Claudia Dey interviewed by the Globe and Mail

This past weekend, the Globe and Mail's James Adams interviewed Claudia Dey about her much ballyhooed new novel Stunt. An excerpt is below, but you can read more at www.globeandmail.com:<!--newline--><!--newline--><!--newline-->A decidedly Toronto novel, set in the early 1980s, Stunt is told in the first-person by Eugenia Ledoux, 9 at the book's start, and then after a (fantastical) overnight growth spurt, 18. She's on a wild-and-woolly quest to find her missing portrait painter of a father, Sheb, who, upon deserting his family, left only a note saying he'd 'gone to save the world.' Eugenia's mournful odyssey brings her into contact with an array of bizarre characters and a number of Toronto locales, including its funky Parkdale neighbourhood (close to where Dey and her family now live), the Toronto Islands (where Eugenia has the aforementioned sex with the treasure-hunting, jewellery-making Samuel Station), the Scarborough Bluffs and the former artists' colony at the Guild Inn. The book, in fact, 'began with a Toronto image, of a girl on tightrope walking above Kensington Market,' Dey observed, 'and the initial thought that it would be a novella.'<!--newline--><!--newline-->Dey's a Toronto girl herself, the youngest daughter (of two) of a lawyer father and an artist mother. But it's not too much to suggest that, imaginatively at least, she was shaped elsewhere. Like Montreal, where she first studied English at McGill, then enrolled as a playwrighting student at the National Theatre School. Mention, too, must be made of the eight summers she worked either as a tree planter or as a cook for tree planters in the forests of British Columbia, Alberta and Northern Ontario. "'The experience taught me how hard I can work -- that I love to be exhausted by work.'