In Bread and Stone, Allan Weiss skillfully combines the story of one of the most dramatic real events in Canadian history, the Winnipeg General Strike, with the spiritual journey of a young man growing to understand who he is, who he is becoming, and what it is that he must do.
In June 2024, Black Rose Books published Bread and Stone. The following exchange between Weiss and BRB team members took place in July.
Bread and Stone is available for purchase here at blackrosebooks.com. Get your copy now!
BRB: How did Bread and Stone’s protagonist William McLean come to you or take shape?
AW: I wanted to write about a young man with strong religious and other views, who confronts challenges to those views, and who seeks an opportunity to live by them, even if it means making sacrifices. I think it’s important to take a stand on something, or believe in something even when it gets difficult, yet be prepared to recognize that you might be wrong.
William begins with some beliefs that are reinforced, like the need for workers to form unions to fight for their rights, a conviction he learns from his father, who had been a unionized miner back in Britain. He also maintains his faith in God and certainty that he was put on Earth to serve, to do God’s work, whatever that might be. That faith and his desire to do his assigned “work” are his motivations for enlisting in the army and then to participate in the Winnipeg General Strike.
On the other hand, as an Alberta farm boy with little experience of the world and very traditional ideas about gender and race, he can’t fathom ideas like equal pay for equal work. He’s not a paragon of virtue but a fallible person, a product of his times who isn’t all that open to what he considers shocking concepts. For him, ideas we now take for granted, like gender equality and racial tolerance, are somewhat beyond the pale. I wanted a protagonist who is somewhat naïve, so he’s easily convinced by wartime propaganda about supposed German atrocities in Belgium and how the Strike Committee provoked useful emotions in civilians and veterans alike.
For instance, during speeches by Strike Committee leaders, some men would sit on the stage facing the audience and lead the applause.
I also placed William’s family farm in the foothills of Alberta in rocky terrain so that it would therefore not be very successful. I spoke to a retired local in a nursing home who confirmed that a farm in the High River area would be pretty rocky and discouraging. William’s family would not get rich from it.
On the other hand, I didn’t want William to come across as an innocent fool; he’s bright, he can read and think, and he knows what he wants and doesn’t want. His spiritual, political, and emotional development is a major focus of the novel, and so I have his voice mature gradually through the novel as his thinking does.
BRB: Talk about the status of Canadian proletarian and working-class literature and where Bread and Stone is positioned within that context.
AW: There have certainly been novels and stories portraying the lower classes, although few of them deal with the role of unions and labour activism. Probably the most famous historical novel about unions and the working class is Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (1987), a portrayal of the workers who built the Bloor Street Viaduct during the 1910s and the union leaders who sought to speak for them. Suzette Mayr’s more recent title, The Sleeping Car Porter (2022), deals with the men who faced class and racial oppression as they worked on the passenger trains in the 1920s, and those who tried to unionize them in the face of threats from their bosses. Irene Baird’s Waste Heritage came out in 1939 and was about recent labour strife and activism in British Columbia. During the Depression years, Morley Callaghan often wrote about the working class dealing with the crisis, and Hugh Garner’s Cabbagetown (1950) is a classic in the field of working-class fiction set in that period.
Working-class characters appear in various authors’ works, such as in the fiction of David Adams Richards, Austin Clarke, Alistair MacLeod, David Chariandy, and Michael Crummey, but overall, proletarian literature has not been a prominent genre in Canadian fiction. The Winnipeg General Strike makes a brief appearance in Adele Wiseman’s Crackpot (1974), and Margaret Sweatman’s Fox (1991) portrays the Strike primarily from the point of view of the wealthy. Other than a musical and perhaps some poetry, it hasn’t been given much treatment at all. Michael Dupuis self-published a novel called The Reporter and the Winnipeg General Strike (2020), but again the events of the Strike are seen from a distance. I wanted to portray what happened in a more immediate way.
BRB: What does the song, “Mademoiselle from Armentières,” represent within the novel and how did the war effort inform the mobilization of working-class people in Winnipeg and Canada?
AW: The song was one of the soldiers’ favourites during World War I and I thought it was essential to include it in the novel. I could also have some fun with it. It had some clean verses and many truly obscene ones. I think people today would be astonished at what the soldiers sang a century ago! I thought it would be amusing to have my soldiers sing the clean verses while marching down Main Street but the dirty ones when they marched through the rich part of Winnipeg, the South End, just to offend the delicate sensibilities of the upper-class people living there. Music is an important theme in the novel, and what I portray about the Tenth Battalion’s band is historically accurate.
BRB: You're also a science fiction author. How did you arrive at writing a novel of historical fiction and do you find similarities or resonances between the genres?
AW: I’ve written science fiction, fantasy, and what some inaccurately call “literary” fiction: realist fiction set in largely contemporary times or not too far in the past and not about major historical events. The line between so-called literary fiction and historical fiction can get pretty blurry. The fact is that a work of any genre can be “literary” in the sense of being complex in structure, themes, and characterization, among other things.
In much of my fiction, I deal with the question of belief and what happens when life, historical events, and just plain growing up challenges one’s beliefs. I wanted to find an event in Canadian history that would offer my protagonist just that sort of challenge and hadn’t been done to death.
Many have written about World War I and the Riel Rebellions. The Winnipeg General Strike was largely fallow ground for literary treatment, and it was so much more complex than I originally thought. The veterans were divided over it, and the Strike Committee was made up of people who had very different, even opposing, views about what the Strike was about. You had everything from staunch trade unionists seeking a better deal for the workers on strike to people who saw the Strike as an opportunity to make profound, radical changes in a society that the war had exposed as corrupt and fundamentally unjust.
BRB: What do you think contemporary activists can learn from William McLean's experience of the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike or from the strike more broadly?
AW: I think contemporary activists can learn that their struggle is part of a much longer one. People are stunned to learn that feminists chanted “Equal Pay for Equal Work” in 1919! No, it didn’t begin with second-wave feminism in the 1960s. Efforts to unionize were part of a broader movement for social reform that led to shorter work hours, better working conditions, and higher pay.
People also need to learn that workers’ enemies are not immigrants or members of minorities, whether racial, gender, or other. Too many strikers in 1919 saw “aliens” as a threat to their jobs and national identity. It’s important not to attack others who are socially vulnerable, too, no matter how much the rich engage in the tactic of divide and conquer. As Eckersley says, in his somewhat politically incorrect way, “They’re all boys…Even the girls are boys.”
BRB: Any final thoughts?
AW: When I talk to people about the book, they often assume that I’m from Winnipeg. I’m not. For me, the story of the Winnipeg General Strike is in many ways a universal one as well as a geographically and historically specific one. It’s about people fighting to make their lives better, even if it means taking significant risks. It’s about courage—both physical courage and the courage of one’s convictions.
I also want to stress the parallels between what William endures during World War I and what he experiences in Winnipeg. In fact, I draw those parallels frequently, sometimes through small touches such as the importance of marching and music, and bigger issues like the difficulty of knowing who your friends and enemies are. The world is a complicated place where simple moral divisions often (although not always) prove unsustainable.
What William undergoes is a lesson in the importance of navigating that complicated realm with great care. He’s not perfect; he’s human, so he doesn’t always get it right. The important thing is that he’s earnest, a quality that is, sadly, quite a bit rarer these days than it was in that period. He really does want to get it right, and I hope readers will see that and give him the benefit of the doubt, and be engaged as they follow him on his philosophical, moral, and emotional journey.
To learn more about Bread and Stone and purchase a copy, please visit the Bread and Stone page here at blackrosebooks.com.