How Amanda Parris went from thinking that writing is a 'selfish' job to becoming an award-winning playwright
In a Q interview, the writer and activist talks about her journey to her creative work
Amanda Parris was seven or eight-years-old when her uncle asked her a classic question: what do you want to do when you grow up?
She confidently told him that she wanted to be a writer.
"He's like, 'Don't you want to take care of your mom? You want to be broke for the rest of your life?'" Parris tells Q's Tom Power in an interview. "He made me feel like my dream was so selfish."
After that conversation, Parris pushed her writing dreams aside — even into adulthood. She decided to focus more on activism and helping kids through art, rather than being an artist herself.
But Parris eventually returned to her writing. She was inspired by the great Black theatre around Toronto, such as the Mirvish production of 'da Kink in my Hair and the African-Jamaican Canadian playwright, d'bi.young anitafrika.
So she started enrolling in theatre programs at Toronto's b current theatre, though it wasn't easy for her to come back to her dreams.
"That was the beginning of that journey of get out of the comfort zone, push yourself, be OK with being the newbie and not knowing," Parris says.
She eventually wrote Other Side of the Game, a play about two Black women who organize in their community and support their incarcerated loved ones. She realized that the media focused on the police and the people incarcerated, but never about those supporting people in prison.
"You never see who has to stay behind to clean up that door that just got knocked down," she says. "Those were the people that I was interested in, the women that had to clean up the mess after the fact."
WATCH | Official trailer for For the Culture:
Parris' gamble paid off. Other Side of the Game was published as a book and won the Governor General's literary award in 2019.
But the real "barometer" that Parris measures her work is by her impact. As part of the research for the play, she had interviewed several women who supported incarcerated loved ones. It was their positive reaction to seeing Other Side of the Game that mattered most to her.
"That was the moment where I was like, 'Oh, I did something here,'" Parris says.
This barometer underlines her new project: For the Culture with Amanda Parris, a six-part TV series on CBC Gem. She compares it to Anthony Bourdain's show Parts Unknown, but instead of focusing on a place, this series focuses on a topic and how it affects the worldwide Black community. Episodes range from discussing the diaspora wars to the business of Black hair.
"I wanted to do a show that would talk about issues that were dominating my group chat," Parris says. "I'm always having this cross border conversation in my head. And so I just wanted to do that on screen."
The full interview with Amanda Parris is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Amanda Parris produced by Vanessa Greco.
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