Daniel David Moses has supported the company with an annual donation for as long as we can remember. For us, Daniel’s contribution to the company is more than just his financial contribution; his constancy roots us, reminds us there’s a community around. We asked Daniel what it is about Modern Times that has keeps him believing in us.
‘Why do I so look for and forward to the work of Modern Times?
There’s a quality, a heft to their accomplishment that’s become familiar and necessary to my journey through life. My mother’s mom, Granma Minnie, was always doing something. Her activities —beadwork, rag rugs, cornhusk dolls with dried apple faces, leather work that produced moccasins, jackets, paper flowers— started out as ways to make extra money to raise a bunch of kids during the Depression but by the time I was becoming aware in the fifties, they’d become both a business and a way of life. The woman founded one of the first Indian craft shops on our Reserve.But what her activities taught the boy I was as he watched her work was how focused, how compelling such crafts could be. Before I ever thought about art, I’d seen something of its practise in her actions, how strong and strange the compulsion to make could be, how richly satisfying. “How about that, eh?” Made right in front of my wide-open eyes, present and by hand, and therefore made with her love, even if she would eventually sell it as a product. Lovely. That’s a human sort of beauty we moderns often feel embarrassed to recognize.But behind the skill, the spectacle, the stories, the wondering, I keep meeting it again and again when I come to Modern Times and for that I’m grateful.’—Daniel David Moses
Playwright/poet Daniel David Moses, a Delaware from the Six Nations lands near Brantford, Ontario, is the author of A Small Essay on the Largeness of Light and Other Poems (2012) and of the classic Canadian play Almighty Voice and His Wife, recently included in the Norton Anthology of Drama, 2nd Edition, Volume 2. He teaches playwriting in the Department of Drama at Queen’s University as an Associate Professor.