Tom Wayman
Former meeting place, VIWU, 1111 Commercial Dr.
"Days when the work does not end. When the bath at home is like cleaning another tool of the owner’s."
From Days: Construction
The Vancouver Industrial Writers’ Union (1979-1993) staged many readings throughout the 1980s at La Quena Coffee House at this address. After Tom Wayman had emerged with his poetry collections Waiting for Wayman (1973), For and Against the Moon (1974), and Money and Rain (1975), plus the work poems anthologies A Government Job at Last (1976) and Going for Coffee (1981), as well as Inside Job: Essays on the New Work Writing (1983), he became the most widely known exponent of literature about daily work: blue- and white-collar, paid and unpaid. In Vancouver he was variously employed at journalism, construction and demolition, high school marker, factory assemblyman and college teacher. Other members of VIWU included Kate Braid, David Conn, Glen Downie, Kirsten Emmott, Al Grierson, Phil Hall, Zoë Landale, Erin Mouré, Sandy Shreve, Pam Tranfield, M.C. Warrior, and Calvin Wharton. VIWU produced the anthologies, Shop Talk and More Than Our Jobs, as well as a cassette recorded with the Vancouver folk song group Fraser Union, Split Shift. Wharton and Wayman edited the first anthology of poems from East Vancouver, East of Main (1989). Wayman’s poem “The Face of Jack Munro,” about the sellout of the 1983 B.C. public sector general strike, captures the turmoil of the B.C. labour movement’s defining event of the 1980s.
