From boilermaker to award-winning book author

Hilary Peach has worked as boilermaker at job sites across North America, including in Nanaimo and elsewhere on Vancouver Island, for almost 30 years.

Now the VIU alum has written a book about her experience, Thick Skin: Field Notes From a Sister in the Brotherhood. The book follows her life as a travelling welder and is a collection of stories, moments and lessons from her career. It recently won the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction award from the University of Waterloo. It is the only award offered in Canada for the genre and recognizes a Canadian writer of a first or second published book featuring a Canadian locale or theme with national significance.

“I feel honoured, gratified and truly pleased that this book is recognized through this prestigious award,” she says. “It means people are seeing it as a really good book, not just a novelty, or ‘that book by that welder.’”

Hilary currently works as a welding and boiler inspector for BC’s Provincial Safety Authority and has other published works under her belt as well.

“I’m a strong believer that you can have a dual career path and lots of people in the trades do – there are lots of artists who take up trades,” she says.

The idea to write Thick Skin came from her publisher at Anvil Press. “He had just accepted my manuscript for a book of collected poems, called BOLT,” she says. “He suggested we do the memoirs next.”

Hilary felt this memoir would interest trades workers – both men and women – because stories about what happens on job sites are so seldom told. The book is a “peek through a window into a world that a lot of people don’t get to see.”

Hilary graduated from VIU (then Malaspina) in the late 1990s. She says her time in the program prepared her well for her career, thanks largely to instructor Glen Nelson, who she calls an outstanding welder and teacher.

“There is a chapter about him in the book,” she adds.

Her career officially began after she obtained her A Level welding certification and was offered a job on a BC Ferries project with the Boilermakers Local 191, Victoria.

“I worked as a shipbuilder for about four years, then started travel-carding with the field local around the province,” she says. “I loved the travel, the adventure, the actual work and the camaraderie.”

Working in the trades “gives a person a sense of their own agency,” she says. “It introduces you to skills and abilities you may not have known you had. It allows you to write your own story and fulfill your destiny. There are always ups and downs in a career like boilermaking. It’s exciting and unusual. I travelled all over Canada and the USA as a pressure welder. It was great fun.”

She says one of the most rewarding parts of her career is the fact that it helped her land her current position with the Provincial Safety Authority.

“As an inspector, I am able to draw on my decades of experience on the tools, and put it together with engineering and mechanical knowledge to contribute to safe mechanical installations in the Lower Mainland,” she says. “It’s a very interesting transition and I can’t wait to see what’s next.”

Thick Skin can be purchased from a variety of local book sellers, directly from Anvil Press or from Amazon.

Plans are also in the works for Hilary to give a talk at VIU next month. Stay tuned for further details on date and time.

Photo: Mark Mushet