Aaron Williams’ family has worked in British Columbia’s logging industry for almost 100 years.

But much has changed over that century and after a few years of working as a logger in his teens and early 20s, Williams knew it wasn’t for him. But he was worried that scenes of people working hard on the mountain sides were going to be lost forever.

So he wrote a book.

The Last Logging Show: A Forestry Family at the End of an Era won the 2025 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction, an award handed out by Wilfrid Laurier University. An event was held this week to give Williams his prize.

Williams spoke with CBC KW’s Craig Norris on CBC K-Ws The Morning Edition about how his family’s history drove him to write the book.

The following interview has been edited for clarity.

Craig Norris: Tell us a bit more about The Last Logging Show.

Aaron Williams: It’s about my family’s history on the B.C. coast, the logging industry there, which I guess is the most cinematic [aspect] of the logging world. 

There’s lots of logging everywhere, but these are the big trees and the big equipment and stuff like that. My family was in that business for just about 100 years. My dad is actually just set to retire in a couple months. 

Craig Norris: So is that the end of your family’s involvement in logging? 

Aaron Williams: Yeah. I don’t think I’ll be going back to it. I did it for a little bit in my teens and into my 20s, but even then that was definitely going into sort of a dying industry. I could see pretty quickly that there wasn’t going to be a future in it for me. 

So I went off and did other things. I worked on a forest firefighting crew for a while. Then I got into writing and I thought my family’s story was worth telling. 

Craig Norris: So whereabouts in B.C. was this? 

Aaron Williams: This is mostly on the northwest coast. Haida Gwaii used to be called the Queen Charlotte Islands, a group of islands off the coast. My parents are still there right now. My dad first showed up there at age 18 in 1974, so 52 years ago. 

Craig Norris: There are different definitions, but in your mind, what is creative non-fiction?

Aaron Williams: It’s got to be truthful. I feel like every non-fiction writer has sort of a different line that they draw. I don’t know where mine is. 

I read Sebastian Junger’s stuff, who wrote The Perfect Storm, and there’s some passages in there. I wouldn’t go that far. I don’t think he’s a hack or a fraud for going a little further, but I guess we just have our comfort zone and we want to stay inside those lines. 

Craig Norris: Why did you want to write this book? Is this a dissemination of information or is this sort of a time capsule for you as well? 

Aaron Williams: It’s a little bit of that. I think something that originally drove me to write this book … is that I became really hung up on all these old, tough jobs becoming automated.

These people used to be climbing up and down mountainsides with heavy gear and stuff like that. Then the technology just kept getting better and better. 

Where my dad is working, there’s still some places where the tech isn’t quite there yet and these guys still have to go out and do this really hard, dangerous stuff. I was really interested in seeing those things, seeing that work being done before it potentially disappears forever. 

Craig Norris: What did your family think of this book? 

Aaron Williams: I kept it pretty close to my chest for about seven years. 

It was a long process. Then I remember at the very last possible second, I sent the manuscript to my dad right as he was leaving on a month-long holiday to Belize. I didn’t hear from him for about the longest time I hadn’t heard from my parents. Then also on his end, at the last possible second, he sent it back. 

I think he was at first quite put off at the fact that he was the main character in a book. I don’t think that sat very well with him. I appreciate that he got over it and is OK with it.

Craig Norris: You won the 2025 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction. What’s it like to get that news? 

Aaron Williams: It was so exciting. I don’t think I’ll ever forget where I was when I got the award. 

I was at my day job at the Halifax airport when the jury called me. I heard their tone of voice change in a good way. It just felt like, I don’t know, not a weight lifting because I wasn’t stressed that I wasn’t getting awards. It was just really special. 

It’s something to hang on to. 

Craig Norris: So you’re a coastal guy. You’ve been close to the oceans. 

Aaron Williams: Yeah, definitely. I have been. It seems like a little bit by accident, but as life goes on, I think that it would probably feel strange to be away from it for very long. 

Craig Norris: So Edna Staebler, is a Canadian writer, a literary journalist who is best known for her cookbooks, but she also wrote about marginal and poorly understood communities including local Mennonite farming sediments. 

Do you feel that the logging community fits into that description a little bit? I mean, that it’s not a well-understood community?

Aaron Williams: Oh for sure, and especially now that it’s less at the forefront of Canadian life.

It’s kind of an interesting coincidence that where my dad is logging happens to be right on the edge of this very small, single Mennonite family. At the turn of the last century, it was a community of about 70. I think it was 70 families. 

Now they’re all mostly gone, but some of the leftovers from their settlement are still there.

Craig Norris: What’s next for you?

Aaron Williams: I’m working on a book about the Martin Mars water bomber, which is a kind of a famous airplane in B.C. that fought forest fires.

Craig Norris: How far are you into that? 

Aaron Williams: Pretty far, far enough that I can talk about it.

Craig Norris: I’m glad you’re not keeping that one a secret.