Ross Pennie

Pelee Island Memoir-Writing Retreat…It’s on for June 21-24, 2013

Ross Pennie — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 18:59:52 +0000

Please join me for three days of summer writing and mentorship at the “On Pelee Time” bed and breakfast on Pelee Island in south-western Ontario.

You have a story to tell, I know you do. And I’d like to help you tell it. From Friday June 21 to Monday June 24, 2013 I’ll be conducting a retreat for friendly, amateur writers at a gorgeous new bed and breakfast on Pelee Island, the most southern spot in Canada.

We’ll be a small group of 5 to 7, spending mornings together around a table, writing individually in the afternoons, catching up again before dinner, and enjoying the evenings as we please. There will be plenty of time for me to meet individually with participants as often as you like, formally and informally.

So… whether your life has been populated by eccentric friends and family, punctuated by exceptional adventures, or at first glance seems rather ordinary, there is bound to be something fascinating about it. Contemporary memoir – everyday people like you telling their stories – has become an extremely popular trend. Memoirs are welcomed into magazines, newsletters, blogs, bookstores, and e-books. And some – such as Angela’s Ashes, The Glass Castle, and The Liar’s Club – have become so wildly popular that they have sat for weeks and months on the bestseller lists.

To engage readers (keep them turning your pages and recommending you to others), you’ll want to tell your memoir with the flair and elegance of fiction. In our three-day workshop, you will:

* learn how to free the voice locked inside you

* focus your stories to give them literary appeal without overdoing it

* apply the tools of the trade: character, plot, description, dialogue, setting, transitions, pacing, and theme

* we’ll talk about marketing your work in this age of blogs and e-books.

Whether you’re looking to write essay-length pieces or a full-length book, I’ll show you how to best tell the stories from your life. And we’ll have a whole lot of fun in a safe, no-pressure, and supportive environment. And if writing fiction is more your bag, you’ll feel right at home, because much of your life ends up in your fiction one way or another.

The “On Pelee Time” writers’ retreat will start on the evening of Friday June 21 and finish about noon on Monday June 24.

Our hosts at “On Pelee Time”, Debbie and Fred Billard, will coddle us in their beautiful and restful setting. The price of the retreat, including the twice-daily seminars, private tutoring, Debbie’s breakfast, and three nights accommodation (double occupancy) is $300.00.

If you think you might be interested, please contact Debbie for further details. Phone: 519-770-2900. Email: info@onpeleetime.ca. And do check out her website: www.onpeleetime.ca

If you’d like to contact me for further info about the writing aspects, don’t be shy. My email address is: rosspennie@gmail.com.

I’m looking forward to spending the long weekend with you.

Ross

You have found my old site, which is no longer current. Please visit me at my new site, simply “rosspennie.ca”

adamking — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 21:17:39 +0000

Margaret Cannon, From Saturday’s Globe and Mail, Published Friday, May. 06, 2011

Tampered – By Ross Pennie, ECW , 300 pages, $24.95 – This slick little medical thriller is the sequel to Tainted, the first Pennie novel that introduced public-health physician Dr. Zol Szabo. Tampered, set in Hamilton, Ont., proves Pennie – McMaster professor and practising physician – is no one-book wonder. This time out, the redoubtable Dr. Szabo is faced with a spate of food poisonings at Camelot Lodge, an upmarket residence for monied and well-connected senior citizens. It should be easy to identify the source, but Zol can’t find it. Neither can his colleague, Hamish Wakefield, a specialist in microbes. But there’s more to the deaths at Camelot than bad food. This one is a good weekend book.

Laughing With My Patients.

Ross Pennie — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 20:54:08 +0000

June 12, 2011

Until a number of readers told me that they laughed much of the way through TAMPERED – my murder mystery where the lives of simpatico seniors are in jeopardy and the body count begins to rise – I didn’t think of myself as a very funny person. And then I got to thinking: at the rather stark and antiseptic clinic where I see my patients, I laugh all day long. While I’m tending the sick and the injured, consoling the anxious and the frightened, treating the feverish and the pained, I do a lot of laughing. And so do they.

