Nine to five doesn't agree with many of us. Not for award-winning playwright Jason Sherman anyway. He hadn't been on his new job (at Coach House Press) more than half a day before he quit.
"It was one of my first jobs after I got my BA. I hadn't written a play since I graduated," says Sherman [BA'85]. "And I thought maybe working with other writers would inspire me. I came in, found a pile of administrative forms to fill out, felt my heart sink and I left!"
After that, Sherman, a Toronto native, immersed himself in the art of playwriting and hasn't looked back since. His first work, A Place Like Pamela, was produced in 1991. He based it on a piece that won the President's Prize in Creative Writing while at York. After that came The League of Nathans (Chalmers Award), Three in the Back, Two in the Head (Governor General's Award), Patience, It's All True and An Acre of Time.
While at York Sherman worked with literary gurus like Mavor Moore, poet bp Nichol and critic Frank Davey, and credits their mentoring and encouragement for keeping him at his playwriting.
During the last two years he's been writing for film and television, penning scripts for the CBC satire "National Affairs". But he says he has mixed feelings about TV work. "It's not that I'm not used to collaborating on projects," he says. "If you come from the theatre, you know how to collaborate to the nth degree." But in the case of a movie for television, from which he eventually removed his name, he rewrote his drafts to satisfy various producers until everyone was pleased except for the director. "He started rewriting the script on the set. It was awful working that way."
But Sherman says ultimately the bad doesn't outweigh the good in the writing life. "The experience of sitting down to write plays and tell stories in many voices is a wonderful thing. Runners talk about 'getting into a zone'. It's like that."
