Non-fiction – Kate Braid

The Erotics of Cutting Grass: Reflections from a Well-Loved Life

March 14, 2025 • alison • Non-fiction

Kate Braid has never been one to follow the beaten path. In 1977, she broke barriers by stepping—or rather, stumbling—into the male-dominated world of construction. With two beloved memoirs, Journeywoman: Swinging a Hammer in a Man’s World and Hammer & Nail: Notes of a Journeywoman, she’s shared her journey as a trailblazer in the trades. Now, Kate is back with her signature blend of guts, wit, and warmth, tackling the fresh territory of women, bodies, and aging in her latest memoir, The Erotics of Cutting Grass.

Forget everything you think you know about growing older. Kate Braid’s perspective is anything but conventional. In these love stories to life and living, Kate dismantles the tired clichés about aging and the female body. From weightlifting in her senior years to questioning why older people in love are seen as “cute,” but not “hot,” and even delving into the mysteries of “remembering” past lives, Kate’s stories are a refreshing take on what it means to age with audacity.

Travel with Kate as she adventures through France, still gets “checked out” on the street, picks up a new instrument, and has a secret love-affair with a ride-on Husqvarna grass cutter. She also navigates the role of step-mother and contemplates how second- and third-generation immigrants in a new world can truly make this land feel like home. Each chapter is filled with insight, candour, and a rebellious spirit that’s sure to resonate with non-traditional women who refuse to be defined by society’s expectations.

The Erotics of Cutting Grass is a celebration of life’s later chapters, written with the same unique mix of humour, frankness, and vulnerability Kate’s readers have come to know and love. Join her on this smart, thought-provoking journey that redefines what it means to embrace ageing on your own terms.

Interview

On April 14, 2025, Joseph Planta interviewed Kate about this new book. You can listen to the interview here.

Reviews

“In her new book, Kate Braid brings into engaging focus aspects of her multifaceted life as writer, journeyed carpenter, teacher, wife, stepmother, grandmother and more. Encounters with French culture and cuisine, fears of singing solo, and the advantages of growing older are, like the rest of her subject matter, explored with an impressive emotional clarity and sturdiness of thought: ‘All my life I’ve tried my hand at anything that popped up, everything that got me curious.’ But even more, she demonstrates a masterful ability to transmute into words her skills at observation. Followers of every trade—including carpenter and writer—learn where and how to look in order to improve their own craft.… As a result, we readers get to enjoy her stories, to marvel at how she processes whatever she encounters, and to come away wiser.”

—Tom Wayman, author of The Road to Appledore or How I Went Back to the Land Without Ever Having Lived There in the First Place

“When have I ever read a book that asks so many questions? The Erotics of Cutting Grass is the latest magical collection of meditations by the profoundly curious and beloved Canadian poet and memoirist Kate Braid. Wide and rangy, it investigates an array of topics through an intimate lens. It’s like someone whispering huge secrets right into your ear. Reflecting on music, relationships, work, spirituality, aging, language, art, and travel, this small book covers a lot of ground. At its heart, The Erotics of Cutting Grass is a body memoir, and a party, revelling in the physical sensations of taste, touch, sound, scent and image, with the voice and skill of a celebrated poet.”

—Hilary Peach, author of Thick Skin: Field Notes from a Sister in the Brotherhood and BOLT

Hammer & Nail: Notes of a Journeywoman

December 5, 2020 • alison • Non-fiction

Kate’s new book of essays and stories, Hammer & Nail: Notes of a Journeywoman, published by Caitlin Press, is available in Canadian bookstores, on-line and directly from the publisher now. It will be available in the US in spring 2021.

In the long-awaited follow-up to her 2012 memoir, Journeywoman, Kate Braid returns with an honest and thought-provoking collection of essays, stories and notes reflecting on her career in a male-dominated profession and on the changes female tradespeople have witnessed.

In 1977, Kate Braid began work as one of the first women to stumble (literally) into construction. Since then, feminism, the #MeToo movement, pay equity legislation and other efforts have led to more women in a wider variety of careers. Yet, the number of women in blue-collar trades has barely shifted—from three percent to a mere four.

In Journeywoman, Braid told a personal story of working almost exclusively with all-male construction crews. In Hammer & Nail: Notes of a Journeywoman, Braid returns to the trades with courage, compassion, and humour. Connecting her lifetime of experiences as a construction worker, as well as an educator and writer, Braid reflects on the culture of labour and recalls the thrill of realizing her own skill and capabilities.

Through stories, articles and speeches, Hammer & Nail sheds new light on our ideas of traditional gender roles—and how those ideas change in small but profound moments of gentleness, strength, humility and clarity on the job. Hammer & Nail is a thought-provoking collection of the highs and lows, the laughs, the heartaches and some of the lessons of Braid’s journey.

