Step into the Thunder Bay Museum and you find a small book shop specializing in local memoirs, local history and museum publications. Jean Morrison, our most celebrated historywriter, was awarded the Elizabeth Arthur Award for best academic full length publication. Her latest Labour Pains: Thunder Bay's Working Class in Canada's Wheat Boom is a well written account of a turbulent time.
Del Dickie picked up the George B. Macgillivray Award for her article on the local funeral dust up; Memorial Society versus local funeral directors. I enjoyed this article which was published in the Historical Society's journal, Papers and Records. A worthy choice. P.S. The Memorial Society won.
I have not read the works of the other two award recipients but I'll get to them. William Vihn-Doyl wrote about the Safeway strike, a strike famous all across North America. I was travelling in California and people there asked me about the Thunder Bay store, often adding admiring words about the resilience of the Thunder Bay workers. Safeway's was on strike in California as well but even so, I was quite surprised to learn the situation in Thunder Bay was well known there. Vihn-Douy's article is called A Study of the Strike at Canada Safeway by Local 75 of the UFCW.
The Gertrude C. Dyke award went to Neil McQuarrie for his book Dance is on Fire. More on this book later after I get a chance to read it.
Meanwhile I am slugging through The Sentimentalists, trying to figure it out and reading many sentences and paragraphs twice. Even then, I am sometimes unsure about the meaning. James Joyce can be dense and Faulkner has his turgid moments and a lot of poetry is incomprehensible but still, I do not know when I have encountered a book that took so much work.
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