I ask the multipierced, tattooed, partly head-shaved Kristyn Dunnion whether some people may find her just as scary as the Ontario pit bulls to whom she co-dedicates Big Big Sky, her recently published novel for young adults (her author photo shows her receiving an adoring lick from a canine fan she calls "my boyfriend").
"If they do," she says, "I just smile at them. I understand I can represent the unknown to some people and they're afraid of that. But have a pleasant conversation, talk about ideas, find out areas of commonality ... and then suddenly those walls can come down.
"Or," she laughs, "not!"
Pit bulls, she thinks, get a bad rap, and implies that her punk lesbian outlaw persona may have the same problem - though most likely not with the age 14 and up readers to whom her novels are pitched. Big Big Sky, her third novel, takes place in a future in which all adults have been killed by aliens who recruit and train young female warriors as killing machines.
Missing Matthew, her first, follows a group of friends who call themselves the Rebel Rescue Squad.
The squad tracks the mysterious disappearance of Matthew Stein, new boy in town. Mosh Pit looks at growing up punk and rebellious in today's urban landscape.
As might be just a little bit expected, she was born and grew up in small-town Southern Ontario. Both parents were teachers, and it was "an idyllic place to be a child, with really romantic, fun memories of playing outside all the time, playing dress-up games like Charlie's Angels ... and my first novel kind of celebrates that kid culture, that rambunctious, wacky time of girl gangs in training, jumping out of bushes, solving crimes."
Being a teen, though, was difficult in a pre-Internet town with neither a cinema nor a McDonald's, in a home without cable television (though she's rather happy these days for having missed years of TV).
Her parents always stressed doing well at school - she did and left home after graduation to attend McGill University in Montreal. She wanted to be a filmmaker. That didn't happen. But other things did. "Montreal was a real coming of age. I was in love with learning anything new, with living on my own and having the freedom. Going to my first gay bar. I wasn't fitting in - turning up in a tutu and wearing reindeer antlers at the lesbian bar didn't exactly get me any dates. It was a really creative time for me, though it was also a time full of stubbed toes and social faux pas."
Today she lives and works in Toronto, but memories of her own ineptitude probably explain why she's so good at relating to high-school kids today. "I get to visit schools as a guest author or to do writing workshops, and I love that. My hat's off to homeroom teachers, but I couldn't do it. I love being a visitor, because you can bring so much to a classroom that the regular teacher or the administration just can't. Being out, being queer ... sometimes I get some negative feedback, but I find the kids know I'm going to be a little different from their regular teacher ... and I feel I can reach an audience that's overlooked - the queer kids at the back of the class, kids who are falling through the cracks. I get lots of e-mail ... from kids who are not fitting in, who tell me they love to read my books, that they speak to them. That makes me feel good, that I'm writing to the kid I used to be."
She may be 39, but she jokes that "I can't wait to become 40. ... I'm going to be a cougar!"