It’s not that I’m laughing at my patients or making light of the illnesses and predicaments that bring them seeking my help. It’s that somehow I’m able to help them see the irony of their situation, glimpse the bright side of their affliction, and recognize the hope I have for their future. A little bit of hope goes a long way. In fact, it’s an essential ingredient in any treatment regimen.

My approach seems to work. Patients returning for their follow-up visits usually greet me with a broad smile, despite their gaping wound (discretely bandaged) or gammy leg. I listen carefully to the next chapter in the story of their illness, I examine them closely, and then we laugh together.

Experts tell us that a placebo medication (a pill that looks real, and the patient thinks is real, but has no actual drug inside it) will improve patients’ symptoms thirty percent of the time. When you think about it, that’s a powerful effect that can be purchased for a few pennies. Perhaps my laughter-studded approach works like the placebo. It goes straight to the psyche where it makes the patient feel better immediately. Far quicker than the doses of antibiotics that are my other stock in trade.

Unless I’ve been asked to see too many patients than is humanly possible in any one day, I usually return home from a day at the office in a really good mood. I’ve been laughing through much of the day and I’m looking forward to the next. With a smile on my face.

To read more about the latest placebo-related research by Dr. Amir Raz at McGill University, check out this Internet link:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110512171525.htm

Life Imitating Art this Week in Germany: Death in a Salad?

Ross Pennie — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 17:32:25 +0000

June 7, 2011

Readers of TAINTED, my first Zol Szabo and Hamish Wakefield mystery, will remember that the government-appointed gurus were falling all over themselves trying to figure out how mad cow prions were tainting the food supply. The government boffins made a lot of useless noise that produced no credible results. In his eagerness to look smarter than everyone else, Dr. Wyatt Burr – that pizza-addicted, ego-driven, government patsy – caused havoc around the world. He sent even the venerable, well-defended Swiss chocolate megacompanies scrambling for cover when he erroneously implicated the gelatin in their much-loved bonbons.

Well, it’s all happening this week in real life. Sadly, people are dying of a nasty strain of E coli that chews up their red blood cells and wrecks their kidneys. Although this real epidemic is centred near Hamburg, Germany, cases have turned up all over the place, including our very own Mississauga, Ontario (our Canadian patient had recently visited relatives near Hamburg). And right now the Germans are doing everything they can to blame someone else. Anyone else, it seems. And fast. The poor Spanish, reeling under crushing debt and unemployment, have seen their veggies pilloried in the press and thrown to rot in Dumpsters. All at the flick of a microphone or the chirp of a tweet from a misinformed bureaucrat.

For a while, it looked like some innocent sprout-growing operation near Hamburg was going to be the next scapegoat, but sound and timely science seems to have saved the farmer from terminal humiliation and bankruptcy. For now.

There’s more to this story than meets the salad plate. Keep your forks clean, stay tuned, and hope there’s a noble fellow like my Dr. Zol Szabo working his heart out somewhere in Germany.

Mystery Scene Magazine: A review by Beverly DeWeese

adamking — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 14:24:50 +0000

Spring 2009, Issue #109

When Dr. Zol Szabo, the medical health officer at Hamilton-Lakeshore, hears the results of seven brain autopsies, he’s scared. Each of the brains shows a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD or mad cow). That’s a huge number of cases for the province of Ontario, and what’s more, it’s a variant of CJD that no one has even heard of. What is it and why has it just appeared?

This scary thriller is for readers who love medical puzzles. Author Pennie, a Canadian doctor, has made the science detection clear and interesting, while showing how certain situations, such as tainted meat or another disease, can trigger CJD. However, in this case, two of the CJD cases are vegetarians, only adding to Dr. Szabo’s difficulty in tracking down the disease’s triggers.

Though not terribly complex characters, Dr. Szabo and his colleague Dr. Wakefield are likeable protagonists who must unravel the disease before it becomes an epidemic. Szabo’s son, who may have inadvertently been exposed to the disease by his father, an attractive PI and love interest, a lab worker colleague, and a crazed mink farmer also add to the human interest. It’s really Pennie’s skillfully developed plot, the absolutely fascinating medical lore, and cogent observations on the politics of public health that made Tainted a page-turner for me.

