The man approached us with plenty of confidence. He seemed self-assured, but had an inquisitive look on his face too. He pulled out a pen and paper ready to make some notes about who we were. One of us at our booth, on Wellesley Street in Toronto, asked him the burning question of the day:
“Are you a writer?”
“Sure am, “ he said. “I’m a poet. Have been all my life.”
The tension in the room was palpable. It was the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in downtown Toronto. The media and a who’s who of the literary community were there. The jury sat quietly. The anxious nominees fidgeted awaiting the verdict. Tuesday night was the moment five Canadian novelists only dream about – a chance to win this country’s richest fiction prize, the Giller. Four were waiting to be told they were second-best. One learned from the envelope in (Giller founder) Jack Robinovitch’s hand that the prize was won.
“And the winner is…” the representative of ScotiaBank said, “Will Ferguson and ‘419.’”
“Wow,” Ferguson said in response. “I want to thank…” and the list went on. And yes, he thanked his mom. “Number four son did you proud.”
In his 2009 book “Tainted,” Canadian author Ross Pennie explores the hypothetical likelihood of a regional health facility facing a sudden outbreak of mad-cow disease in a small Ontario community without any apparent explanation. The book is a thriller, an entirely fictionalized depiction of a system facing a medical crisis and widespread public panic right in our own backyard.
But Dr. Pennie admitted to me – and the audience watching our interview at the Whitby Pubic Library, Monday night – that he didn’t write this medical mystery as a slam against doctors or Canadian health facilities. No, he said, it was, in a way, medical teaching universities he was decrying.
“I’m not criticizing doctors or the medical system,” he said, “but I am knocking those in academe who would rather drag each other down than see any one individual scientist get credit for advancing the cause of medicine.”