Writing fiction as a way to relax?
Works for Tony Pi, Graduate Program Assistant at the Cinema Studies Institute
Cinema Studies professor Bart Testa interviews Tony Pi, the CSI Graduate Program Assistant, about his fiction-writing.
Tony Pi
When Tony Pi came to Innis College in the 2008 spring term to act as temporary administration assistant for the Cinema Studies Institute, we were struggling with the business of running a large undergraduate program and a small but brand new MA program. We had lost our undergraduate administration assistant at the start of the school year and, after a long search for a graduate assistant, found someone who almost immediately got an offer she could not refuse. Tony arrived from the UofT’s temporary pool, wholly unknown to us, then. He set about calmly and quietly to put things in running order and immediately engaged himself with the graduate colloquium we were running for the Film Studies Association of Canada. It was during those preparations that we got to see Tony in his full stealthy multi-tasking mode. It was also in those weeks that I accidentally ran into him at a lunch spot on Bloor Street. In the course of that conversation, I got some sense of who Tony Pi was – and, boy, was I surprised, and not for the last time.
Tony Pi took his BA at U of T in linguistics and then went to McGill to study graduate linguistics, doing his PhD on semantics, and then branching out into Canadian socio-linguistics. Back in Toronto, in 2000, Tony took his first admin job at the Linguistics Department. After a year and half, he then moved to the west coast and taught for two years at Simon Fraser University. When he eventually returned to Toronto, he put himself in the University’s temporary staffing pool. This is how he found his way to Cinema Studies.
This year, Tony surprised me again. While in his office one day, I spotted a Science Fiction anthology on a shelf so I asked him if he read Science Fiction. Well, yes, but he also actually writes Science Fiction and Fantasy and that book that I had pointed out, Ages of Wonder (DAW 2009), was an anthology containing his new story, “Sphinx!” I was at the photocopier in five minutes and read the story that night. The next night, I read his “The Stone Cipher” (2007). Both stories were really good – smart and logical and coolly observant, while also weirdly and wonderfully improbable.
It was when Tony was working on his dissertation, now thirteen years ago, that a friend suggested he take up writing fiction as a way to relax. When he came back to Toronto, he took a writing class with Science Fiction author Robert Sawyer at the Taddle Creek Writing Workshop, and began writing Science Fiction and Fantasy stories seriously. Since then, Tony has accumulated 18 published stories and one poem. These have been published in magazines like Abyss & Apex, On Spec,and Intergalactic Medicine Show as well as anthologies like Ages of Wonder. Tony has now sold a novella-length tale. Having read a few of his stories, I would have to agree with critic Chris Butler’s remark that everything in Tony’s fiction is fully researched but only to arrive at the most fantastic ends.
Tony was nominated this year for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Nomination eligibility lasts two years following the nominee’s first profession publication. This is Tony’s second year, having missed last year’s nomination by three votes. Members of WorldCon, who also run the famous annual Science Fiction convention, award the prize through a voting system. I look forward to learning the results this summer. In the meantime, Tony is starting on a new story modeled on the Chinese wuxia, or martial arts genre, featuring a female-warrior as its protagonist.
For more information on Tony’s work, check out his website at www.eyrie.org/~pi/bibliography.html.
Update 2010: Tony was also interviewed by U of T Magazine at http://www.magazine.utoronto.ca/blogs/the-dragon-and-the-stars/
Bart Testa
Cinema Studies
2009