Reviews

“Hammer and Nail reads like sports reporter Alison Gordon’s baseball memoir Foul Ball! in its often humorous and always pointed examination of a traditionally male sphere resistant to female intrusion. In essayistic chapters, Braid offers insider information about things we’d never know as laypeople. […] framing her years of working as a journeywoman through the more current lenses of the pandemic, #MeToo, and the struggle for diversity in the workplace.”
—Quill & Quire

“Through a series of micro-essays she provides details of her working life, practical advice for women in trades, and feminist readings of male spaces. … Braid deftly threads herself throughout the narrative as a constant guide through rough yet rewarding terrain. Woven throughout the whole text is a beautiful love story where the reader gets hints and samples of Braid’s passion for her craft.”
—The Ormsby Review

Journeywoman: Swinging a Hammer in a Man’s World

January 15, 2010 • alison • Featured, Non-fiction

“Since women started working in the trades in the 1970s, very little has been published about their experiences. In this provocative and important book, Kate Braid tells the story of how she learned the carpentry trade in the face of skepticism and discouragement.

She was one of the first qualified women carpenters in British Columbia, the first woman to join the Vancouver local of the Carpenters’ Union, the first to teach construction full-time at the BC Institute of Technology and one of the first women to run her own construction company. Though she loved the work, it was not an easy career choice but slowly she carved a role for herself, asking first herself, then those who would challenge her, why shouldn’t a woman be a carpenter?

Told with humour, compassion and courage, Journeywoman is the true story of a groundbreaking woman finding success in a male-dominated field.”

See what reviewers and readers have to say about Journeywoman: Swinging a Hammer in a Man’s World.

Emily Carr: Rebel Artist

January 14, 2010 • admin • Non-fiction

“The more isolated Emily felt from her family, the more she clung to the idea of painting. No doubt her sisters saw it as a mere hobby, a pastime. But Emily’s dream of becoming an artist was nurtured by the French painter C.A. de L’Aubinière and his English artist-wife, Georgina, who probably taught Emily briefly in 1886.

“She was in awe of them because they were the first ‘real’ artists she had met – but she was oddly disappointed when she saw their pictures. Their landscapes did not seem at all Canadian to her, though no one yet knew exactly what a ‘Canadian’ painting should look like. In the European tradition, landscapes were panoramas of peaceful meadows with the odd tree, a cow perhaps, beside a quiet stream. They didn’t look at all like the British Columbia Emily knew, where, just outside the city, endless acres of trees towered above an almost impenetrable undergrowth, and the cow was in her back yard.

“Nonetheless, the two Europeans sowed a seed that made Emily sling an old pair of shoes across her rafters. Now, every time she had a little money she pushed it into the shoes. She had a plan.”

Red Bait! Struggles of a Mine Mill Local

January 13, 2010 • admin • Non-fiction

Written with Al King.

Al King was an organizer, Local 480 (Trail, British Columbia) president and eventually western Board member of the International Union of Mine-Mill & Smelterworkers, a trade union that was – depending on your point of view – a Communist hotbed or one of the most progressive unions in North American history. He tells a fascinating story, unrecorded elsewhere, of the growth and challenges to Mine-Mill from 1937 when he got his first job as a labourer at Consolidated Mining (now Cominco) in British Columbia, to the time when the union voted to merge with the Steelworkers Union and beyond.

“We had known they were planning to do something but this was astounding. Following the raiding actions, John Gordon…called a big meeting in the Legion Hall to decide what to do. When I left to go to the meeting Lillian said to me, ‘Please be careful.’ She knew feelings were running high and she was worried about fist fights.

“The usual turnout for a union meeting was twenty or thirty men but that night 600 showed up, many of them young veterans. There were so many, they couldn’t all fit in the hall. They filled up the building and overflowed outside, down the steps and into the street. When we saw those numbers, we knew we had a chance.”

The Fish Come in Dancing: Stories from the West-Coast Fishery

January 12, 2010 • admin • Non-fiction

A collection of interviews of eight of British Columbia’s fishermen – including one fisherwoman – who in 2002 still worked in the rapidly disappearing fishing industry off British Columbia’s west coast.

”Meanwhile on the beach, the beach man had tied the net to a tree. I guess it was a good two-foot around. Just at the right time, the tide changed. Old Frankie says, ‘Now you’re gonna catch some fish.’ We’re straining against the tide when all of a sudden the tree the net’s tied to comes out of the ground. It flies up in the air and comes right down on top of the skiff. Now, there’s a fifty-foot tree across the skiff and it’s being towed away from shore. Both the skiff man and beach man are standing on the beach, helpless.

The skipper is embarrassed. Everybody’s laughing. All the seiners were blowing their horns. It looked like an absolute mess, our first set of the year.”

Dave Cochrane, interviewed by Robert Boyd