I began thinking of writing a biography of Quebec social activist Léa Roback in 2023 right after Canada Post honoured her activist work with a stamp.
Léa Roback (1903-2000) was my Great Aunt, and she was well-known for her seven decades of activist work in Quebec. Yet a biography of her life and activism had yet to be written in either French (the official language of Quebec) or English.
At a time when our current geo-political moment has produced polarized views and a lack of dialogue, I believed that Auntie Léa’s ability to cross linguistic, religious, cultural, and class borders to work towards social justice in the 20th century needed to be documented and shared with contemporary social justice educators and activists. The English biography is being published by Lived Places Publishing (June 2025) with plans for a French translation of the biography to be published soon after that.
My Great-Aunt Léa was a force. She was brave, bold, fiercely intelligent, well-read, politically astute, and funny. Like her sister, my grandmother Rose, and the other Roback siblings, Auntie Léa was a compelling storyteller, and much of what I knew about the injustices in the world in my childhood and adolescence came from listening to my family, and Auntie Léa herself, tell stories about her activist work.
Story Merging
As I began to plan the way I wanted to write my biography of Auntie Léa’s life and activism, I became interested in a writing approach called story merging which merges the biographical story of an individual person with the story of the person writing the biography.
In a biography, the stories that are shared are usually only about an individual subject, another person. In autobiography, the storytelling is about oneself and often requires the writer to create an autobiographical persona. However, when a life writing project combines both biography and autobiography, a third story emerges.
In my biography of Léa Roback, the third story is a story of how Auntie Léa’s activism was an early influence on my own educational and theatre activism and the ways her activism might influence the work of other contemporary activists and educators. For example, in my biography I write about how my aunt and grandmother’s love for theatre inspired me to establish an independent theatre company in Toronto. Gailey Road Production is a place where “research meets theatre and theatre meets research” through the creation of research-based and verbatim theatre plays. When read aloud or performed, the plays provide opportunities for conversations around discrimination, human rights, and activism.
Gailey Road’s latest verbatim play, The Love Booth and Six Companion Plays, is a set of seven short plays about histories of queer and trans activism and care in the early Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Liberation movement. As a set, the plays illustrate the way queer and trans activists challenged cis-heteronormativity and racism. Working with an ethic of community care and a lens that examines the intersections of cis-heteronormativity with other forms of structural discrimination (such as anti-Asian racism, anti-Black racism, anti-Indigenous racism, and settler colonialism), the plays dramatize a wide variety of moments of activism and care that took place in North America in the 1970s and 1980s. To hear the plays read aloud by the cast who performed them at the Toronto Pride Festival in June 2023 go to https://gaileyroad.com/the-love-booth-companion-plays or look for Gailey Road Audio on your favourite podcast platform.
To read other examples of story merging, I suggest:
- Linda M. Grasso’s Equal Under the Sky: Georgia O’Keeffe and Twentieth-Century Feminism (University of New Mexico Press, 2017)
- Marnie Mueller’s hybrid memoir-biography The Showgirl and the Writer: A Friendship Forged in the Aftermath of the Japanese American Incarceration (Peace Corps Writers, 2023)
- Megan Marshall’s Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017)
Linda Grasso’s book examines how Georgia O’Keeffe’s life and art continues to inspire contemporary women writers. For example, she discusses Jessica Jacobs’ poetry collection Pelvis with Distance: A Biography-in-Poems of Georgia O’Keeffe (White Pine Press, 2015). Jacobs’ collection combines a set of poems written in the first-person voice of O’Keeffe and her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, with Jacobs’s reflections on her own life.
Marnie Mueller’s memoir-biography explores the convergences between the life of her biographical subject Mary Montoya (the showgirl) and her own life, revealing the complexities of identity and the impacts of historical events on personal lives.
In her biography about Elizabeth Bishop, Megan Marshall merges biography and memoir by alternating between personal reflections and biographical chapters.
Working with the approach of story merging provided me with the opportunity to reflect on what I could learn from Auntie Léa’s advocacy and activism, and how I might integrate her ability to cross borders and provide activist community care into my own teaching and theatre social justice work.
For readers interested in thinking about the ways the writing approach of story merging might inform their own research and writing, I offer two reflection prompts:
- In what ways, if any, might the practice of concept of “story merging” enhance or layer your own biographical writing? Can story merging help you meet a goal you have for your project?
- How might blending personal history with historical and biographical research shed light on the ways your own life experiences are intertwined with broader political and historical contexts?
Happy writing!
Learn More About Léa Roback
Léa Roback (1903-2000) gained renown for her seven decades of activism in Quebec, particularly championing union rights and women rights. Yet, despite her significant accomplishments, no English-language biography exists. In our current geo-political climate, marked by polarization and lack of dialogue, documenting Roback’s ability to transcend linguistic, religious, cultural, and class boundaries in pursuit of social justice is inspiring.
Léa Roback: Quebec Social Justice Activist is based on interviews between Roback and filmmaker Sophie Bissonette, sociologist Nicole Lacelle, journalist Merrily Weisbord and others, promises to engage students, educators in social justice-oriented fields, Equity Studies, Gender Studies, Education Studies, Canadian Studies, Canadian History courses and all those who seek justice and enthusiasm from a life-long human rights activist.
Tara’s book is published under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license as defined by Creative Commons – which means that you are free to download, copy, and redistribute it in any medium or format as long as you follow the license terms. Please see our Open Access title list for all freely available books and license terms.
We want our books to be available to as many people as possible. If you’d like to purchase an individual copy, please email us and we’ll give you a discount code:
IMAGE CREDIT (HEADER): photo Courtoisie des Archives de la Fédération des travailleurs et des travailleuses du Québec, Les Midinettes de Montréal, 1937. Federal Photos., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped from original file.
IMAGE CREDIT (INLINE): Léa Roback (1903-2000) Stamp, Canada Post
