MacIntyre, Wendy 1947-

Personal

Born 1947, in Glasgow, Scotland; immigrated to Canada, 1952. Education: University of Edinburgh, Ph.D.

Addresses

Home—Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. E-mail—[email protected].

Career

Writer and editor.

Member

Writers' Union of Canada.

Writings

NOVELS

Mairi, Oolichan Books (Lantzville, British Columbia, Canada), 1992.

The Applecross Spell, Fitzhenry & Whiteside (Markham, Ontario, Canada), 2003.

(With R.P. MacIntyre) Apart, Groundwood Books (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2007.

Contributor of scholarly essays, fiction, and literary criticism to academic journals, including Malahat Review, University of Windsor Review, Open Letter, and Ironwood.

Sidelights

Wendy MacIntyre, a Scottish-born writer and editor living in Canada, is the coauthor of Apart, her debut work for young adults. A novel-in-letters written with R.P. MacIntyre, Apart centers on Jessica Doig, a New Brunswick teen. Jessica places a classified advertisement in her local newspaper asking for information about her estranged father, who has left the girl in charge of her autistic younger brother and depressed mother. Thinking he has spotted the man, troubled high schooler James "Sween" MacSween replies to Jessica's advertisement, and the pair begin an intense fifteen-month relationship, reflecting on their struggles—including Jessica's unhappy reunion with her father and Sween's emotional breakdown—in their correspondence.

Apart garnered praise for its distinct epistolary prose style. "The double author letter format allows the reader to become intimately acquainted with both Jessica and Sween, so different from each other and yet so similar in many ways," Linda Irvine noted in Resource Links. According to Lisa Doucet in the Canadian Review of Materials in Apart "the authors very successfully capture the candor and vulnerability that these two teens display in each letter as they open up to one another. Through their written communications they find a freedom to be themselves and to discover themselves as they go along, and they draw strength, satisfaction and encouragement from one another."

Biographical and Critical Sources

PERIODICALS

Canadian Review of Materials, October 26, 2007, Lisa Doucet, review of Apart.

Resource Links, April, 2008, Linda Irvine, review of Apart, p. 27.

School Library Journal, December, 2007, Catherine Ensley, review of Apart, p. 136.

ONLINE

Writers' Union of Canada Web site,http://www.writersunion.ca/ (December 15, 2008), "Wendy MacIntyre."