According to reviewer Charlotte Cameron, who met Laurie Lewis in Oaxaca, Mexico in March of 2011: "Laurie Lewis is a writer who got her start in publishing at Doubleday in New York in 1961. Later she became the Head of Design at University of Toronto Press. In 1991 she founded Artful Codger Press. Her book Little Comrades (Porcupine's Quill, 2011) reflects her many accomplishments and a lifetime experience with books. [SEE REVIEW BELOW]

"Lewis's parents were active communists. Her father, a violent alcoholic who beat her, worked in Vancouver for the Shipwrights and Boilermakers Union in 1942. Her mother, a newspaper reporter, eventually worked for McClelland & Stewart.

"In 1951, after moving to New York, Lewis was interrogated about her Canadian parents. She couldn't remember the names of people her mother knew, and it was her mother the FBI was interested in. There is a shivering ending to this mother-daughter story, and an unusual twist.

"Lewis attended General Brock High School in Vancouver and remembers going by street car with her mother in an attempt to witness the herding of the Japanese into Hastings Square. The radio encouraged people to go and pick strawberries from the gardens left behind in Abbotsford by Japanese farmers."

BOOKS:

LITTLE COMRADES (The Porcupine's Quill, 2011) $22.95 978-0-88984-342-4

[BCBW 2012]