Bacchus Books and Cafe will be hosting a reading by award-winning author, Angie Abdou, on March 29 starting at 7 p.m.
Abdou wanted to be a writer since she was about four years old, after an encounter with a book that became her first favourite book (Dr. Seuss’s One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish).
“Rather than pursuing what I most wanted, I lived a sort of parallel existence – doing academic writing and teaching books rather than writing them. That changed about a month before my 30th birthday. I was in a head-on collision on the highway between Calgary and Fernie. I was sure I would die. I woke up in the Foothills Hospital trauma ward. As soon I was up and around, I started taking a fiction writing workshop. That was 1999. I published my first book (a collection of short stories called Anything Boys Can Do) in 2006 and my second (a novel called The Bone Cage) in 2007,” she said.
Abdou always finds inspiration fairly close to home.
“I write to make sense of the world around me, to figure out the things that trouble me.”
Over the years she has worked hard to develop her writing style.
“I always try to push myself, and in my mind each of my books is a little more ambitious than the last.”
She also said that she enjoys getting out on the road and meeting people.
“I love doing public events. I try to make people laugh and think. I want books to be fun, and for people to be glad that they came (rather than feeling like they fulfilled some sort of torturous duty). I get a rush from people telling me that I’ve inspired them and that they’re going to work harder at pursuing their own writing.”
As for her latest work, The Canterbury Trail, Abdou explained it is a dark comedy about mountain culture.
“It pokes fun at the petty identity politics of small town life and explores the relationship between these town-dwellers and the natural world. In the book I play with some of the ideas and structures of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Like Chaucer, I have some fun with my characters’ contradictions and vices. So – it’s about sin. Who doesn’t like reading about sin?”
As for her future Abdou said she has work already completed.
“I’ve recently finished a novel about foreign nannies and hot yoga. It’s about domestic labour, contemporary families, globalization, motherhood, insanity.”
