Hilary the welder
July 13th, 2022
For more than two decades Hilary Peach worked as a welder and was one of the few women in the Boilermakers’ Union. She kept journals of her experiences and has now published Thick Skin: Field Notes from a Sister in the Brotherhood (Anvil $22) about working in this hard-driving field of industrial construction with its coded language and secret subculture. Her jobs took her from BC’s shipyards and pulp mills to Alberta’s oil sands and Ontario’s rust belt. She even spent time in the huge power generating stations in northeastern US. Peach also took time to become a West Coast performance poet including performances at the Vancouver International Writers Festival. She founded the Poetry Gabriola Festival and was its artistic director for ten years. Her debut collection of poetry, Bolt (Anvil, 2018) references her time as a welder as well tackling topics like snakelore, songs of loss and longing, and those times when a body is overtaken with the impulse to run out of control. Peach continues to work as a welder for the Boilermakers’ Union while maintaining her interdisciplinary art practice on Gabriola Island. 9781772141955
Leave a Reply