Sara was a screenwriter-in-residence at the Canadian Film Centre and has worked for many years in the BC film industry, including five seasons in the writing room of Edgemont, CBC-TV’s Gemini and Leo award-winning teen series. She also writes creative nonfiction and is the editor of Swelling with Pride: Queer Conception and Adoption Stories (Dagger Editions/Caitlin Press), selected for the American Library Association’s 2020 Over the Rainbow Nonfiction Longlist. She graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing and Theatre from UBC, where she now teaches in the School of Creative Writing.
Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?
I was born and raised in Ottawa. I grew up in Blackburn Hamlet in the east end. In the 1970s and 80s, Blackburn was still a shiny new suburb, surrounded by NCC greenbelt and crawling with kids. I graduated from Gloucester High School in 1988 and moved to Kingston to study Drama at Queen’s. I came back to Ottawa after each year of university to work at various summer jobs, e.g. at Ottawa Public Library, NCC Infotent on Parliament Hill, Gloucester Summer Theatre Camp, and National Science Library (then known as CISTI). I left Ottawa for good at twenty-three, when I moved to the west coast to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing and Theatre at UBC. Other than a short stint in Toronto as a screenwriting resident at the Canadian Film Centre, I’ve made my home in Vancouver ever since.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
Like many writers, I discovered my passion young, making picture books as a kid and writing long, complicated stories for creative writing assignments. When I was at Emily Carr Middle School, late Ottawa author Jan Andrews came to my class as a visiting writer for two consecutive years. What an incredible gift this was. She got a classroom full of awkward, hormonal tweens working on novels. This was my first introduction to long-form writing and I was all in. I finished a book-length fiction manuscript each year Jan was with us. The content is cringe-worthy when I look back now, but most importantly, Jan taught me that I could create a long-form narrative and follow it through from start to finish.
By high school, I’d fallen in love with plays. My friend’s older sister was studying Theatre at University of Ottawa and invited us to watch countless student productions at Academic Hall and in the studio of the now-defunct white Theatre Department house on Waller Street. To my young eye, the student work seemed edgy, provocative and exciting. I was taking Drama myself at Gloucester and performing and working as crew on school shows. Around this same time, the National Arts Centre English Theatre, under Maureen Labonté and later Gil Osborne, started offering a myriad of outreach and development programs for local playwrights in the now long-gone Atelier, an intimate, 100-seat black box theatre on King Edward Avenue. One of these initiatives was an annual Young Playwrights Search, where four winning teen playwrights would spend a week with professional actors, dramaturgs and directors workshopping their scripts at the Atelier, cumulating in a public staged reading.
When I heard about the inaugural contest in 1985, I was inspired to merge my passion for writing with my love for theatre and script my first-ever stage play. With the confidence I’d gained writing long-form prose with Jan Andrews, I wrote a full-length, lighthearted family drama called Hunky Dory and won the contest. The week I spent at the Atelier working with Ottawa theatre professionals was immersive, exhilarating, and life-changing. I now knew without a doubt that this is what I wanted to do when I grew up – not just write, but write plays and collaborate with other artists to make theatre.
I kept writing plays and won the Young Playwrights Search again in 1986 with Gimme Some Truth and in 1988 with Sadly As I Tie My Shoes. The NAC went on to produce the Canadian premiere of Sadly As I Tie My Shoes as part of the 1988-89 English Theatre Off-Centre season at the Atelier. The show was directed by Stephen Malloy, dramaturged by Janet Irwin, and starred Birgitte Solem, Michael-Valiant Saunders, Joan Gardner, Noel Counsil and the late, great Heather Esdon. It received critical acclaim and was voted best new play of the year by Ottawa Citizen theatre critic Barbara Crook.
Through the local playwriting community, I also discovered Tree Theatre and, by extension, Tree Poetry, and had the pleasure of attending numerous readings and events there while still in town.
Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all? Have there been subsequent shifts due to where you have lived since?
Emerging as a writer in Ottawa at a time when the two major theatre companies in town, NAC and Great Canadian Theatre Company (GCTC), were actively nurturing local playwrights and new play development, set me on a career path writing for theatre that might not have otherwise happened. For this, I am forever grateful.
