Taking tea with Grandaddy Tough: Accessing the affective topography of logging poetry and labour

In this article I draw upon life history interviews I conducted with retired loggers on the Sechelt Peninsula of British Columbia and published logger poetry to examine the complex embodied and affective relations loggers have with the landscapes they helped shape and the machines and conditions under which they worked. Specifically I examine how the dangers inherent to logging labour are paired with particular affective relations to local landscapes and the machines with which logger's shaped them. I suggest that repetitive explanations offered in logger poetry and the labour history interviews I conducted be examined as something more nuanced, interesting and grounded than mere masculine self-mythologizing. I explore these representations as evidence of an incomplete, melancholic process of mourning for personal and environmental losses sustained in logging labour.