The Gazette from Montreal, Quebec, Canada • 111

Sheehy on older focuses women COMPETITION AND ENVY ARE GENERALLY NOT A PROBLEM FOR THESE PAIRS; WRITING FOR DIFFERENT AUDIENCES HELPS Couples Some work apart 1 '1H I 1 CONTINUED FROM PACE 1 "Knowing there's someone down the hall who can say 'let's have a cup of coffee helps reduce the sense there's nothing but a big, vacant space a whole day with a blank screen," said Moriarty Competition, they insist, is not an issue for them, perhaps because they write for different audiences. "When I learned Colin had been nominated for the Governor-General's prize, I was so proud, it didn't occur to me to feel competitive," Moriarty said. Genevieve Letarte was envious when Fortner Anderson was invited to two international poetry festivals in Europe. "I was very jealous, but I said it and we laughed," said Letarte, 50, a novelist and poet whose most recent novel is Tout Bas Tres Fort. Laughter plays an important role in the couple's relationship.

Letarte says she's glad when Anderson, also 50, a poet and spoken word artist, leaves for his day job with the Directors Guild of Canada. "I could not stand to live in the same place as someone who also worked at home," Letarte said. The couple write on opposite schedules. Letarte spends most weekdays writing at a card table in the dining room of their Clark St apartment. Anderson's writing life only gets going after dinner.

He writes from seven until midnight several times a week, as well as during the day on weekends. He has the office, though it's poorly heated. "The lack of heat adds a certain rigour and discipline," he said. Anderson seldom shares his poetry with Letarte until it's done. She, however, likes to discuss her writing with him, especially when she's planning a new project On the night before this interview, Letarte said, she had pestered Anderson with questions about her new novel "I ha- MV miuumn 1 1 mil i i ii- -liimitiiiti-i laMfciflwr wn-twrniiiMftv iiriiiftirrWi -itntfiiii-ir" r- iinrmtiiteri ini 1W1 have collaborated on a novel for Elise Moser.

"I like to have complete quiet," said Moser. So the couple rarely write at the same time. Lalumiere, 39, writes mostly when Moser, 43, who also works as a publishers' rep, travels for work. When Moser writes, she sends Lalumiere to the movies or to watch TV in the living room of their Coloniale Ave. home with the headphones on.

They are each other's first readers. "We're both great supporters of each other's work. At the same time, we're not blindly adoring about the work. It's the work that counts," said Lalumiere. tors, Internet dating and inter-generational love affairs of the older womanyounger man kind are apparently all the rage in Middle America.

But God is OK, too. If you can't find a soul-mate, at least get in touch with your own soul, suggests Sheehy who is nothing if not liberal-minded: "And just because we might be more spiritually centered doesn't mean we have to be less sexy" she assures, without a trace of irony Sheehy identifies most strongly with healthy, wealthy, heterosexual women. Lesbianism doesn't interest her much (though there's one chapter about Crossing the Sexual Border in Midlife) and she's not the kind of reporter who hangs out on street corners looking for bag ladies to interview. Rather, she spends her time at toney spas and clubs or the sex accessory parties that she says have displaced Tupperware gatherings in the Bible Belt south She hints that women who don't colour their hair, exercise regularly and flirt shamelessly just aren't trying. In order to give the book a heartwarming ending, she seeks out a rarer-than-rare 94-year-old woman who has an 89-year-old steady boyfriend.

Nice schmaltz, superficial research While Sheehy is a master at the gossipy sexual anecdote, what she overlooks is that many women in their middle years feel liberated from the need to please men or anyone else They may like their sensible shoes. They may not want to paint their nails or learn to tan-. go. And they may not want to start up a new business, either. Retirement can mean simply a change of pace, a savouring of the familiar.

Reading a good book. Hugging a grandchild. Why can't a Seasoned Woman be a Natural Woman content with her life, unwilling to be swept away by yet another phony version of the Great American Dream, erotic or otherwise? Is it possible to find your true love at 80? Perhaps. But death remains unavoidable, physical suffering probable, and there are Degrees of Denial and Peddlers of False Hopes. Some of them write bestsellers.

Sex and the Seasoned Woman: Pursuing the Passionate Life, by Gail Sheehy, Random House, 354 pages, $25.95. pdonnell thegazette.canwest.com COURTESY OF RANDOM HOUSE Gail Sheehy: some wisdom and much balderdash. hind it and it is stemingtodiscov-er along with Jones how quickly the most inconceivable and unscrupulous business practices can be seen as not only conceivable, but in fact necessary- Through its unique comedic strategy, Company has the rare quality of making us laugh out loud even as it reveals to us the darker side of corporate ethics. It's a book whose subject matter could have very easily resulted in simplistic and shallow humour, but instead Barry has managed to write a novel that is equal parts funny and illuminating. Montreal writer Jon Paul Fiorentino is the author of The Theory of the Loser Class (Coach House Books, 2006) and the managing editor of Matrix.

