Our guest speaker on June 1, 2016, Megan Murphy, has had an interesting and varied career in the performing arts for over two decades.
Since graduating from York University’s Fine Arts program, she has worked as an actor in both the local and Toronto film, television and theatre scenes. She is currently a morning show co-host on 2 Peterborough radio stations, 93.3 MyFM and 107.9 Classic Rock.
In 2014, she went on a cross-Ireland bike trek which made local news headlines and will now be her upcoming documentary Murphy’s Law, screening on June 18 and 19, 2016 at Showplace Performance Centre. It’s been an ongoing journey filled with personal strength, surprises, and a lot of emotion.
On her 35th birthday, she moved from Toronto back to Peterborough into her parents’ house. Her return to Peterborough was anything but a happy one. Having lost her 65-year-old mother Mary Anne to cancer in 2012 — and still grieving the 2004 death of her 57-year-old father, well-known Peterborough lawyer Marty Murphy – Megan had also recently ended a six-year relationship. She found herself at the lowest point of her life. It was during this dark time that she discovered something that would change her life forever.
“Just around the time that I moved back, I found a journal in a box under the stairs,” Megan explains. “It chronicled a journey my father took when he was 26, during a difficult time in his life. He and my mom weren’t married yet and they had taken a break of their own. He was trying to figure out what he wanted, so he got his bike and rode around Ireland for a month and tried to find himself.”
Megan’s discovery of the journal was a surprise, as her father had said it perished in a house fire in the late 70s. “When I found the journal, I felt right away that it was a sign,” Megan recalls. “If my parents had been alive when my life fell apart, my father would have said, ‘Maybe you’ve got to go out and find yourself.’ He did do that. He just wasn’t here.”
Megan decided to replicate the same 1,400-kilometre bicycle trip across Ireland her father took in 1973 — and then discovered he had left more behind than just the journal for Megan’s journey.