Tom Wayman
In 2015 the Vancouver Public Library named Tom Wayman a Vancouver Literary Landmark with a plaque on the city’s Commercial Dr. commemorating his championing of people writing about their own employment. Since 1973, he has had published innumerable volumes of his poetry, fiction and cultural criticism.
Recent books include The Shadows We Mistake For Love (short stories; Douglas McIntyre, 2015), Helpless Angels (poems; Thistledown, 2017), If You’re Not Free at Work, Where Are You Free: Literature and Social Change (selected essays; Guernica, 2018), and Watching a Man Break a Dog’s Back: Poems for a Dark Time (Harbour, 2020).
Wayman has been writer-in-residence at the University of Windsor, University of Alberta, Simon Fraser University and the University of Toronto, among other institutions. He is a co-founder of, among other ventures, Vancouver’s Kootenay School of Writing, the writing program at Nelson, B.C.’s Kootenay School of the Arts, and Nelson’s Elephant Mountain Literary Festival.
Since 1989 he has been based on his acreage, “Appledore,” in southeastern B.C.’s Slocan Valley.