Spunky erotica collection covers a vast spectrum PAT DONNELLY Trust Gail Sheehy to put a positive spin on sex and the senior citizen. After all, the woman who wrote Passages, The Silent Passage, New Passages and Understanding Men's Passages, is now 68. Sheehy's latest book, Sex and the Seasoned Woman: Pursuing the Passionate Life, is by turns comforting, aggravating and inspiring. Everybody's gal pal of the boomer generation is determined to convince us that eternal, orgasmic youth is achievable, as long as we are affluent enough to afford sex toys, health club memberships, striptease lessons, sun destination holidays and her books, of course. It is a relief to hear that Sheehy has outgrown her former infatuation with hormone replacement therapy Well, almost.

Now, rather than urging women to pop hormone pills that may or may not cause strokes and cancer, she advises us to shove hormone creams up our vaginas. There is some wisdom to what Sheehy says and much balderdash. Most of what she writes has already been thoroughly chewed over in any number of U.S. women's magazines, including Cosmopolitan, which she wroteforinheryouth. This may have perverted her writing style for life.

Sheehy has a mania for Mining phrases and capitalizing them. A Pilot Light Lover is anyone who rekindles the ashes of your libido after you graduate from postmenopause into your Second Adulthood. A Romantic Renaissance is what can happen once the flames are burning again. Truly lucky couples can Graduate to Grandlove, "the payoff phase in the arc of pursuing the passionate life" Enough is Enough. It's hard to believe that this is the same Gail Sheehy who once won the Washington Journalism Review Award for Best Magazine Writer in America for her in-depth profiles of world leaders, who has published 14 other books and who has been a contributing editor to Vanity Fair for more than 20 years.

Sex and the Seasoned Woman wasn't written in isolation, either. Sheehy's research began with a website query that led to meetings with dozens of women across the United States. In her acknowledgments, she expressed gratitude to an entire "Team Sheehy," including her husband and "in-house editor" ClayFelkec While Sheehy initially gives the impression that she wants to carry on where Helen Gurley Brown (Sex and the Single Girl, 1962) left off, taking the same generation on a new journey into eroticism, she does allow that a genuine search for spiritual meaning in life can also be life-enhancing. Personal vibra me, it is an ingenious one that leads to comedic riches and intrigue. Barry has a knack for well-constructed punchlines.

The hilarious doughnut incident that begins the novel is recalled at perfect moments throughout the book even as the plot thickens and the office environment grows more and more riotous. But underneath the comedic turns is a story of ethics. As Jones unravels the mystery behind Zephyr Holdings and discovers its real function, he also discovers the true relationship between values and behaviour in a corporate environment. As Eve, his co-worker and eventual love interest, puts it "When people talk about the importance of ethics, they never include themselves." Jones finds himself in the position of comprehending that corruption has a fierce logic be David Homel and Marie-Louise Gay rassed him all night." But Anderson was not in the mood to help her out. "It bothered me.

I wanted to go to bed," he said. Letarte says she can't imagine sharing her life with someone who was not an artist. The only drawback is that their writing schedules leave little room for a shared social life. "We don't do enough things together outside the house," she said. Claude Lalumiere is a noisy writer.

He groans, he hums, he plays CDs when he writes. That's bad news for his partner of nearly 10 years, short-story writer and seasoned writers, like Torontonian Nalo Hopkinson, winner of the World Fantasy Award, Minneapolis-based erotica writer Catherine Lundoff, and Bram Stoker Award nominee Ashok Banker of Bombay The anthology covers a phenomenally vast spectrum of themes. But then, love isn't simple. From first crushes to the outer reaches of sci-fi fantasies, this anthology forms a lascivious collage guaranteed to raise some eyebrows, quicken some heartbeats and blush a few cheeks. The wide-eyed innocent urgency of a first kiss unfolds poetically in the pre-teen romance The Prettiest Teeth, by Nova Scotian writer and media artist J.R.

Carpenter U.S. gay romance writer Scott D. Pomfret's Sucksluts Anony-. mous expertly dishes up an addict's inescapable lure. The frills of nuptial ceremo If ALLEN MclNNIS THE GAZETTE young adults, out next month.

