Cassie Stocks

Cassie Stocks is a Canadian novelist whose debut, Dance, Gladys, Dance, won the 2013 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. Published by NeWest Press in 2012, the novel follows Frieda Zweig, a twenty-seven-year-old painter who has abandoned her ambitions and tries to construct an ordinary life. Her move into an old house brings her into contact with Gladys, the ghost of a woman who surrendered her own hopes of dancing. Their connection allows Stocks to combine supernatural comedy with questions about artistic confidence, work, aging, and the pressures that narrow women's choices. Stocks developed early drafts while studying professional writing at MacEwan University, and her literary record also includes short fiction published before the novel. Dance, Gladys, Dance balances humour with grief and frustration, using Frieda's return to art to argue for the value of creative persistence without reducing the surrounding women to simple lessons.