What does it mean to work for a living?

Told in short prose, Glass Bricks tells the story of Lester’s experience working both traditional and non-traditional jobs. Sometimes raw and often humourous, Lester shares stories about learning to work, working, and moving on. Glass Bricks explores the significance of our basic human right to work in an era where the struggle to find meaningful, full-time employment is all too real.

Louella Lester is a Winnipeg-based writer and amateur photographer. Her poetry, fiction, and non-fiction has appeared in journals such as, New Flash Fiction, Spelk, Reflex Fiction, Vallum, Prairie Fire, The Antigonish Review, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, at CBC News Manitoba Online, and in the anthologies, Gush: menstrual manifestos for our times, (Frontenac House, 2018), A Girl’s Guide to Fly Fishing, (Reflex Press, 2020), and Wrong Way Go Back (Pure Slush, 2020).

Louella Lester's profile page

"Louella's debut, a micro-memoir, is assured and funny, full of insightful detail and meditations on the value of hard work."
— Ariel Gordon, award winning poet and author of Treed: Walking in Canada’s Urban Forests.

Not many can say their resume includes everything from door-to-door onion seller and weather observer to diesel mechanic and seventh grade teacher. Drawing on her vast—and sometimes humorous—work experiences, Lester invites you to peek behind the door marked “Employees Only.” What you discover in the next tax file or mink shed she opens may surprise you.
—Angeline Schellenberg

“With Glass Bricks, Louella Lester playfully twists an existing genre: gritty work memoirs that read like flash fiction. Her honesty, her faithful recollection, and spot-on memories of her decades of jobs (those great and those not-so-great), make for short, sharp, and highly enjoyable vignettes of working life: specifically one woman’s working life. While a genre of “work” writing exists, I’m deliberately not placing this book in that context. This is women’s work, and it stands on its own two hard-working feet.”
—Kimmy Beach. Author of Nuala: A Fable (UAP, 2017).

Shortlisted for the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction