Winnie the Pooh springs back to life in satirical book
Jennie Egerdie, the Kitchener author who says making out in a dumpster behind Centre in the Square influenced her comedic take on the world, is returning to her hometown with her latest book, “Oh, Bother: Winnie-the-Pooh is Befuddled, Too (A Smackerel-Sized Parody of Modern Life).”
“My soul-crushing environmental anxiety brought me to Pooh,” said Egerdie, who checks into Waterloo’s Words Worth Books Thursday at 7 p.m. to mark the release of her latest primer on modern life.
“I was comfort-reading A.A. Milne’s ‘Winnie the Pooh’ during a climate change worry spiral, and when reading I was surprised by how troubled Milne’s original Hundred Acre Wood was. I’d always thought of the Hundred Acre Wood as a perfect place, but it isn’t — Pooh Bear gets stuck in a hole, tails are lost and multiple homes flood with rain.”
Described as a modern take on the beloved Milne characters, her book is part parody and part pastiche/ homage, as Pooh and pals grapple with 21st century issues like urban sprawl, global warming and species extinction.
“We think of the Hundred Acre Wood as delightful, idyllic — not because the world is perfect, but because of how Pooh and his friends look out for each other,” says the author of “Frog and Toad are Doing Their Best,” named one of Vulture’s best humour books of 2021.
“That felt inspirational, and the Hundred Acre Wood felt like a great area to explore modern anxieties with humour and gentleness.
“I wanted to create a joyful space for readers to visit when the world feels a little too hard.”
Milne’s characters entered the public domain in 2022 after the author’s copyright expired, which allowed Egerdie to transform Pooh’s mythical kingdom into a metaphor for the pressures of modern day life, with a humorous strain inspired, in part, by her Kitchener upbringing.
“I spent a lot of my time as a kid at Princess Cinemas and GenX Video — RIP,” notes Egerdie, a Millennial cusper who attended Kitchener’s Cameron Heights Collegiate and later moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., where she pursued comedy and began writing for The New Yorker and McSweeney’s.
“As for formative experiences, I did once make out in a dumpster behind Center and The Square, and that does inform a lot of my comedy.”
Her Words Worth Books appearance will feature a conversation with Lisa O’Connell, the founding artistic director of Pat the Dog Theatre Creation, who happens to be Egerdie’s mother.