthope near Stratford, Ontario in 1926. He has won the Governor General's Award three times for his poetry, though he is perhaps better-known as a playwright, especially for his landmark Donnelly trilogy (1974-75). Reaney's theatrical adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice Through the Looking-Glass returned to the stage at Stratford in the summer of 1996.

His work includes: The Red Heart, poems, 1949; A Suit of Nettles, poems, 1958; Twelve Letters to a Small Town, poems, 1962; The Killdeer & Other Plays, drama, 1962; Colours in the Dark, drama, 1969; Collected Poems, 1972; Listen to the Wind, drama, 1972; The Donnellys, a trilogy of plays, 1974-75; Baldoon (with C.H. Gervais), 1976; The Boy With an R in His Hand, young adult, 1980; Take the Big Picture, young adult, 1986; Alice Through the Looking-Glass, stage adaptation, 1994. James Reaney died in 2008.

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“Keeps reminding us that the way through our world of sickness and breakdown is play.”
— Profiles in Canadian Drama