I met Tom Wayman in the early 1980s when he was teaching English and writing at David Thompson University Centre in Nelson. DTUC (1979-84), a joint venture between UVic and Selkirk College, was the provincial government’s response to the community uproar over the closure of Notre Dame University of Nelson in 1977. DTUC was innovative and leaned heavily into the arts. Tom, a seasoned educator and published author with a history of activism and organization, fits into the culture beautifully. When the government shut DTUC, Tom taught at its successor, the Kootenay School of the Arts, off and on between 1991 and 2002.
KSA, DTUC and NDU were community initiatives; obviously the people of Nelson are strong believers in post-secondary education, and Tom shares this passion. He has been and remains an energizing force in the local writing community—initiating and organizing festivals, events, and courses, bringing writers from afar and building schools. Among his many initiatives were “Terrain,” a three-day environmental writing conference, and “Eh to Zee,” a cross-border conference that brought to Nelson writing students from Washinton State and the Okanagan. Beyond Nelson, Tom taught at several mainstream post-secondary institutions in the US and Canada, including finally the University of Calgary 2002-2010. He helped start and taught at, the alternative Kootenay School of Writing’s Vancouver Centre from 1984-1987.
As well, Tom served as writer-in-residence at a number of Canadian universities, including the University of Toronto, in 1996. He held the Fulbright Visiting Chair in creative writing at Arizona State in 2007 and has kept busy in the West Kootenay co-founding and serving on the organizing committee of Nelson’s Elephant Mountain Literary Festival 2012-2021, and New Denver’s Convergence Writers’ Weekend 2012-2020. In 2015 he was named a Vancouver Literary Landmark, with a plaque on Commercial Dr. commemorating his championing of people writing about their own daily employment. In 2022 he received the province’s George Woodcock Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Literary Arts.
-Written by Verna Relkoff, author, editor, educator, Nelson, BC
***
Which ’hood are you in?
I live on 9 acres in an unincorporated area along southeastern BC’s Highway 6 about 68 km. west of Nelson, BC. The general name for the area is Winlaw, although technically I live in a northern suburb of Winlaw called Appledale. And my property is situated on the back road, rather than the highway—the back road follows the west side of the Slocan River valley here, whereas the highway is east of the river. I’m about 6 km. north of “downtown” Winlaw, which boasts a convenience store, post office, fire/ambulance station, two cafes, and some “hippie” stores, including a grocery.
The Slocan Valley is deep in the southern Selkirk mountains, the second range west of the Rockies. West of the Selkirks are the Monashee Mountains, which form the eastern wall of the Okanagan Valley. Our region is known as the West Kootenay, as Nelson sits on an arm of Kootenay Lake, from which the Kootenay River flows south toward the Columbia.
Waves of immigration have resulted in the region’s population being quite a mix: in the 1890s silver boom, mainly US miners and smelter workers arrived, some of whom stayed to be farmers, loggers and lumber mill employees. Early in the 20 th Century, a Russian pacifist religious sect, the Doukhobors, relocated here—so Russian speakers, choirs, cemeteries, and community halls are part of the present landscape. During WW II this area saw Japanese-Canadians interned in several camps and villages; some of these people remained. Then in the 1960s and 70s, young US war resisters opposed to the Vietnam War, and back-to-the-landers from both the US and Canada, settled here in significant numbers.
Currently, equity refugees from the Lower Mainland and southern Alberta constitute the latest wave of in-migration, bringing with them ever-increasing real estate prices and the threat of gentrification. Also present these days are post-secondary students from wealthy Indian families. Life is never dull with so many diverse groups interacting and, in many cases, building permanent lives here.
What do you do?
I write poetry, fiction and nonfiction, published by a range of Canadian publishers. My latest collection of poems is Out of the Ordinary, released in spring 2025 by Harbour. My most recent collection of short fiction—all Slocan Valley tales—is The Shadows We Mistake for Love from Douglas & McIntyre, which won the 2016 Western Canada Jewish Book Award for fiction. My most recent nonfiction is a 2024 memoir from Harbour, The Road to Appledore, or How I Went Back to the Land Without Ever Having Lived There in the First Place.
Most days I work at the computer until 2 or 2:30 pm, then am outside—gardening, or hiking, canoeing, or cross-country skiing in season, or doing seasonal chores including pruning my apple, cherry and plum trees, splitting and stacking firewood, chasing from the garden and grounds hungry deer and the local herd of feral turkeys, and clearing snow from my rather long driveway.
Over the years I’ve been involved in a range of local community literary projects. including helping establish Nelson’s annual literary festival. Promotion of my own books and writing, as well as giving editorial, publishing and book promotional advice to friends and former students also keep me busy.
What are you currently working on?
I recently completed a couple of book projects: a novel about working construction in Gastown in 1970, and a selected poems by a California friend who died in 2020. Neither of these volumes has a publisher yet, so finding one for these books are among my ongoing literary tasks. My own current writing project is a series of poems about the wildfires in the valley in summer 2025 that resulted in the evacuation of two nearby villages, Silverton and Slocan. I hosted a couple of friends who were evacuees, so had a close-up view of what it means to not know, day after day, whether you will have a home you can return to.
Where can we find your work?
Copies of some of my recent titles are found in many independent bookstores, and in the gift shop on BC ferries crossing between the Lower Mainland and the Sunshine Coast or Vancouver Island. Several BC public libraries have a wider selection of my books. Both in-
print and out-of-print titles of mine can be ordered through my website.
