Inside Job: Essays on the New Work Writing

One powerful taboo that still remains in our literature today is the taboo against discussing our most central daily experience: working for a living.

Poet and editor Tom Wayman believes that with the recent appearance of a new kind of work writing we have begun at last to see the end of this limitation. In his essays gathered in Inside Job Wayman considers this new fiction, poetry and drama and argues that the new writing will change not only the literature of the future but also what we value from the literature of the past. Wayman demonstrates as well how the new work writing differs from 1930s-style "socialist realism."

Inside Job shows for the first time why an accurate presentation of our work will be increasingly the subject our best authors choose in the 1980s and for generations to come. Inside Job includes a selected bibliography of recent work writing.

Tom Wayman was born in Ontario in 1945, but has spent most of his life in British Columbia. He has worked at a number of jobs, both blue and white-collar, across Canada and the U.S., and has helped bring into being a new movement of poetry in these countries--the incorporation of the actual conditions and effects of daily work. His poetry has been awarded the Canadian Authors' Association medal for poetry, the A.J.M. Smith Prize, first prize in the USA Bicentennial Poetry Awards competition, and the Acorn-Plantos Award; in 2003 he was shortlisted for the Governor-General's Literary Award. He has published more than a dozen collections of poems, six poetry anthologies, three collections of essays and three books of prose fiction. He has taught widely at the post-secondary level in Canada and the U.S., most recently (2002-2010) at the University of Calgary. Since 1989 he has been the Squire of "Appledore," his estate in the Selkirk Mountains of southeastern BC.