Join WAHC as we dig into Suzette Mayr’s award-winning The Sleeping Car Porter this February as part of our Black History Month Book Club! Grab your own copy and come prepared on the 22nd to join in a discussion facilitated by community organizer and artist, Sahra Soudi. We’ll be digging into the history of porters in Canada along with the book itself!
Mayr transports readers to the grueling workaday life of Baxter, a railway porter criss-crossing Canada in 1929. Drawing on the lives and experiences of real life porters, Mayr crafts a compelling and historically faithful portrait of Black labour in North America in the first half of the 20th century.
Sign up and save your spot today! Please note this is an IN-PERSON EVENT.
Top Image – Sahra Soudi Photo credit: Ariel Bader-Shamai
Bottom Image – Suzette Mayr Photo credit: Heather Saitz
Sahra Soudi is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, educator, and community organizer based in Hamilton, Ontario. They combine their activism and artistic practice to envision better and more just futures for all. Soudi advocates for the inclusion and participation of Black, Indigenous, disabled, and racialized communities in a range of settings, from artist-run centres, and DIY venues, to national galleries.
Soudi is an emerging artist and curator, passionate about cross-movement solidarity and disability justice. They honour this framework by empowering and mobilizing their communities to push for radical change. You can catch their current show, What Moves Us in the Middle, on view now in the James Street Gallery at Hamilton Artists Inc.
Suzette Mayr is the author of six novels including her most recent, The Sleeping Car Porter, winner of the 2022 Giller Prize, the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction, and the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize. The novel was also shortlisted for the 2024 Dublin Literary Award, a finalist for the 2023 Governor General’s Award for Fiction, and shortlisted for the inaugural Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and the Republic of Consciousness Prize (US and Canada). Mayr’s other novels have won the ReLit Award and City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize, and been nominated for numerous other awards. Mayr has done interdisciplinary work with Calgary theatre company Theatre Junction, and visual artists Lisa Brawn and Geoff Hunter. She has also published articles in journals such as Horror Studies, Studies in Canadian Literature, and The Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. She is a former President of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta. Mayr teaches Creative Writing at the University of Calgary, and is a Killam Laureate. You can learn more about her work at: https://www.suzettemayr.com/
Awards and Recognition For The Sleeping Car Porter
FEATURED ON MICHELLE OBAMA’S INSTAGRAM
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD
WINNER OF THE 2022 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE
WINNER OF THE 2023 GEORGES BUGNET AWARD FOR FICTION
FINALIST FOR THE 2023 GOVERNOR GENERAL’S AWARD FOR ENGLISH-LANGUAGE FICTION
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY TOP 20 LITERARY FICTION BOOKS OF 2022
OPRAH DAILY: BOOKS TO READ BY THE FIRE
THE GLOBE 100: THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022
CBC BOOKS: THE BEST CANADIAN FICTION OF 2022
SHORTLISTED FOR THE CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTION
WINNER OF THE CITY OF CALGARY W.O. MITCHELL BOOK PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 REPUBLIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS PRIZE
Baxter’s name isn’t George. But it’s 1929, and Baxter is lucky enough, as a Black man, to have a job as a sleeping car porter on a train that crisscrosses the country. So when the passengers call him George, he has to just smile and nod and act invisible. What he really wants is to go to dentistry school, but he’ll have to save up a lot of nickel and dime tips to get there, so he puts up with “George.”
On this particular trip out west, the passengers are more unruly than usual, especially when the train is stalled for two extra days; their secrets start to leak out and blur with the sleep-deprivation hallucinations Baxter is having. When he finds a naughty postcard of two queer men, Baxter’s memories and longings are reawakened; keeping it puts his job in peril, but he can’t part with the postcard or his thoughts of Edwin Drew, Porter Instructor.
Porter Talk Mini-Series Podcast from the Library and Archives Canada – https://library-archives.canada.ca/eng/collection/engage-learn/podcast/Pages/podcasts.aspx
…And Still I Rise, an online exhibition through the Hamilton Civic Museum – https://hamiltoncivicmuseums.ca/exhibition/and-still-i-rise/demanding-our-rights-wwii-1960s/
WAHC wishes to acknowledge the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Hamilton, the Province of Ontario, CUPE National, the Canada Council for the Arts, Canada’s Building Trades Unions, OPSEU/SEFPO and Teamsters Local Union 879 for their support of our exhibitions and ancillary programs.
For more information, please contact Cayley James, Outreach and Development Specialist, at (905) 522-3003 ex. 21 or cayley@wahc-museum.ca