When I arrived in Vancouver in the early to mid-90s, there were far fewer opportunities for text-based playwrights. Instead, the doors that initially opened for me as a dramatic writer on the west coast were in film and television. I’ve done a lot of screenwriting and story editing here, and spent five seasons in the writing room of Edgemont, CBC-TV’s Gemini and Leo award-winning teen series, created by fellow Canadian playwright and TV showrunner Ian Weir.
Further, part of my MFA coursework took place in the multi-genre Creative Writing program at UBC, where I now teach today. As graduate students, we were expected to branch out and work in at least two other genres in addition to our speciality. This key learning experience has emboldened me to move more freely between dramatic and literary genres than I might have, had I completed my MFA solely in a Theatre department. For example, I am now also known in the literary community as a published writer and editor of creative nonfiction.
Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow?
Something unique and exciting about Ottawa theatre is the rich cross-pollination that occurs between English and French practices. During my time there, I saw some amazing francophone shows produced by NAC’s French Theatre, as well as French Canadian plays in translation at GCTC. My sensibility as an emerging playwright was as much informed by the work of Michel Marc Bouchard, Michel Tremblay, Jovette Marchessault and early Robert Lepage as it was by the likes of Judith Thompson, Sharon Pollock, George F. Walker, Timberlake Wertenbaker and Caryl Churchill.
Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How had the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?
The plays I created as a teenager were all set in Ottawa. I was writing about the world I knew. My adolescent characters in those early plays get around the city on OC Transpo, hang out on Rideau and Elgin Streets, and cross the river to Hull to buy alcohol underage at the Dépanneur.
My plays tend to be very theatrical. I like to play with time and space on stage, and to incorporate stylized, movement-based elements. I think this is a direct result of the highly evocative, inherently theatrical French Canadian work I experienced in Ottawa as a young playwright.
Q: What are you working on now?
I have two big projects on the go right now, that are in conversation with one another.
I’m writing a play for the first time in a long while. It’s called Courage and is an anti-war play that explores intergenerational impacts of migration and flight. It interweaves three main narratives: my grandmother’s 1948 escape through the snowy East German Harz Mountains with five month-old twins in a baby carriage; playwright Bertolt Brecht’s return to communist East Germany that same year, after a long exile abroad, to stage his famous play Mother Courage in East Berlin; and my present-day return with my queer family to hike the Harz Border Trail, retracing my grandmother’s footsteps and making peace with the past. While this may all sound pretty serious, there are also healthy doses of humour and magic realism sprinkled in. Time and space fold in on themselves, present intersects with past, and magic happens. I’ve been developing this script over the past couple of years in collaboration with Vancouver dramaturg Joanna Garfinkel, and this past May at the 2026 Banff Playwrights Lab with Montreal dramaturg Emma Tibaldo.
I’m also working on a book-length collection of creative nonfiction, a memoir in essays, about growing up as a Canadian Kriegsenkel (a German word coined in the early 2000s, meaning “war grandchild”). The book, like the play, examines intergenerational war trauma and, more specifically, my experiences growing up in Ottawa with immigrant parents (a British mom and a German dad) who’d spent their early childhoods on opposing sides of World War II. The collection explores my struggle to reconcile various facets of my identity, namely my British heritage and Canadian nationality, with their heroic World War II narratives, with the guilt and shame associated with my German heritage and blood ties to the nation that perpetrated the war and the Holocaust. Add to the mix my queerness, deemed “un-German” by the Nazis, making me simultaneously an embodiment of hero, perpetrator, and victim/survivor. While this book aims to provide an unflinching look at the trauma and tragedy of war and its lasting impact on subsequent generations on all sides of a conflict, it also expresses themes of healing, post-traumatic growth, resilience and social responsibility. As with the play, there are various lighter, more playful pieces to offset the more serious parts. For example, there’s an essay about why I love bike riding, and another about my life-long Davie Bowie fandom. A couple of early pieces from the book have been published in Canadian literary magazines: “My Summer Behind the Iron Curtain” appeared in Geist and “My Other Tongue” in Prairie Fire.
