Fordmates by Ivo Maravec

Fordmates is a collection of fourteen linked short stories written by Ivo Maravec, a former line worker at the St. Thomas Assembly Plant. Published by Porcupine’s Quill, the reader’s first impression is of a beautifully crafted volume, printed on high-quality paper and illustrated with meticulous line drawings of engines and cars.

The stories themselves are both entertaining and heartbreaking, filled with characters who linger long after you close the book. Maravec’s skill as a wordsmith and documentarian shines as he captures the day-to-day rhythms of the plant and the people who work there. In the opening story, The Greenhorn, Rob is helpfully providing a comprehensive orientation to a new employee:

You’ll suffer, my boy, you will. Your back, of course. During a single shift, you’ll lift and carry about seven thousand kilograms, half of it bending forward to the basket or over the frame. I guarantee you some back pain, but that’ll be only muscles. That’s why I’m telling you to avoid twisting your waist – the last thing you want is to screw up the vertebrae in your spine. In the first months, your shoulders and forearms are going to howl in protest. So will your wrist, from turning the driveshaft…

But you’d better be careful. I can think of one woman, such a darling – she’s divorcing her third Fordmate to marry a fourth. All within twenty years. With each divorce, she’s been after the money, but not only that. It’s a bigger deal that she gets half of the guy’s pension…

Then, slowly, sneakily, almost imperceptibly, boredom will start fogging your mind like morning mist… You’ll have to find something to keep your spirit afloat. Almost everyone here has a hobby or passion or ambition that keeps them sane…

Rob’s cautionary tale about women using the well-paid Ford workers for their own ends is borne out in the story, Lucy and Leo. Lucy is a summer student who develops a romantic relationship with Leo and convinces him that if he supports her financially while she completes her university degrees, she will do the same for him once she is gainfully employed. Leo is an avid reader and harbours aspirations of one day being able to take courses and improve his skills. Leo takes on extra shifts to cover Lucy’s expensive tuition, books, and personal needs. Six years later, after Lucy has graduated with a Master’s degree, Leo comes home to find a note:

Lucy wrote that she was leaving him and moving to Toronto, a city that could offer her much more room to pursue her career. He hadn’t had much time for her lately. He’d been neglecting her. But the main thing was that she now belonged in the elite group of people decorated with not just one degree, but two, and her education really obliged her to seek out new friends and a life partner whose achievements were commensurate with her new status and elevated spiritual needs.

Initially devastated, Leo becomes depressed and suicidal and eventually finds solace in his books. When working on the line one day, reflecting on his reading, he shouts “She’s right out of Balzac!” This moment of recognition is healing for him as he has found a way to understand his betrayer and move forward with his life. Such moments of pathos are beautifully drawn, richly described and entirely visual. Maravec describes the scene so well that the reader can almost smell the line, hear the sounds of it moving forward, and see the workers momentarily pause when Leo cries out.

The Body and the Underbody is among the most humorous stories in the collection. Two young women from a local “gentleman’s establishment” join a tour group visiting the plant. The two intend to advertise the full range of entertainment on offer and manage to stop the line.

Then she stepped out of the skirt altogether, picked it up and twirled it above her head, swinging her hips to the hard rock coming from the radio playing up the frame line. Not to be outdone, the first one pulled her skirt down too, but she was wearing neither logo nor panties, and it so happened that Ronnie burst upon the scene to the view of a nude female rear end, a view so totally unexpected that at first he couldn’t quite grasp what he was seeing.

‘Why’s the line down?’ he barked at Andy.

Andy didn’t think any words were necessary and just pointed to the dancing girl.

‘Start the line!’ yelled Ronnie.

‘I refuse. On the grounds of safe…’

While the manager was eager to restart the line, the workers refused, claiming the dancers posed a “safety hazard” for them. In an all-too-believable and amusing sequence of events, the union rep is called to arbitrate. The Canadian Autoworkers Union then issued a statement indicating that “working while exposed to female breasts, buttocks, and sexual organs constitutes a serious safety hazard.”

Each of the stories offers glimpses into the lives of the men and women who work in the plant. In Sandro, for instance, the main character “was initially amused by the idea that the Ford Motor Company had hired only half of him – the physical half. In one sense, it felt degrading; in another, it was liberating.” Over the years, Sandro comes to believe that the drudgery and toil are sapping his spirit, and in a moment of pure magic, he begins to sing aloud an operatic aria, his voice so powerful that the line is stilled while everyone listens. Such moments of exposed humanity are breathtaking.

Humour abounds in these pieces, including robots that malfunction when within view of a beautiful girl, a rattlesnake that arrives in a box of parts, an engineer trained in another country and now working on the line, who plays with the chronomeister’s time-motion calculations. The dreams and fortunes of the workers are writ large, with all of their vulnerabilities. An entertaining and quite moving collection. Highly recommended.

This is a TMR Starred Review!

Ivo Moravec is a former Ford employee who worked on the line at the St. Thomas Assembly Plant for twenty-one years, and who has since become a unique voice in Canadian literature. Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, he obtained a Master of Economics from the Economics University in Prague, then worked for the Research Institute and for a Ministry of Industry think tank as a researcher and analyst. In 1983 he defected to Austria, then emigrated to Canada and settled in London. His writing career began with the publication of Tightrope Passage: Along the Refugee Route to Canada (McClelland & Stewart, 1997). Moravec retired from Ford in 2007. He lives in London, Ontario.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Porcupine’s Quill; First Edition (Sept. 15 2023)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 088984464X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0889844643

Lucy E. M. Black

Website

Lucy E.M. Black (she/her/hers) is the author of The Marzipan Fruit Basket, Eleanor Courtown, Stella’s Carpet, The Brickworks and Class Lessons: Stories of Vulnerable Youth. A Quilting of Scars will be released October 2025. Her award-winning short stories have been published in Britain, Ireland, USA and Canada. She is a dynamic workshop presenter, experienced interviewer and freelance writer. She lives with her partner in the small lakeside town of Port Perry, Ontario, the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of Scugog Island, First Nations.