‘Genre-bending’ advocate for workers
Coming Home from the Candy Factory
by Jane Byers
Qualicum Beach: Caitlin Press, 2025
$24 / 9781773861746
Reviewed by Wendy Burton
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Coming Home from the Candy Factory is a genre-bending book, part memoir of Jane Byers’ career as a corporate ergonomist for large employers, part story of her misdiagnosed concussion, part radical advocacy, part celebration of work, and part analysis of the consequences of what she ironically labels “below the neck” work.
These parts make an intriguing whole. The book is a collection of vignettes, essays, and poetry. Byers provides compelling vignettes of encounters with workers returning to work after injury; pre-emptive inspections of structures that could lead to repetitive strain injury; and at times antagonistic encounters with supervisors. These are stories of inspection, vigilance, witnessing, and recording. Byers’ tone is neutral; the freight of her meaning is carried by the depth of her accounts. Byers writes as an advocate, one who uses the tools of her trade to make workplaces safer for those who labour, on behalf of those who love them and the communities built around these industrial complexes. Using unapologetically specialized language, Byers leads us into an often-hidden world, which she describes with restraint. The reader is left with no doubt of her respect for those who labour and the predictable and unpredictable physical toll.
Poetry interrupts the text, bracketing the essays and vignettes with images of stunning beauty: “Dregs of winter linger in the icy-lipped puddles of truck-pocked mud, gravelled welts.” Byers’ poetry is at times integrated into the text, echoing the essay nearby. At times, her poems burst onto the page, art whose subject is work below the neck, including her reverie of spending an afternoon on a stand up paddle board, far from the demands of her work but anchored nonetheless to the thoughts that occupy, no pun intended, her mind. Her poetry is not didactic or polemical. I cannot resist favourably comparing her poetry to that of Peter Marcus, recognized as the “workers’ poet” of Vancouver (A Worker’s Friend, Granville Island Publishing, 2020). Byers’ poetry illuminates, with sparkles of wording, creating art of the work she witnesses and records, and the harms she attempts to mitigate.
This book is evocative and engaging. Byers counters the claim “when everyone knows what work is – there is nothing to explore.” She begs to differ, except Byers isn’t begging. This book is not so much a tugging on the reader’s sleeve as using a bullhorn. The reader cannot resist listening.
This book is for those who work in occupations that are by their definitions hazardous to health. This book is for those who live alongside those who ‘enter the mines’ every day, even if metaphorically. This book is for activists tackling what seem to be intractable industrial practices, which foul the surrounding communities, reaching with tendrils of death into every corner. I recommend this book to those who supervise this work, their labour considered “above the neck.”
This book is about doing the work to keep us all safe, and reminding those who need it that industrial practices are not, by immutable law, beholden only to the economies of production. Byers writes of her father’s life and work as example. This essay is told with a daughter‘s love – a persuasive chronicle of a labouring person.
The ones who earn her contempt are those she encounters who could make changes and won’t. I hope the fire chief she describes in the essay “Woman in the Hall” recognizes himself in her account.
Byers makes her work personal; places herself, all the safety gear described and donned, at the heart of the workplace, nose-to-nose with those who labour and those who supervise such labour. Her sightline is impossible to dismiss.
Byers engages the question why industrial work is seldom the subject of art, and this essay had me with three screens open, looking for the images she describes. She leaves us with an answer to her question, in her poem about the caster, his cheeky bandana, his grace. She honours the often-invisible work and worker, honours their dignity and valour. If one sentence describes this book it is “those who work matter and are worthy of art.”
She turns her gaze, in the final essay, to the notwork of what is sometimes referred to as domestic labour: raising children, maintaining a household, donning the hazmat suits required to perform uncounted and largely unacknowledged domestic labour.
The title, with its reference to a candy factory, juxtaposes the delights of every delectable surface of a chocolate factory to the “do not touch” warnings about surfaces, tools, machinery, air – the visible and invisible dangers of most factories. The book has a table of contents, and footnotes at the bottom of the relevant pages, which is a nice change from books that leave the reader to flip back and forth between the pages of the book and the endnotes.
The essay “Collateral Damage” is the account of her experience after she falls in an icy parking lot and suffers a concussion, a workplace injury undiagnosed for months. Her story interrogates the response of her workplace – WorkSafeBC – to her injury, her slow recovery, and her attempt to get accommodation so she can return to work. For those who have traversed the intricacies of accessing workers’ compensation, this essay will be a comfort and a warning.
Who has not felt something similar to her conclusion, expressed in the poem “Skunk Cabbage”?
I wasn’t thinking of quitting my job on this morning walk,
but the plant has convinced me
the logic of paycheque and pension is overrated.
Art, too, can be this brash, nonsensical –
plant that smells like an animal and is named for food.
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Wendy Burton is Professor Emerita at University of the Fraser Valley, where she taught academic and work place writing, story-telling, diversity education, and Indigenous Adult Education. In 1997, she earned a doctorate for her feminist analysis of story-telling as knowledge claims. Throughout her work life, she wrote creative non-fiction, long and short form fiction, and poetry. Her debut novel Ivy’s Tree (Thistledown) was published in 2020. She writes fiction and creative non-fiction. Her most recent essay is “Meditations on the Headstand,” Folklife, Winter 2023. [Editor’s note: Wendy Burton has reviewed books by Lembi Buchanan, Linda M. Ambrose, Gina Starblanket (ed.), Danny Ramadan, Jo-Ann Wallace, and Chris Arnett for The British Columbia Review.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster