Andrew F. Wood
Author • Storyteller • Teacher • Public Speaker
Some writers publish early and often, but I’m not one of them. At 72, The Clown King is my first foray into the public literary arena. But to call this a debut would be misleading. It’s more accurate to call it an arrival, long delayed.
My writing began more than fifty years ago, as a student in the theatre program at the University of Ottawa. I wrote my first fairy tale — The Butterfly Princess, a lyrical fable about vanity and its consequences, as a gift to a girl I admired from afar. I printed it on Christmas morning, drove to her house, and slipped it into the mailbox. I was too shy to knock. The story has sat quietly for decades, but now has been re-purposed and may soon see the light of day.
I graduated from NYU’s School of the Arts in 1979, together with my first wife, Dunay. We soon settled in Toronto and that’s when I began writing more systematically. I launched into an ambitious novel for young readers titled “Rainbow’s Room.” I wrote a number of chapters but it never came to fruition; I was sadly hobbled by self-doubt at the time. A major work that I did complete in those years is a three-act farce titled The Queen of Zilch. It’s written in the tradition of the British Panto, with a cross-dressing villain, audience participation, and a political allegory running below the surface. It would play well on any stage and is waiting for its opportunity.
What sustained me as a writer in the years that followed was Peter Peter Puppet Theater, a touring company that my wife and I co-founded in the mid-1980s, by which time two young sons had entered our lives. (Not coincidentally I was driving a taxi on weekends to make ends meet.) I wrote numerous short plays, many of them in collaboration with Jeff King as composer and lyricist. We performed at schools, libraries, festivals, and Christmas events in the Toronto area and in south Florida for nearly a decade. I also performed as a storyteller, notably with The Story of Corey, a rollicking piece about a small boy diagnosed with “testitis”. Every child in the room recognized it immediately.
When I completed my teaching certification in 1993, the puppet theater began to recede into the background, but my writing didn’t stop — it changed form. I joined Toastmasters International in 2001 and discovered a new arena in which to express myself. Over nearly two decades, as a Distinguished Toastmaster, I won many speech contests and competed at the district level on repeated occasions. These speeches were crafted for live audiences and had to work in the room or not at all.
When I retired from the Toronto school board in 2019, a friend who was from China invited me to teach at a school she was setting up in Suzhou, near Shanghai. By mid-September I was installed there, and soon established a writing practice: one day a week at a Starbucks I was lucky to find not too far away. These resulted in essays that were sent home by email to a circle of readers in Toronto. I called them Letters from China, and intended to gather enough of them for a book of humor and commentary. Then COVID arrived. After returning home to Canada for a visit in December 2019, my renewed visa to continue my work in China came through just as the airports closed down in January 2020. The book will remain unfinished, but I feel that the letters that do exist are rewarding to read.
Currently, my major creative writing project is titled “The Seven Deadly Sins.” This is a cycle of moral fables for young readers, each one illuminating a different sin from Christian tradition — Pride, Greed, Envy, and so on — through animal characters and enchanted worlds. Most are completed, and hopefully they are stories that teach without preaching. The oldest piece in the cycle, The Butterfly Princess, predates the newest by more than fifty years.
The Clown King was originally conceived for the series as a fable about lust — for power, for wealth, for adulation. But it outgrew the proportions of a children’s story and became something for adult readers; sharper and more urgent: a satirical fable. The Clown King targets the public figure who has held sway in the media and captured the world’s a ttention since he first went down a golden escalator in 2015.
The pen name W.A. Frederick is my own name rearranged — Wood, Andrew Frederick — with a private tribute folded into it: as a child, I kept two novels on my bookshelf for years written by another Andrew Wood, a British author of sea yarns for boys. They were a quiet promise to myself.
For inquiries, please contact: prafesser@gmail.com