Ancaster News

adamking — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 14:24:06 +0000

Debra Downey, Senior Editor

April 15, 2009

The best thing about Ancaster resident Ross Pennie’s first medical thriller is the news there’s two more novels in the works.

Recognizing Dr. Pennie’s talent for spinning an intriguing, page-turning tale, ECW Press has already signed on to continue the story of public health doctor Zol Szabo and other masterfully created characters who deal with frighteningly real epidemics.

A practicing physician and infectious-disease specialist, it’s no surprise Dr. Pennie is intimately familiar with the chilling aspects of an epidemic. In fact, the idea for Tainted is rooted in his own real life drama.

With his writing talents honed over decades of practice and the medical knowledge of insider, Dr. Pennie hits his stride with Tainted.

Set in an affluent area along the Niagara Escarpment, the city in which main character Dr. Szabo works looks and feels like most small urban centers. But the calm community is turned upside down when residents begin to die from what appears to be mad cow disease. Dr. Szabo and a young infectious diseases specialist must trace the source of the deadly food-borne illness that seems to have contaminated almost everything on supermarket shelves. The pair hope to avoid a maelstrom of panic and find a quick solution. But while the clock is ticking, the investigation becomes hampered by political expediency, greed, ambition and fear.

As a member of the medical establishment, readers would expect a realistic tale from Dr. Pennie. What’s surprising is the manner in which he beckons mystery lovers to sit down beside his protagonist and experience the frustration and terror of the crisis firsthand.

Dr. Pennie’s descriptions are vivid. Take for example these comforting few hours at home before Dr. Szabo’s world takes a turn for the worse.

“He sipped his scotch and nestled his lanky frame deeper into the buttery leather of his recliner. A north wind…rattled the living-room windows. Zol stroked the furry spine of Cory, the ginger cat who hunkered into his lap. They both gazed at the blue flames licking the simulated logs in the fireplace.”

As the high-stakes tension evolves:

“Restless energy seeped from Zol’s pores all afternoon. He dialled Hamish’s number half a dozen times but was always greeted by the stilted voice of the answering machine. He paced the carpet…almost counted the seconds.”

Two more Dr. Zol Szabo medical mysteries are scheduled for 2010 and 2011. The next novel takes place in a Hamilton retirement residence where seniors are dying of unexplained food poisoning.

Hamilton Spectator: Canadian Mysteries

adamking — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 14:22:52 +0000

Reviewed by Don Graves

April 4, 2009

Tainted is an outstanding mystery/medical thriller. Author and MD Ross Pennie hits all the high points: tension, absorbing descriptions of places (in Hamilton) that become an integral part of the action, tight pacing, and dialogue that is page-turning, thrusting the reader squarely into the core of the crisis.

To be successful, a medical thriller must feel real, and involve something that could actually happen to you. Tainted delves into political expediency, blind ambition, emotional trauma and resolution and it all feels very real.

Seven bodies in a morgue, dead from mad-cow prions having destroyed their brains. An actress, teacher, doctor, car-salesman — all innocent people struck down by a possible epidemic, a tragedy that might also consume the young son of the investigating medical officer of health, Dr. Szabo. Lip-biting

suspense, edgy and frightening plot combine with rare insight into characters driven by greed, fear and passion produce what is sure to become a bestseller.

Pennie is a bright new addition to the Canadian mystery writing scene and another in a growing list of new, top-drawer, local mystery writers. Tainted is a must read for 2009. Best yet, it’s the first in a series.

London Free Press: Stirred to Anxiety

adamking — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 14:22:03 +0000

By Joan Barfoot

April 18, 2009

One of the terrifically interesting things about some crime fiction is the way it can dunk readers into intriguing professions they know very little about.

So it is with Tainted, written by a Hamilton infectious disease specialist, about an investigation into the source of a fatal local outbreak of mad cow disease. Since presumably just about anyone can be stirred to anxiety about the many diseases and viruses, from mad cow to ebola, flinging themselves around a small world, Dr. Ross Pennie starts with a built-in advantage.

The McMaster University prof and lab director at Brantford General Hospital kicks off Tainted with a phone call to Zol Szabo, single father and associate medical officer of health for Hamilton-Lakeshore, advising that a local neuropathologist has found mad cow-variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in the brains of three dead people.

