A.S. Penne’s short fiction was first noticed by the University College Norma Epstein Creative Writing Competition (Toronto).  Since then her stories have won awards on both sides of the Atlantic, notably the Ian St James Award in the UK and the Writers’ Digest award in the USA.  Penne’s publishing credits also include magazine articles and a book of creative nonfiction.  An excerpt from Old Stones (TouchWood Editions, Horsdal & Schubart, Victoria 2002) won the 1999 Prairie Fire Creative Nonfiction Contest and was later announced as a finalist in the 2000 Western Magazine Awards.  Penne’s “real” job is as facilitator of youth writing workshops for the Festival of Written Arts in Sechelt, BC, a position that maximizes her background in education and writing.  She is currently at work on a novel.

In each of these seventeen stories, characters must come to terms with a sometimes uncomfortable recognition about the self before relationships with others can move beyond a sticking point. Penne examines the human tendency to take the easiest way out; the desire to be understood and known by others before first working to understand and know one’s self.  The relationships in Reckoning dip and curve with the protagonists’ reluctance to fully engage, swaying and teetering as each positions him/herself on the edge, anxious about meeting head-on with life, love or their own culpability.

Reckoning

Turnstone Press, 2008

In each of these seventeen stories, characters must come to terms with a sometimes uncomfortable recognition about the self before relationships with others can move beyond a sticking point. Penne examines the human tendency to take the easiest way out; the desire to be understood and known by others before first working to understand and know one’s self.  The relationships in Reckoning dip and curve with the protagonists’ reluctance to fully engage, swaying and teetering as each positions him/herself on the edge, anxious about meeting head-on with life, love or their own culpability.