http://www.theglobeandmail.com/books/writer-paul-quarrington-dies-of-... Writer Paul Quarrington dies of cancer Michael Posner Toronto — Globe and Mail update Published on Thursday, Jan. 21, 2010 10:31AM EST updated on Thursday, Jan. 21, 2010 8:07PM EST Paul Quarrington, 56, a beloved Canadian writer, musician and screenwriter, passed away early this morning after a heroic battle with lung cancer. A statement posted to his official website said: “Paul Quarrington's brave battle with cancer is over. He passed peacefully at home in Toronto in the early hours this morning surrounded by friends and family. It is comforting to know that he didn't suffer; he was calm and quiet holding hands with those who were closest to him. The past few days saw a rapid decline in his ability to breathe.” Quarrington was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer in the spring, but managed to keep working on a range of projects that reflected his diverse artistic interests and talents – a new solo album of his own songs, another album with his band, the Pork Belly Futures, a new screenplay, a new novel, as well as a memoir, Cigar Box Banjo . He also continued to perform, at times even while hooked up to an oxygen machine, toured Labrador, chronicled his illness in a series of newspaper articles and worked on a documentary film inspired by the memoir Life in Music . In the last several months, Quarrington had managed to maintain a pace that would have exhausted a healthy man – demonstrating a prodigious work ethic that belied his familiar persona as a rumpled, slightly undisciplined laggard. “I've never seen anybody keep going like he did,” said Rob Sanders, publisher of Greystone Books, Quarrington's non-fiction publisher. It was endless. He had the creative passion of a comet.” Sanders said the writer finished final revisions for the memoir, to be published in May, on the weekend. He said Quarrington in recent days was finding it increasingly hard to breathe. He cancelled one scheduled public appearance this week. Although additional oxygen tubes were brought in, they were unavailing. “Paul was a remarkable person,” said his long-time friend, music publisher Michael Burke. “He was able to see the bright or humorous side of almost everything. When I saw him in August, he said he was making two lists. One was of all the people he admired who lived shorter lives than he did, and the other was of all the people he detested who lived longer lives than he would.” Anne Collins, his fiction editor at Random House, said “Paul derived immediate gratification from his music, and income from his work for film and TV, but novels were like an itch he had to scratch. Although I think of him as one of our most accomplished writers, one who left a deep imprint on our national psyche, I don't think he could have raised a family on the proceeds of his novels alone.” In an official statement, Collins said: “Paul Quarrington brought humour, grace, energy and joy to the dark business of dying, in the same way he brought those qualities to his remarkable fiction. He was one of our funniest writers and surreptitiously one of our most profound. I hate the fact that he has died, but I am so glad he did it in the company of the people he loved best. I am so sorry for their loss, and deeply sorry that Paul won't be able to sing us more songs or tell us more stories, both things he loved so much to do.” He had been mulling over various ideas for a new novel only recently, Collins said. “I saw him at the Writers' Trust dinner in November and he looked good. He'd had a heart attack in Calgary the week before, but there he was, in a tuxedo. And he said, “I don't think it's going to be a novel. Maybe a short story.” Collins said editing Quarrington was mainly a process of “striking the right balance between the humour and lightness that came so naturally to him and the darker stuff that was always roiling around underneath.” For Quarrington, the dark stuff included a harrowing event in childhood, documented in his last novel The Ravine , and the death of his mother, also from cancer, when he was just a teenager. He addressed the latter subject in his contribution to The Heart Does Break , a book of short memoirs about grief and grieving. Another close friend, musician and writer Dave Bidini, with whom Quarrington was scheduled to have dinner tomorrow, said “it was Paul , so open, friendly, funny,” who first showed him the possibility of being a writer. “He showed me and many other aspiring writers that there could be depth in humour. He just fizzed with joy. We spent a lot of time together, travelling, riding in long car rides, and he was such a great companion, just a lot fun to sit beside.” It was Bidini who nominated Quarrington's 1987 novel King Leary for the CBC's Canada Reads series, a competition it subsequently won. “I did no work for that,” Bidini said. “The book sold itself.” One of Quarrington's