DAWSON CITY – Clem Martini is probably best known as a playwright.

The Calgary-based professor is the three-time winner of the Alberta Writer's Guild Drama Prize, a Governor General Drama Nominee for his anthology A Three Martini Lunch, a National Playwriting Competition winner for The Life History of the African Elephant, and is the past president of the Playwrights Guild of Canada.

His text on playwriting, The Blunt Playwright, has enjoyed tremendous success at universities and colleges across the country.

On the other hand, it's harder to deal with plays at a public reading than it is to use other forms of writing, so Martini, the current writer-in-residence at Berton House, stuck with prose for his public reading at the Dawson Community Library in mid-March.

That's fine. Martini has written an animal fantasy trilogy about the secret life of crows called Feather and Bone: the Crow Chronicles.

He is currently working on both a novel and another young adult fantasy trilogy, as well as another textbook, this one on Greek and Roman comedies.

With his brother, Oliver, Martini produced a memoir called Bitter Medicine: A Graphic Memoir of Mental Illness.

Two of his brothers have suffered from schizophrenia, and Bitter Medicine is the illustrated chronicle of Oliver's struggle. Martini read from portions of this moving story.

Oliver's form of the disease involves acute paranoia, and the drugs he has to take to control his mental processes have triggered physical symptoms that resemble Parkinson's Disease.

With most chronic diseases of this type, medications have a limited span of effective use before it is necessary to phase out one type and slowly try something else.

In Oliver's case, the next batch of drugs contained something that caused him to develop diabetes as a side effect.

When it first hit him and Clem took him to the emergency ward, the combination of physical symptoms caused staff to think he was drunk, so he was not treated immediately.

Then, once they got his symptoms under control, they sent him home without realizing there were some drugs he did need to be taking, so he had a serious attack of paranoia.

It was an intense reading that prompted lots of questions from the audience of about 18 people.

Martini's second choice for the evening came from a book with the working title The Comedian, a novel that certainly ties in with the textbook he's also writing.

The novel is based on the life of Plautus, a Roman playwright of the old Latin period (254-184 BCE) whose comedies are among the earliest surviving works of this era.

In the excerpt, the playwright is faced with the challenge of finding a new lead actor for his latest play after the death of his first choice.

He and the producer find a broken-down actor who used to have some show of talent and decide to risk their production on the chance that he can be rehabilitated. It was an amusing reading, and lightened the tone of the evening after the first part.

Martini has been enjoying his time here.

His wife and fellow author Cheryl Foggo visited with him during his first week here, and he was later visited by another of his brothers during the recent Myth and Medium conference week in Dawson.

By DAN DAVIDSON

Star Correspondent