PEDAL

Sometimes shocking in its candour, yet lent great charm by its enigmatic characters, Pedal explores how we are shaped by accidents of timing – trauma, sex, brain chemistry – and challenges beliefs we routinely have about the nature of pedophilia, the essence of innocence, and the idea that the past is something one runs from.

Julia Hoop, a 25-year-old counselling psych student, is working on her thesis, exploring an idea which makes her graduate supervisor squirm. She is conducting interview after interview with a group of women she affectionately calls the Molestas – women whose experience of childhood sexual abuse did not cause physical trauma. Julia is the expert, she claims, because she has the experience: her own father, whom she calls ‘Dirtbag,' disappeared when she was 8 years old, leaving behind nothing but a legacy of addiction and violence. When both her boyfriend and her graduate advisor break-up with her on the same day, Julia leaves Vancouver on a bicycle for a cross-Canada trip in search of her father – or so she tells people. Her unexpected travel partner is Smirks, a handsome athlete who also has a complicated history that, as it turns out, relates to Julia's research. Their travel days are marked by peaks of ecstatic physical exertion and their nights by frustrated drinking. After an unsettling incident involving a trio of aggressive children, Julia wakes up in the morning to discover Smirks has disappeared. Everything, once again, falls apart. CHELSEA ROONEY is a graduate of the University of British Columbia's MFA program in Creative Writing. She is a host of The Storytelling Show on Vancouver Co-op Radio, and has been a regular contributor to Project Space's artist-publishing web series ( projectspace.ca) since spring 2013.