Spoken Word

24 Aug 2023

Spoken Word: Episode 25: Dangerous Devotions, by Anne Penhall.

James WF Roberts, Joy Media, Joy94.9, Literature, Podcasting, Spoken Word, Uncategorized

LISTEN TO PODCAST NOW

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:49 — 34.6MB)

Subscribe or Follow Us: Google Podcasts | RSS

Spoken Word: Episode 25: Dangerous Devotions, by Anne Penhall.

Episode 25 of Spoken Word on Joy 94.9, we discuss Anne Penhall’s new book, Dangerous Devotions; a crime thriller set in Sydney, about sex workers with disabilities. A heinous murder and so much. Trigger warning: This podcast discusses fetishes, kinks and disabilities.

“Inclusive, subversive, and enthralling”

Dangerous Devotions

By A D Penhall

Clan Destine Press

Set around beautiful Sydney Harbour, Dangerous Devotions lifts the lid on one the glittering city’s most unusual private escort services.

The first in the Harbour City Mysteries, Dangerous Devotions is inclusive, subversive, and enthralling. The debut crime novel by psychologist and disability advocate AD Penhall is a riveting insight into the world of sex workers with niche specialties. Sonya and Avril work for an escort agency where the workers are all people with disability – amputees, chair users, or people of short stature – and the clients call themselves ‘devotees’.

Blind barrister Tom Challinor’s plans for a well-earned week off are dashed by an attempted murder linked to the escort agency. Meanwhile, bizarrely-mutilated dolls are turning up on the doorstep of a women’s refuge. As Tom investigates an underworld of desire, entitlement and exploitation, the menace of predatory passion clamps tight around Avril and Sonya, and young women start to disappear.

Plenty of crime novels – and real-life crimes – involve sex workers, obsession, perpetrators with a sense of entitlement, and consequent dramatic malfeasance.

But an escort agency whose workers are all people living with disability is one out of the box.

“I’m not sure if there is actually an escort agency which only employs disabled workers. But well before I started the book, I’d heard – from a woman in the sex industry – about workers who dressed up as disabled to please particular clients. And, living much of my life with people with disability, I’d also heard talk of devotees, pretenders and wannabees. In fact, it seems there’s a long history of being attracted to specific disability – an example is Montaigne’s mid-1500s essay ‘On Cripples’. In this he maintains it’s said (he doesn’t admit himself to this experience) that a ‘lame woman’ is the best choice for the ‘sports of Venus’,” Penhall said.

“Sydney seemed the perfect place to situate and explore the potential consequences of an innovative escort agency. Sydney’s a town that loves a fast buck and the newest trend, so I put ‘devotism’ and risky commercialised sex together, mixed in some very smart, active characters living with disability – sneaking attributes and mannerisms from people I know, as writers do – and, well, there you have Dangerous Devotions.”

To write the book, Penhall did a lot of reading on ‘devotism’, people with disability’s attitudes to it, and web-searching of devotee sites and more.

“I garnered thoughts and opinions from people living with disability and I ran with my own years of observations about the way the service industries, some religions, many conservative groups infantilise particularly adults with cognitive and/or severe physical impairments. These groups just assume people with disability to be uninterested in desire, and in sex,” she said.

“Attitudes, guardianship, the set-up of services etc effectively ensures that many people I know are precluded from demonstrating desire, from being sexually active, are, in short, blocked from engaging in ordinary adult behaviours. The legacy of ‘mental age’ testing is a long and nasty one.”

Penhall was also able to draw on her family experience with disability.

“I was born into two families – my mother’s and my father’s – each with an unusually high representation of people who live with many skills, interests, likes/dislikes. and a diversity of impairments. I have spent my work life with people with disability, as a speech language clinician, coffee-companion, fellow-parent, psychologist, and advocate. For several years, I was editor of IDA (Intellectual Disability, Australasia). Without the intimacies of family relationships and my wonderful and occasionally challenging ‘clients’ and their supporters, this book would not have been possible.”

Tom Challinor was partly based on her Uncle Phil who was, among other things, blind.

“There are certainly characteristics of Uncle Phil in Tom – the brushing away of any hint of what’s called in disability areas ‘inspirational porn’ – that is, the overcoming obstacles/aren’t you amazing-type comments. Tom’s appearance and the way he speaks, though, came about from a chance meeting at an ethics talk at the Sydney Writers Festival,” Penhall said.

“That ‘Tom’ was a totally glorious looking bloke in a fabulous full length leather coat. I don’t know his name, never saw him again but the discussion we had and his speech manner and image stayed with me and somewhere along the way he became Tom. It may have been because he reminded me of a man I had once been in love with. I initially named the character Paul after that young man, who died, way too early, in a dramatic car accident. Tom is my gesture of ongoing friendship with Paul.”

The novel was presented as part of an MA in 2005 at the University of Technology Sydney with Professor Cathy Cole. It’s taken a while to rework it as Dangerous Devotions, Penhall said.

“Since then, I’ve experienced the usual writer’s laments – time, children, space, the need to earn money, the recalcitrance of publishers and agents, especially toward older, first-time novelists,” she said.

Penhall is now hooked and has a second novel planned.

“I have a favourite character in Dangerous Devotions – one of the escort agency workers – and I am not planning to give up spending time with her. She’s starring in the next in the series, with support roles for the others. They’re a bit of a gang, by now, ready for adventures.”

Penhall is a literary pseudonym. Ann’s real name is Penhallurick but it doesn’t fit well on a book cover, she says, and people have conniptions trying to spell it.

Bio: A D Penhall is an author who’s been a psychologist, a baker’s van driver, a vegetarian cook (when not a vegetarian), a cleaner, the editor of a disability-professional magazine, an eco-tourism provider (and cleaner again), an activist, a repeat volunteer, a disability advocate. She is now and always will be a mother and grandmother.

A.k.a. Ann Penhallurick, she is author of a number of prize-winning and/or published short stories, various reviews, articles and degrees, including an M.A. in Creative Writing and a PhD in Social Inquiry. The product of twelve schools in twelve years, even more flats and houses than jobs since, she now aims to age with red lipstick, hiking boots, and some degree of disgrace in the Blue Mountains.

www.clandestinepress.net

Orders can be made direct to Clan Destine Press, Lightning Source or Ingram iPage.
ANZ Booksellers & Library Suppliers order direct from CDP or from Ingram.

International: Gardners Books; or POD via Ingram Lightning Source US, UK, Europe