Patti Flather
Writer & Theatre Artist
Hello and welcome. My name is Patti Flather. I’m an award-winning storyteller – a playwright, writer, theatre artist, and cultural producer in the Yukon, Canada. I also work as a director, dramaturg, and mentor helping other creators to develop and share their voice and vision. I believe in the power of transformative stories to question, illuminate, inspire, celebrate, and connect us across landscapes and cultures.
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With deep gratitude, I acknowledge that I live, create, and benefit as an uninvited guest on the traditional territory of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation and Ta’an Kwäch’än Council. I acknowledge the Tagish Kwan as the original people who live and occupy the lands within this Traditional Territory, alongside the headwaters of Chu Níikwän, also known as the Yukon River. Shäw níthän. Kwänäschis. Thank you.
My first fiction collection, Such A Lovely Afternoon, is published with Inanna Publications. During the pandemic I created Tomorrow Quilt, a northern audio story quilt. I’m excited to be part of Yukon Digital Theatre Collective’s first project – adapting and creating digital, live and hybrid radio plays and other stories to share in 2023.
My plays, starting with Sixty Below, have been produced in the Yukon and across Canada. Paradise is published with Playwrights Canada Press. A scene is featured in Refractions: Scenes, released in 2021 with PCP. Find my other play scripts here. Check out Ndoo Tr’eedyaa Gogwaandak—Vuntut Gwitchin Stories radio plays and booklets in Gwich’in and English, a 2019 Yukon Heritage Award winner. With Gwaandak Theatre, Vuntut Gwitchin Government, community members, and artists, I was a co-creator.
Contact me to book a reading, a workshop with youth or adults, or dramaturgy. I’m a proud member of Playwrights Guild of Canada, The Writers Union of Canada and Literary Managers & Dramaturgs of the Americas. I also offer writing workshops including with the Yukon Artist in the School program. With the Yukon Words team, I’m helping to develop programming to support and celebrate word arts in the Yukon and beyond.
Books & Plays
Such a Lovely Afternoon
Such a Lovely Afternoon is a dazzling debut collection from award-winning Yukon writer Patti Flather. A feisty young tomboy grapples with gender roles with sometimes hilarious results, a refugee single dad struggles for dignity in his northern community, and a malfunctioning compost toilet and wacky neighbours upturn a woman’s island cabin life, among other tales.
Against vivid landscapes from Canada’s West Coast to Hong Kong to the Yukon, Flather reveals poignant beauty, compassion and humour in everyday lives, with characters searching for identity and belonging, delving into their resilience and humanity.
Tomorrow Quilt
Join me for this four-part personal podcast. I’m a settler in Canada today because of the 1918 flu pandemic that broke my great grandmother’s heart. I become a grandma during this pandemic, stitching the corners of my story-quilt to here, now, tomorrow. Our journey together on this earth.
Paradise
A haunting, poetic play about four characters struggling to find grace and humanity, Paradise explores trauma, mental illness, addiction, and the lengths we’ll go to for personal freedom.
Paradise is about an unemployed logger, a young Canadian accused of terrorism, a family doctor and his daughter, searching for their humanity and yearning to connect, like all of us.