DIRTY WORK

For readers of Eating Dirt by Charlotte Gill and Fire Season by Philip Connors, this extraordinary memoir offers a glimpse into the joy, fear, filth, and ferocity of working at a remote fishing lodge in the boreal forest of Northern Ontario.

DIRTY WORK follows Anna through nine weeks of working as a housekeeper at a fishing lodge 100 kilometres south of James Bay—one summer of dirty work and dirtier humour, black bears and four-foot-long pike, and hot days and nights spent alongside the ghosts and spirits of Northern Ontario. As Anna grows accustomed to the ferocity of the boreal forest and the fishermen at the lodge, she comes face to face with dangerous wildlife, experiences unparalleled joy, and finds herself permanently altered by the fierceness of the environment, with a new repertoire of dirty jokes from the dockhands.

This memoir is a reflection on the nuances of the trophy fish and the people who pursue them, the fierce bonds that develop through shared, hard labour, and the everlasting power of the boreal forest and the creatures that inhabit it. When human ‘civilization' meets black spruce, one yields to the other, and wildness follows.

Anna Maxymiw's work has appeared in a range of Canadian and American publications, with some of the more notable being The Globe and Mail and The Walrus. Essays from this forthcoming memoir have been published in The Malahat Review, Maisonneuve, and Hazlitt and won Silver in the Humour category at the National Magazine Awards, where the piece was also nominated in the Personal Journalism category. This is her first book.