reflections: tarragon rbc emerging playwright award

Pictured above: Promotional shot, 2023 (left); the Tarragon Young Playwrights Unit 2015/2016 cohort during the March Break intensive, me on the far right with short hair (right)

It’s been a couple weeks since it was announced I was selected as the Tarragon RBC Emerging Playwright for 2023, and I’ve held off from speaking too much about it because I’ve been battling a pretty severe depressive episode. Still am. More on that later, but I wanted to share a story:

I was fifteen when I was given the chance to work with Tarragon, in their Young Playwrights Unit. I was in Grade 10, and I’d written my first play, Hope: it was about getting stuck in cycles of depression, not knowing how to give and receive love in the face of that and the struggle to find agency. It went on to be produced at the Sears Drama Festival at the District and Regional levels. It was the first of four plays I’d written in high school, the last of which being Fine China, which went way further than I’d ever imagined it could at the time.

I almost wasn’t allowed do it.

My schedule, movements and life at that point were so tightly controlled by my father that I knew when I’d share this with him it’d be a “no.” And it was. And I was shattered. My budding artistic career was already cut short before it’d even started.

Luckily when I explained the situation to my drama teacher the next day, she’d called my father and told him this was not an opportunity to treat lightly: it was a professional experience. As a person with a high regard for authority, he accepted. Thank you for that, Ms Burt.

It was a formative first moment for me as an artist: it taught me that my fate as an artist should never be in the hands of anyone else. Through artistry, I was finding personhood; it extended to teach me that if I was ever going to have agency in life, I would have to take it by force.

It’s this scrappy mentality that’s gotten me where I am today. It also gets me into trouble sometimes. But when I think about how I came from a context where I believed that I had an obligation to live the rest of my life trapped and miserable without any idea that there was a possibility for anything else? I’ve been through too much to play nice, placate anyone or water down the truth of what I want to express. I’m motivated to live powerfully, and I will be doing what it takes to get there.

From one of the many trips made up to Tarragon from Mississauga in 2016.

This post was originally published on Instagram on October 24, 2023.