Metaphorically Speaking with Hilary Peach

Hilary Peach features at Metaphorically Speaking January 19th, 2023 

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Thick Skin is a collection of stories that follow Hilary Peach as she worked as a  transient welder – and one of the only women — in the Boilermakers Union. Distilled from a vast cache of journals, notes, and keen  observations, Thick Skin follows Peach from the West Coast shipyards and pulp mills of British Columbia, through the Alberta tar sands and the Ontario rust belt, to the colossal power generating stations of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.

Hilary Peach is a writer, recording artist, and producer of unusual art projects. She was a founder and director of the Poetry Gabriola Festival, an infamous interdisciplinary performance event that presented many Canadian and international artists on Gabriola Island. For twenty years she also worked as a transient welder, travelling across Canada  and the United States, working in pulp mills, chemical plants, refineries, and generating stations. In 2022 she released a memoire  about this time, Thick Skin: Field Notes from a Sister in the Brotherhood (Anvil Press 2022). 

She has a collection of poetry, BOLT (Anvil Press 2019), and has released three audio-poetry projects, Poems Only Dogs Can Hear, Suitcase Local, and Dictionary of Snakes. Hilary Peach now works as a welding inspector and a Boiler Safety Officer, and is writing fiction.