2027 Events
Saturday February 6, 2027 The Parasites
“It’s no use crying over the past, because you can’t change it. What’s the point? The only thing that matters is the future.” The Parasites
We open the year with Daphne du Maurier's most autobiographical and least classifiable novel. Published in 1949 and the first book she wrote in the writing hut at Menabilly, The Parasites follows the three Delaney step-siblings — Maria the actress, Niall the composer, and Celia the illustrator — children of a celebrated singer and a famous dancer, each gifted just enough to fall short of their parents' greatness. The frame narrative opens on a Sunday in the country when Maria's husband Charles turns on all three: "You're just parasites!" — and the novel flashes back through a childhood of theatres, hotels, and Paris, and forward into the emotionally entangled, faintly scandalous adulthood of a family circle closed to outsiders . Funny, cruel, and unexpectedly tender, it is du Maurier writing about the world she was raised in — talent as inheritance, and inheritance as a trap.
Professor Michael Shum and his wife, Jaclyn Watterson, will travel from New York to dissect this novel. Our speakers bring the sensibility of working writers to the discussion. Michael Shum previously addressed the Society in May 2024 with "Marda's 7 Stages of Sight," a reading of du Maurier's 1959 story "The Blue Lenses" , and returns, along with his wife, to consider how the Delaneys' theatrical world shapes du Maurier's craft from the inside out.
February 6, 2027
1:00 pm - 3:00 pm
5214 Palomar Lane
Dallas, TX 75229
Tea will be served.
ZOOM is available for meeting.
April Kiss Me Again, Stranger
"She said nothing, but her hands trembled slightly as she poured the tea, and I had the oddest feeling that I had seen her somewhere before, or someone very like her." Kiss Me Again, Stranger
In Daphne du Maurier’s “Kiss Me Again, Stranger,” a lonely young man becomes infatuated with a mysterious cinema usherette and spends an evening with her, only to discover she is involved in a series of unsettling, possibly violent events. The story blends suspense and psychological tension, leaving readers questioning the true nature of the woman and the narrator’s encounter with her.
DdM Society member, Penny Jackson, will work through the themes of the story and supply answers for why people act the way they do. Penny Jackson is a New York playwright, novelist, and short story writer — a MacDowell Fellow and Pushcart Prize winner whose novel Becoming the Butlers was named a New York Public Library best book of the year and optioned by Warner Brothers. Her own plays turn on ordinary people in liminal rooms and unlikely encounters, which makes her an ideal guide to a story that is essentially a two-hander with a fatal third act offstage.
April
1:00 pm - 3:00 pm
5214 Palomar Lane
Dallas, TX 75229
Tea will be served.
ZOOM is available for meeting.
August "Writers Should Be Read" Summer Meeting in Michigan
The Daphne du Maurier Society of North America will hold its annual reading retreat at Higgins Lake, Michigan. The afternoon will consist of coffee, treats, and discussion of either The Parasistes or Kiss Me Again, Stranger will be enjoyed by all who attend. Discussion will be lead by DdM member Laura Kirklen.
August
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Cottage Grove Association Dining Hall
Regrettably, ZOOM is not available. We are out in the woods of Michigan.
Saturday, October 9, 2027 Daphne du Maurier and Hitchcock: Page to Screen
Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptations of Daphne du Maurier’s stories—most famously “Rebecca” and “The Birds”—are masterclasses in suspense, turning her atmospheric prose into visual tension that lingers long after the credits roll. Hitchcock keeps du Maurier’s haunting ambiguity intact but layers in his own psychological complexity, making these films both faithful and uniquely his.
DdM member, John Francis, will give us his take on the author and filmmaker's relationship and review some of their collaborations. This lecture argues that the author and Hitchcock shared a preoccupation with loneliness, gender, fear, suspense, and Gothic imagery, and both built compelling and complex emotional landscapes for their characters. The session unpacks essential scenes from The Birds (1963) to show how technique on the page becomes technique on the screen.
John Francis is an Arts Society accredited lecturer, university lecturer, consultant, researcher, and visual artist who has delivered lectures and workshops across the US, the UK, Beijing, and Malaysia His lecture list also covers Hitchcock's Hollywood masterpieces including Vertigo and Psycho (johnfrancislecturer.co.uk).
October 9, 2027
1:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Event location - Mena-kinney
5214 Palomar Lane
Dallas, TX 75229
Tea will be served
ZOOM will be available for this meeting.
Saturday, December 4, 2027 Happy Christmas
Saturday, December 4, 2027 Happy Christmas
"It is just a tale that says Christmas isn't all about having the latest most marvellous gifts, showing off to relations and neighbours" Happy Christmas
We close the year with the least-known and most pointed thing du Maurier ever wrote about the season. First published in 1940 and reissued by Todd, Happy Christmas finds the prosperous, middle-class Lawrence household deep in preparations — staff organising, Mrs Lawrence fussing, Bob and Marjorie squealing over presents, Mr Lawrence watching from the sidelines — until a telephone call from a refugee charity announces a Jewish couple with nowhere to go. The family, worried the guests will spoil the day, puts them in the room above the garage. Drawn in stark lines, with no elaboration and no pointing of the moral, it is a deliberate modern retelling of the Nativity and a quiet indictment of Christmas as display — twenty-four pages that land, as one reader put it, "one very big punch."
Saturday, December 4, 2027
Noon - 2:30 pm
Luncheon served.
Event location - Mena-kinney
5214 Palomar Lane
Dallas, TX 75229
Society members will be notified in due course if this meeting will be available by ZOOM.