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www.oakvillebeaver.com The Oakville Beaver, Friday February 22, 2008 - 29 Artscene Oakville Beaver · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2008 Authors serve grim smorgasbord for breakfast By Melanie Cummings SPECIAL TO THE BEAVER Moral comas, human capacities for redemption and do-or-die ultimatums are the stuff of a sobering Sunday morning reflection. And so it was at the latest Book and Brunch Author Event organized by Bookers Bookstore, where panhandler-turned-philanthropist Frank O'Dea spoke about his biography When All You Have is Hope, author David Adams Richards examined misplaced ambition and greed in The Lost Highway and writer Alissa York explained how fascinations with horses, polygamy and taxidermy took root in her book Effigy. Fate and predestination come in to play in Richards' book about the fictional character of Alex Chapman and his pursuit to lay claim on a lottery fortune that is not rightfully his, as well as the love of his life, who is now with another. The pursuit is a juxtaposition of the academic's lifelong quest to be someone who is above the need for money and someone who has character traits that are as far from his hated great uncle James. While not a totally likable character, as Adams reveals Alex's past to readers, he becomes a more sympathetic one. Richards quite candidly told the audience during question period that he fought poverty all of his life and that he drew the main character Alex from a composite of people he knew growing up, including himself, who at one time or another went into a moral coma to justify their deceit and ill-made choices. Knowing nothing about horses, Mormons, 19th century Utah or taxidermy didn't deter the University of Toronto creative writing instructor Alissa York from penning her book Effigy. DEREK WOOLLAM / OAKVILLE BEAVER FROM COVER TO COVER: Alissa York, author of Effigy, left, Frank O'Dea, author of When All You Have is Hope and David Adams, The Lost Highway, pose for a photo Sunday morning during the Books and Brunch author Event at the Oakville Golf Club. Shortlisted for the Giller Awards, Effigy began with a little spark of a story that surfaced during her research of the Mormon faith. It's the story of the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which 120 unarmed women, men and children were slaughtered over a few days as they traveled from Kansas to Missouri. The official story was that a band of natives killed the innocents but really Mormon militia carried out the atrocity. One source in York's research said 17 children aged seven and under lived. Another said 18 survived. That discrepancy by one, opened the window for York to insert her long recurring, imaginary character, Dorrie, whom had only been developed so far, to have cascading black hair and oddly, worked as a taxidermist - a craft York describes as a cross between a butcher and sculptor. In Effigy Dorrie is a child bride at 14 and married to a polygamist. Dorrie becomes wife number four of a horse farmer, and is the conduit for which York examines the redemptive ability of people. Frank O'Dea had to search inward for his biography (written by John Lawrence Reynolds) to tell his firsthand story of failure then success. "It took three years to write this book because I didn't want to go over to dark places that I didn't want to relive," O'Dea told the crowd. Sexually abused by three different perpetrators as a child, an alcoholic at 13 and homeless shortly after, the entrepreneurial founder of Second Cup and ProShred Security has become a philanthropist raising money on behalf of street kids, AIDS, child literacy in Third World nations and land mine removal. But 30 years ago all he owned was on his back and his daily effort involved panhandling enough to buy a 99-cent bottle of wine and perhaps 50-cents for a piece of floorspace in the local flop house. Instead he'd typically lay down his intoxicated head on a park bench, he said. "Tomorrow I'll get a job, call my family, I told myself for years on end," said O'Dea. His once lonely, dirty and violent existence on skid row has since been replaced with honours and decorations, earning officer status in the Order of Canada in 2004, honourary Doctor of Laws from Royal Roads University in Victoria, B.C., and praise from the likes of United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney. Hope, vision and action remain his mantra. O'Dea found help along the way in unlikely places, from the Toronto paint store owner who paid him $5 per day to stack cans, to the ad endlessly heard on the a.m. radio station played there, that offered help for alcoholics. On Dec. 23, 1971, O'Dea gave himself an ultimatum: die or change. "I had to stop living in conflict with every value I learned as a child," he said of his upper-middle class childhood in Montreal. O'Dea cashed in a $1,000 Canada Savings Bond and grew a $1 billion company called Second Cup. 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