Stef Penney
Topic: Writers in the News
It makes me laugh that the focus on Stef Penney is that she wrote a novel based in the Canadian wilderness when she has never been to Canada. I saw another article on her today that went on and on about it. When did we become so focused on a person being there? The whole point of fiction is that it's from our imagination. If I'm writing an historical novel I can't go to whatever historical period I'm writing about. If I can't go there I can't write about it? If I'm not a man, I can't have male characters? It's bizarre to me.
EY

Cured agoraphobic lands top UK literary prize
By Paul MajendieWed Feb 7, 6:21 PM ET

Debut novelist Stef Penney, once an agoraphobic too terrified to travel, landed one of Britain's top literary awards on Wednesday for a haunting novel about the Canadian wilderness she has never visited.

Penney, a screenwriter who now has her fear of open spaces under control, landed the Costa Award for "The Tenderness of Wolves," which literary critics hailed as an astonishingly assured debut.

Utterly astounded by her surprise win, Penney told reporters afterwards: "I am still shaking. I am supposed to be a writer but I don't know how to describe that."

Penney said of her agoraphobia: "It isn't a distant memory. I don't think it ever goes away completely. I can now fly which is great."

Asked what message she had to offer to agoraphobics after her personal journey of the imagination, she said: "Don't give up. It might take a long time, you might not know how you are going to get over it, but you can."

Comedy writer and director Armando Iannucci, who chaired the judges, said "Within 50 pages, I was completely in love with it."

The 37-year-old British writer took the coveted award after a close fought tussle with novelist William Boyd for his spy drama "Restless" and Brian Thompson for his quirky wartime autobiography "Keeping Mum," Iannucci said.

It was only the fourth time that a debut novelist had landed the book of the year award since 1985.

Agoraphobia often confines sufferers to their homes. Penney conquered hers after a two-and-a-half-year battle before going out to research the book in the British Library in London.

She told Reuters at the ceremony: "I was fascinated about Canada because I couldn't go there."

"It made me want to armchair travel," she said. "Something did eventually cure me. Whether it was part of that, I don't know but perhaps it was."

"The more I researched, the more fascinated I got and the bigger the canvas got," she said of the novel that starts with a brutal murder and the sudden disappearance of a teenage boy in a remote corner of 1860s northern Ontario.

The Costa, formerly known as the Whitbread, is split into five categories -- for best novel, first novel, poetry, children's book and biography -- with 5,000 pounds ($9,856) going to each winner and 25,000 pounds to the overall winner.

Poets Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney and children's writer Philip Pullman are among previous book of the year winners.

The prize, selected this year from a record 580 entries, is designed to reward the most enjoyable read of last year, whereas winners of the prestigious Booker Prize are picked above all for their literary prowess.

Copyright ? 2007 Reuters

A Muse
Topic: WC - Daily Practice
6:12pm 6Feb07 Tuesday

I like the thought of having a muse. A certain person to focus on and write for. To some extent, I write for my mother, someone who was an avid reader. I write what I think she would have wanted to read but it's a goal that I'll never realize since she's no longer alive and will never read what I write.

So although I think I'll probably always write with my mother's reading interests in mind, I think I'd like to find a muse. Mind you, if it's as easy as finding true love, I might be shit out of luck!

EY

Calvin Trillin
Topic: Writers in the News
A literary portrait of a marriage
Readers embrace Calvin Trillin's memoir about his relationship with late wife Alice
Feb 06, 2007 04:30 AM
Judy Stoffman
Entertainment Reporter

The humourist Calvin Trillin didn't think he was writing about marriage when he composed his new book, About Alice. It was to be a portrait of his late wife and muse, who died at 63 of heart failure on Sept. 11, 2001.

"For a long time I had no plans to write about her," he says. After her death, he published a novel about a man obsessed with parking (Tepper Isn't Going Out), a collection of articles about food (Feeding a Yen), and two volumes of light verse about the Bush administration, bringing his published books to 24.

"Then David Remnick (editor of The New Yorker, where Trillin has been a staff writer wince 1963) asked rather hesitantly if I'd thought of writing about Alice. And I realized that I wanted to recreate her as a whole person, not the sitcom sensible mom figure that I wrote about in my lighter pieces."

Readers of Trillin's books such as Alice, Let's Eat; Family Man and Travels With Alice had known her as the straight man, advising moderation to his own flakey and gluttonous persona.

The fizz in their relationship, their pleasure in each other's company, was in constant evidence in Trillin's portrait of Alice, whom he met at a party in the early 1960s. She married him because he made her laugh; he wrote all his subsequent work to impress and entertain her: his first and best reader.

After The New Yorker article appeared in March 2006, Trillin recalls receiving "a lot of letters from young women about marriage. I didn't mean to be writing about marriage, but I guess that came through."

Letter writers wanted to know how to have a marriage as happy as the Trillins'.

Marriage has fallen into disrepute, brought low by Philip Roth and Claire Bloom, Prince Charles and Princess Diana, and a host of narcissists and philanderers. According to recent reports, the proportion of unmarried people is at an all-time high in the United States.

The author was in Toronto from his Manhattan home to read at Harbourfront last night from About Alice, a slightly expanded version of The New Yorker article. We talked in the office of Random House Canada, his publisher.

Trillin is a compact man with a fringe of dark hair around a bald spot, dressed with L.L Bean-like informality in khakis and a blue V-neck sweater over a checked shirt. Like most funny writers, he is deadly serious in person.

