Print Version (Download PDF)

Flanked by an empty coffee cup on her left and an ever growing ashtray on her right, Sara leafs through a haphazardly assembled pile of typewritten notes.

Her intense expression would be more suitable on someone cramming for an exam. I take my seat directly across from her and break her concentration with an inquiry into what she is reading. “I’m reading Michael Douglas’s screenplay for Wonderboys, it’s one of my favourite movies.” It’s not just casual reading before work, she’s trying to learn new writing techniques to perfect her craft. She has never written a screenplay before and thought it would be a good idea to read one.

She is relaxed and at ease (thanks in part to the cigarettes). Her response to each question is preceded and followed by a hearty drag from her seemingly endless supply of cigarettes. The ashes sprinkle out of the spent butt like confetti at a child’s birthday or any celebration for that matter. These days Sara has many good reasons to smoke – her story “Aqua Velva Smitty” took first prize in the Playboy College Fiction Contest, she is the first Canadian to win this contest. As she opens up a new pack of cigarettes she reflects on her recent literary victory.

“Playboy has a contest every year. I have a newsletter that talks about the market and decided to send in a story about a worker named Aqua-Velva Smitty who has an affair with a mentally challenged Orthodox Jewish girl. You don’t expect to win. It’s a great story but this contest is huge! It took forever for me to believe that I actually won.”

Sara savours every moment that she can expand her literary horizons; morning, evening and night – it’s a disciplined passion that burns and expands like a lit match over an open propane tank. While her commitment to writing is impressive her motives are nothing short enthralling.

“One of the reasons I started writing was because I started hearing voices in my ear. Stupid voices from nowhere. Annoying chatter. At first I wondered if I was crazy but it turned out they were characters talking, waiting to be put on the page.”

She has trained these seemingly chaotic voices to assist her in converting pages of sterile white paper into
chronicles of the dark and occasionally twisted world.

Sara is a serious writer who pumps at least 2000 words a day. Her iron work ethic towards writing was
inspired by the Stephen King book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. “Writing is a job like any other” insists Sara, “you have to set up a routine.” On employment Sara could write the book. She has worked as a front line social worker, a clerk at the Toronto Court of Appeals,and a candy girl at a Toronto movie theatre.

She is currently employed at the downtown video store Have You Seen…? ”It’s the fucking best job in the world! I love those guys [owners Howard and Paul] so much.” At her old jobs she would carry her mostly stressful work home with her, but in her current position she can take her work home in the form of a movie! “I take movies home but no stress.”

There’s nothing like a stress-free evening to write a dark, scary story that will spook the wits out of her readers! Horror and crime are Sara’s areas of expertise – one might aptly describe her as an excellent candidate for the CBC correspondent in Hell. She could objectively report on the fire and brimstone without so much as a grimace.

“Everything seems to obvious to me. For example I went into No Frills one day and they had these huge lemons. To most people they are just lemons but when I look at them I think that there could be an eyeball in the centre. When I told the lady at the checkout this she looked at me like I was crazy.

Will Sara ever write happy Disneyesque stories? I highly doubt it. She finds happy stories, dull, boring, and obvious. When a friend asked her to write a happy story about the Oregon Coast it evolved into a crime piece about a restaurant shooting. In the story a woman and her baby are in McDonald’s and the baby gets killed in a restaurant shooting. A gunman pointed the gun in her direction and for whatever reason she held her baby in front of her and the baby was shot. She was tormented by guilt and collected baby dolls, pretending they were her dead daughter. So much for a nice day at the beach!

Will the gloomy stories keep coming? Of course! Sara has a source of fuel as potent as a carton of cigarettes: Peterborough.

“Peterborough’s weird, but inspirational to me. It makes me have a million good ideas. You know how you’re a Trent student but you wanna move away. I like where I am, I like my apartment, I like my job, I like the people I’ve met here. It’s a cool time. I’m not thinking of leaving.”

Aqua Velva Smitty will appear in the October 2004 edition of Playboy. Sara’s short story Grass appears on page 12 of Toast.