The couple recently collaborated, co-editing Lust for Life: Tales of Sex Love (reviewed on this page). "I realized the book needed a woman to co-edit," said Lalumiere. "And he knew one," Moser chimed in. Lalumiere writes fantasy; Moser tends more to what she describes as "grim realism." Their different styles reduce the possibility of rivalry between them. "But ask us again when one of us hits the big time," said Lalumiere.

Monique Polak's most recent novel for young adults is Home Invasion (Orca). Erotica Volumes 4 and 5, as well as more than a dozen other anthologies and magazines. He also blogs at lostpages foundpages.blogspot.com. His collaborator Moser was a winner in the CBC's 2003-2004 Short Story Competition and her story Or Be Killed won a commendation in the 2005 Commonwealth Short Story Competition. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in webzines Carte Blanche and Nth Position and in several anthologies.

With their first collaboration, Lalumiere and Moser have created a collection of new erotica worth curling up with before -and after- Valentine's Day Lust for Life will be launched Monday at 7:30 p.m. at Sergent Recruteur, 4801 St. Laurent Blvd. Eileen Travers is a Montreal writer. "downsizing" and get fired for eating the wrong doughnut His co-workers are typical the cogs that make up a company, from the ridiculously attractive secretaries, to the broken-down sales reps, to their eager assistants.

These cogs warn Jones repeatedly not to rock the boat. He is dimmed to the company's mission statement, which is a hilariously opaque litany of corporate jargon. His fellow employees urge Jones to stop being so insistent on comprehending: "Don't try to understand the company Just go with it," they say. But he is fuelled by his inquisitiveness and eventually he discovers a truth so shocking and insidious that it turns his Life upside down. To reveal the specific plot twist would be a disservice to those interested in reading the book, but trust Lust for Life: Tales of Sex Si Love Edited by Claude Lalumiere and Elise Moser Vehicule Press, 197 pages, $18 EILEEN TRAVERS SPECIAL TO THE GAZETTE Sex and love can weave deli-ciously tangled and tortuously complicated webs.

And the period just before Valentine's Day is perfect timing for the release of a spunky anthology containing 21 new stories that attempt to dissect some of those webs. Edited by Montreal writers Claude Lalumiere and Elise Moser, Lust for Life is a lively collection of erotica for the 21st century The stories delve into the extremes of human sexuality to capture the banal, bizarre and surreaL The contributors include new Hilarious Company By Max Barry Doubleday, 338 pages, $32.95 JON PAUL FIORENTINO SPECIAL TO THE GAZETTE I was almost certain I would not like this book. A satire of Western corporate culture in an office setting seems too easy (See Office Space, The Office, and so oa) But Australian writer Max Barry's third novel, Company, turns out to be much more than a knockoff of current comedic trends. Dedicated to the fine folks at Hewlett-Packard, where Barry used to work, Company is in fact a fiercely unique novel that is sophisticated in both narrative strategy and comedic timing. The novel, set in Seattle, is at first very much similar to an ny are stripped down in Charity in Her Flesh, by Montreal pastor Matthew Anderson.

But there's so much more. That includes Maya Stein's heartbreaking First Time, Ian Watson and Roberto Quaglia's zany legal drama The Penis of My Beloved, and Dan Rafter's The Adventures of Ultima, about a newly discovered superhero who gets world-domination-size power from orgasms. Lust for Life is Lalumiere's fifth anthology, his previous books include Island Dreams: Montreal Writers of the Fantastic, and Wit-punk, on which he collaborated with Marty Halpern. His latest anthology is as eclectic as his work. A prolific critic and writer, his reviews of science fiction and fantasy books appear regularly in The Gazette and his fiction has been published in Tesseracts 9, SciFiction and in The Mammoth Book of Best doughnut theft.

But this novel becomes much more than just a light send-up an exceptionally effective satire that is multi-layered and immensely satisfying. Stephen Jones, the new hire at Zephyr Holdings, is ambitious, clever and, most of all, curious. Almost immediately after being hired, the young protagonist, known throughout the novel simply as Jones, discovers that none of his fellow staff members has any clue what Zephyr Holdings actually does. So Jones spends his time at work trying to figure out the true purpose of the company, and his time at home reading management strategy books. At first he discovers that his new employer is an ineptly run corporation where desperate careerists strive for "vertical movement," cower at the mention of satire of corporate culture iHuminates ethical issues COURTESY OF DOUBLEDAY Max Barry: great punchlines.

episode of The Office, with Barry mining water cooler territory and exposing the "wisdom" of mid-level employees for laughs. The story begins with an inspired bit of business, one employee accusing another of.