Skip to main content
2025: Aaron Williams, The Last Logging Show

2025: Aaron Williams, The Last Logging Show

Print | PDF

Description

By the time Aaron Williams began learning how to fall a tree, his family had been making clear cuts on BC hillsides for nearly a century. During his father’s generation, the industry started to crumble, and by the time Williams arrived, he knew his future lay elsewhere.

But his father continued in the trade, his work taking him into the forests of Haida Gwaii. There, Williams follows him into a season at Collison Point, where the loggers are increasingly unwelcome visitors to the ancient forests.

The Last Logging Show captures the spectacular setting of Haida Gwaii and the people who call it home. It unravels the lives and dreams of those who log the forests for a living, who have toiled alongside their Haida co-workers for generations—but while old approaches to forestry come to an end, new ways come into being. Thoughtful and compelling, this is a story of connection, community, and the force of fundamental change.

Judges’ Comments

“In Edna’s own creative non-fiction, she often wrote compassionately about communities that were marginal and poorly understood, from Nova Scotia fishing villages to Mennonite farming settlements. Aaron Williams has written a book about such a community. The Last Logging Show is a compelling chronicle of the lives of loggers and their families as their rugged way of life is endangered by global economics, environmental activism and the assertion of sovereignty over their own resources by Haida Gwaii’s Indigenous people. As a logger’s son who has abandoned the logger’s life, Williams presents a nuanced, often very funny, examination of a divisive topic through the voices of those who have lived their lives in the diminishing shadow of old growth forests.”

Harry Froklage, former associate director of development for Laurier’s Faculty of Arts

About the Author

Aaron Williams’ writing has been published in newspapers such as the Globe and Mail, the Halifax Chronicle Herald and the Vancouver Observer. He has an MFA in creative non-fiction writing from King’s College. His first book, Chasing Smoke—based on his experience fighting forest fires in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, Quebec and Idaho—was a finalist for the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award in 2018. He lives in Halifax with his family.

Learn More

Explore the works of our previous Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction winners.

×