closest friends was songwriter Dan Hill, with whom he grew up in the Toronto suburb of Don Mills. Hill, his brother Lawrence, and the three Quarrington brothers, Tony, Paul and Joel, were all friends – part of that “strange, eccentric, hyper-talented constellation” of alien spirits that existed on the margins of straight-laced, Wasp Don Mills adolescence. At one point, Hill wanted to be part of a band Paul had formed, but was told to “come back when I knew more about Wilson Pickett.” Later, however, they formed a folk duo, Quarrington Hill, and performed their own material in various Toronto clubs and church _base_ments. Hill had been with Quarrington virtually every day in recent weeks. It was during a benefit performance in April in Kingston, he said, that he first noticed Quarrington's “weird cough.” A few weeks later, Paul called him from the hospital to tell him he had just had his lungs drained of fluid, three litres' worth. “It's probably pneumonia,” Hill said. But Paul said, “it might be cancer.” When the grim diagnosis was confirmed, Quarrington said he went home and sat, stunned. “I took a walk in the Bluffs, and blubbered a bit like anyone would. I sort of said, ‘Well, you know, let's make the most of it.' You know, stop drinking cheap wine immediately and enjoy what one can.” In the summer, Hill began working with Quarrington on Are You Ready, a song about death, one of about a dozen new tunes written for his first solo album. Later, they and Paul's brother, Joel, spent a week in Nashville, adding string arrangements to the tune. Typically, said Hill, “Paul just wanted to be going all the time – the Country Music Hall of Fame, the RCA building, clubs, southern restaurants. Now I'm a pretty fit guy” – Hill runs 10 miles a day, at 56 – “but I could not keep up with him.” All proceeds from the sale of the song will be donated to the Paul Quarrington Society, a charitable organization that will provide scholarships to children showing talents in several artistic areas. During a career that spanned more than 30 years, there seemed to be few artistic genres in which Quarrington did not demonstrate his remarkable talents. He produced 10 novels, including Whale Music ; _base_d loosely on the life of reclusive Beach Boy Brian Wilson, it was called the best novel ever written about rock music by Penthouse magazine. It later won a Governor-General's Award for literature. Two other books, Galveston and The Ravine , were nominated for the Scotiabank Giller prize. He also produced six books of non-fiction, one of which ( King Leary , the story of a broken-down former National Hockey League goalie playing on a minor-league team in northern Ontario) won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour, as well as five plays, among them two musicals for children. For the screen, he wrote the screenplay for Perfectly Normal , wining a Genie award in the process, and for Whale Music , and was nominated for a Gemini for his work on the hit TV series Due South . He made quick work of his writing for film and television. “That's always been one of the writer's well-kept secrets,” he once said. “It doesn't take as long to do an actual screenplay as one might think. But I know I'll be in trouble with other writers if I divulge the exact amount of time.” He loved both genres equally, saying, “I don't think my loyalty is to one medium or the other. I just love stories. But a movie can't hold as much as a novel. And that leads to a major problem when you're writing a screenplay. Producers want you to hand in 120 pages, but logic tells you that's too long. You know you are going to wind up cutting and it will be brutal.” In music, perhaps his earliest love, Quarrington show proficiency with half a dozen instruments – guitar, clarinet, squeeze box, bass, harp, and piano – and he wrote songs, including Baby and the Blues, which was a number one adult contemporary single in Canada in 1980. Before he started writing novels, he toured as a guitarist and vocalist with Joe Hall and The Continental Drift. For a brief time in the early 1990s he also fronted another band, The Mudwrestlers – so-called in honour of then Vancouver MP Chuck Cook's statement that more Canadians watch mud wrestling than read domestically produced books. Raised in the Toronto middle-class suburb of Don Mills, Quarrington was the middle of three sons, and one daughter born to a professional parents. His father was a professor of psychology at York University; his mother had a practice in child psychology. He demonstrated his gifts early on. His friend, music publisher Burke, vividly recalls the first time he encountered Quarrington at their Don Mills junior high school. “Paul had been asked to read the narrative of something called Little Bop Riding Hood , accompanied by the school band. He told me later he was petrified and had been coerced into doing it, but
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