The son of a Kansas City Jewish grocer, Trillin was educated at Yale and worked at Time magazine in his early days, an experience captured in his first novel Floater. A Time colleague, the writer John Gregory Dunne, became a close friend.

Unlike A Year of Magical Thinking, the memoir by Dunne's widow Joan Didion (soon to open as a Broadway play), About Alice is not sad.

"Joan's book is about mourning and mine isn't," he says. His is an upbeat story about the 25 extra years he had with his wife, an educator, TV producer, fashion plate and generous friend to all.

Though never a smoker, Alice was diagnosed with lung cancer at the age of 38 when their two daughters, Abigail and Sarah, were small. The aggressive radiation treatment that saved her life eventually led to fatal heart damage.

Alice was also exceptionally beautiful, as the photo on the book's jacket, taken in London on their wedding day, shows. Why were they married abroad?

"I had a friend who arranged a trip for us to London; Alice was there visiting someone and we decided it would be easier to get married there because by then her parents were fragile financially. She didn't want them to have to pay for a wedding."

The picture was taken by a newspaper photographer assigned to see if any couples were brave enough to get married on Friday the 13th, which it happened to be.

Alice died on 9/11, but Trillin ignores this coincidence in his 78-page book. "It was a nightmare logistically; everyone in New York was traumatized," he says. "I didn't want to attach myself to the historical event. It would have been a faux drama."

He dwells most on the good times, like the summers spent at the family cottage on the south shore of Nova Scotia, which Trillin continues to own.

"My girls grew up there. I've been arguing for years that I should be considered one-sixth Canadian content since I live here two months a year, but I still don't find myself on the Canadiana shelf in bookstores," he says.

Sarah and Abigail brought their prospective husbands to the cottage to see if they passed the Nova Scotia test. Guests were required to try out a gizmo from the Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue that was supposed to enable one to walk on water.

"We called it the Jesus toy; most people fell into the water. How gracefully you met defeat was the test."

No Easy Bake
Topic: WC - Daily Practice
5:46pm 6Feb07 Tuesday

Talk about laziness, I could go to sleep right this minute. I may have to put all my gear back on and go for a walk to wake myself up. It's pathetic and this is without sugar too. Mind you I did eat too much for lunch, what with one of the guys bringing in food to share and my own lunch that I carried with me. It was Filipino food that the gooseman brought in and I'm always one to try food that I wouldn't normally have. Ado kept saying that it was called, "fux you."

Hmm, what's in it?
"You take all the left over food you have in the house and stick it in a pot and throw in some curry spices to cover the taste."
"Yeah," I said, "and when your kid asks you, 'what's this?' you say, 'fux you, just eat it!'"

It was one of those kind of days!

Air, tall guy and I got into a giggling frenzy imagining all the possible situations at Naked Sundays. Apparently a gym in the Netherlands is going to bring in Naked Sundays for the body builders who happen to be nudists. I talked about lifting weights facing a mirror and watching your breasts.
Lift the weight up, ahh they look great, bring the weight back down, ooh, they sag!

And to think it all started with the recall of the Hasbro's Easy Bake oven. I always wanted one when I was a kid. My cousin Kim had one but her mother refused to buy more cake mix because it was too expensive. I still have fond memories of the time we baked a cake in it. I dreamed of owning my own. It's probably good I never had one, I probably would have been a fat kid instead. Now they're recalling those bad boys because kids fingers are getting caught and getting burned. What a way to turn a kid off cake. Or worse yet give her a cake phobia.

Okay, I've got to go for a walk and come back and write.
Hmm, the Toronto Star had a big write up today about Calvin Trillin whose reading/interview I was supposed to go to last night. I'll see if the article is posted on the Star online.
EY

Breathing exercise - Cleaning Angels
Topic: Living on Purpose
Tuesday 5:37pm 6Feb07

I guess I should preface this one with an explanation. I truly believe that life is about energy and imagination. If my energy is focused on getting sick, I will be sick. If my energy is focused on being depressed I will be depressed. If I live with a child's imagination where everything is magical and Angels and fairies exist, well it just makes my world a better place so why not do it?

I love the thought of having guardian Angels that do all these jobs for us on the sidelines while we go on about our daily life. Napoleon Hill used Angels and had an Angel that he would send out in advance when he was driving somewhere to find him a parking spot when he got to his final location - his parking Angel. I've always loved that idea.

With the media that tells us on a daily basis that we are going to get killed if we go to Mexico because 4 or so Canadians died in Mexico, they're out to get all Canadians. If we don't go to Mexico we'll probably get Cancer next week, get bitten by a mosquito this summer and get the bird flu, eat tainted beef and have some effects from Mad Cow disease, drink water or better yet, put an ice cube in a cocktail and get Hepatitis... sigh!

I made up this breathing technique to give me some sort of peace of mind from the hysteria and fear that we are bound to feel when you listen to the news and other people and and...

I do my simple breathing of inhaling through my nose and exhaling through my mouth.
Relax my body starting at my feet and working up to my head
Then I call all the cleaning Angels and ask them to clean my insides.
I imagine all these tiny flying angels inside my head vacuuming, and sweeping and dusting and scrubbing and sanitizing and healing
I imagine them starting in my head and working down in my nasal passages, my lungs , cleaning my heart and unclogging anything thing that needs to be unclogged, warding off anything that I might catch, and taking care of anything I might not think of.
It seems a little crazy but it's all I have to keep me from getting paranoid about every little thing that I could catch.
Hmm, I haven't used them in awhile, need to get them to deal with my arthritic toes...

When they are done, I always thank them for cleaning me up.

It seems strange but it doesn't hurt.

EY