Rachel Langer had already written thousands of words for episodic television by that morning in February 2017 when she cracked open her computer to write the most personal story she had to tell: that of her long journey with endometriosis.
It wasn’t the first time the Vancouver screenwriter had shared something of herself in her writing – in an episode of CBC’s This Life, she drew upon her own experience with grief to inform how the characters dealt with the loss of their matriarch – but this would be the first time she’d specifically laid out something so private for public consumption.
Endometriosis is a disorder in which tissue that normally lines the inside of the uterus grows outside of it. Those who live with endometriosis often endure unrelenting pain. Working as she did in a segment of the industry where women are vastly underrepresented (in 2016, the Writers’ Guild of America put the number of women television screenwriters at 29 per cent), Langer had “always been terrified to speak out” about her endometriosis, she says during a recent interview on the Drive.
“People are always looking for a reason to say, ‘No, you’re not the right person to hire,’’’ she says.
For years, Langer had worked diligently to bring her A-game to every screenwriting gig, and just as hard to keep her painful condition a secret (“I will be completely frank in saying that I have to work three times as hard to cover it up as most people have to work to get through the day”). But on that wintry day, after nearly 10 years of keeping a significant part of her life hidden from friends and colleagues, Langer was compelled to speak out.
“I thought, ‘You know what? I don’t want to hide this part of who I am because it’s accurate and I didn’t do anything wrong,’” she says.
The essay – entitled “3 surgeries, fiery pain, dismissive docs: My life with endometriosis” – was subsequently picked up by Medium and Chatelaine. Langer wrote with an intense, searing honesty about the “velociraptor on fire gnawing through every fibre in my midsection,” the challenges of navigating a medical system that rarely listens to women, and her fears about disclosing her condition to peers and employers in the film biz.
Upon publication, the public’s response to Langer’s essay was immediate, overwhelming and rewarding. “What shocked me the most was how many women [came] forward and said, ‘Thank Christ, I’m not alone,’” marvels Langer.
As for the response from within the film industry, “the women were amazing,” says Langer. “I got some of the same from men, although guys, they’re just not as comfortable saying, ‘You’re talking about your uterus; good for you!’ And that’s OK... I’ve felt really liberated. I’m not shying away from it.”
As in her off-screen life, identity and speaking truth to character are hallmarks of Langer’s screenwriting.
“I can never not tell an identity story,” says Langer, whose writing credits include Aeternus, Continuum, Olympus, 2018’s Reboot reboot, and the highly anticipated Ghost Wars, which premieres on SyFy Network on Oct. 5. “It’s a pervasive theme in my life, of finding who you are and how that’s not a fixed mark and how that’s going to grow and expand and change.”
Langer studied screenwriting at BCIT and graduated from the Canadian Film Centre’s primetime TV program in 2014. She’s written for and alongside many of her mentors, including Dennis Heaton (a multiple Leo Award winner for Motive, now writing on Ghost Wars), Simon Barry (Continuum, Ghost Wars), and the late Denis McGrath, who passed away earlier this year. McGrath was a well-respected Toronto-based TV writer, producer, teacher, and champion for Canadian television; his numerous credits included the Vancouver-shot Continuum, on which Langer worked as a writers’ assistant.
From McGrath, Langer learned that “it can always get better, but it can always get worse. Even if you think it’s the worst it can possibly be, there’s a way up, there’s a way out, there’s a way through, and never be afraid to be loud about it if you need to.”
In June, Langer took home the 2017 Leo Award for Best Screenwriting in a Dramatic Series for that aforementioned episode of This Life entitled “Well Fought, My Love,” which Langer wrote while her grandfather “was dying of a stroke in the hospital. There were things in that episode that were directly out of my family’s experience, so winning a Leo Award for that episode was intensely validating.”
Also validating: Langer’s time in the Ghost Wars’ writers’ room. The Vancouver shot series was created by Barry and is set in a remote Alaskan town that has been overrun by paranormal forces. It stars Avan Jogia, Kim Coates, Kandyse McClure, Vincent D’Onofrio, Meat Loaf, Maddie Phillips, and Sharon C. Taylor.
The sci-fi horror series is very different from the family drama that was This Life, and Langer is happy to move back and forth between genres. “It’s all about putting a character in a place and a setting, and if it’s sci-fi, that’s great, and if it’s quiet, emotional, family stuff, that’s great,” says Langer. “It’s freeing to feel that way. I can go anywhere as long as the characters come with me.”
Ghost Wars premieres on SyFy on October 5 and in Canada in 2018. Reel People will have more from our recent Ghost Wars set visit closer to the series’ Canadian premiere.
Follow Rachel Langer @RachLanger
More from Rachel Langer
On her earliest beginnings as a storyteller: “My parents always tell me I started talking before I was walking. The first story I really remember is, we had to do a one-page story in elementary school, and I did a comedy parody of Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. I was 8. My aunt, who was a lit prof at Trinity Western, used it in her class until she retired. I didn’t understand why, but she said, ‘You’ve got the parody perfect!’ I was like, ‘Cool, what’s parody?’ I told it from the Wolf’s perspective and made him out to be a guy who was just trying to use his instincts in nature and couldn’t understand why he was a villain. I was always looking for the underdog even then.”
On advice she’d give to a younger version of herself just starting out in her career: “There are three key things. One is perfection doesn’t exist so don’t wait until it’s perfect to put it out there – but put out the best version you can. There’s a happy balance. It’ll never be the thing that you thought it was going to be, but you have to do enough work to not put out a first draft. The second is to just make stuff. When Derek [Langer, Rachel’s husband] and I finished film school, we were just inundated with school debts and student loans and just scraping by, and so we thought we should do corporate videos because we thought it would make us some money, but what we should have done is just make films. We’re doing that now. We just shot three short films in the past year. We bought all of our own gear and now we’re just making stuff. We don’t care if it sells. We don’t care if it just screens a couple of times and that’s it. We’ve just got to make stuff. The third thing is that living in the fear is the sweet spot. I just started writing my first feature film that Derek is going to direct, and I’m terrified, and I have no idea what I’m doing, and it’s great. That fear is driving me to just get through, and if it sucks, it sucks.”
On early lessons she learned from television showrunners: “I learned about how much work it actually took. I don’t think I was aware of the immense job that it is to create and run a TV series. I think that’s a defining thing to learn, and I think you either get scared, or you get inspired, and I walked away going, ‘I have to do that.’”