Szabo and his colleagues are already dealing with an outbreak of flesh-eating disease at a local nursing home which, although it sounds more than serious in itself, promptly drops down the priority list.

Tainted then pursues the medical and scientific investigation into where the variant CJD might have originated, and thus how to stop it. Since it can lie dormant for a couple of decades, the scientists initially put their hopes on exposure to British beef in the bad old days of mad cow there.

But a couple of the dead, whose number rises to at least seven, were vegetarians and others had never been near the U.K., leaving the investigators looking elsewhere.The regional medical officer of health, whose job Szabo covets and fears not getting, doesn’t wait long to call in the blustering big public health guns from Toronto, even though they’d earlier created a crisis by misdiagnosing a malaria case as Lassa fever.

This is where the novel gets alarming for a reader. Learning, from an author involved in the field, how office politics, academic investments, and personal ambitions may affect responses to disease outbreaks, is disheartening at best. So is the resistance, taken for granted as a virtue in Tainted, to giving the media, and so the public, any hint that something dangerous is going on.Then naturally, when a badly investigated culprit is wrongly announced, local and international panic ensues, before Szabo and his friends and colleagues, at considerable trauma and physical risk, reach the correct conclusion.

While somewhat stodgily written, Tainted has a quick-paced plot, with the requisite personal-life developments ticking alongside the science.

It’s in the intersecting pursuits of university research, hospital treatment and public health unit responsibilities, though, that the real interest lies for outsiders — who might reasonably hope that the professionals are working swiftly and collegially to protect us, while fearing that sometimes, distracted from the point, they might not be.

Winnipeg Free Press: Timely, scary simulation of scientific detective work

adamking — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 14:21:14 +0000

By John Sullivan

May 10, 2009

As the world falls all over itself to respond to a threatened H1N1-flu pandemic, Ross Pennie’s Tainted (ECW Press, 240 pages, $25) is a timely, fascinating and scary simulation of the scientific detective work involved in an outbreak investigation.

Zol Szabo, associate chief medical officer of health for Hamilton-Lakeshore region, knows the three-case cluster of rapid-onset Creutzfeldt-Jakob (mad cow) disease that drops in his lap one bleak November night could be both a health nightmare and a career-ender.

Szabo and his small team (including a comely P.I.) scramble to find the disease source that links the deaths of a rich philanthropist’s wife, a car salesman and a dentist. But, as the caseload jumps to seven, the genie is soon out of the bottle and all public hell breaks loose.

Fearing that his young son may be infected but hampered by medical politicians, a grandstanding “star” investigator’s rush to (false) judgment, and a flurry of finger-pointing, Szabo frantically sifts a whatdunit haystack of possible contaminants from Swiss chocolate to British sausages to a new botox drug.

Eventually there’s murder too, but this resonant (if somewhat plodding) first novel stoutly eschews the potboiler epidemic of gratuitous sex, wild derring-do and cinematic hyperbole for stark realism.

Pennie, an infectious-disease specialist at Hamilton’s McMaster University, knows of what he speaks. And he makes clear that the scariest aspect of any new plague will almost certainly be the swirl of public, media and official panic that dogs and impedes efforts to cope with it.

Booklist: Book reviews of the American Library Association

adamking — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 14:20:34 +0000

March 5, 2009

First in a new medical mystery series starring Canadian public-health doctor Zol Szabo, Pennie’s novel is a taut and timely work of suspense. After a variant of mad-cow disease is found in several recent autopsies, Zol has only a few days to track down the source of the contamination before a media storm breaks and sends the public into a panic. With the help of assistant epidemiologist Natasha, medical professor Hamish, and private investigator Colleen, Zol tracks back the germs.

Pennie builds tension perfectly, grabbing readers from the first page and keeping them entranced, both with the story itself and with nagging worries about the safety of the food they eat. All the characters, including such secondary figures as Natasha’s Indian mother, obsessed with finding her a husband, and Zol’s young son, Max, are realistically portrayed, their actions and emotions well matched with both their personalities and the plot.

Must reading for fans of Robin Cook and Peter Clement.