Welfare Wednesdays

Jack met Lucy, and then it all went bad… Vancouver’s drug-ravaged Downtown Eastside becomes more bearable for Jack Offley and Lucy Blanchard when they meet by chance one sunny afternoon. With Jack’s help, Lucy escapes her abusive common-in-law husband, but the young lovers soon become caught up in the nightmare of drug addiction and find themselves homeless. Stumbling along day by day, Jack and Lucy live only for the last Wednesday of every month, when the welfare checks are issued. Horrifying but darkly comic, Welfare Wednesdays is a love story like no other, a blistering tale of hope but perhaps not exactly redemption.

Jack met Lucy, and then it all went bad… Vancouver’s drug-ravaged Downtown Eastside becomes more bearable for Jack Offley and Lucy Blanchard when they meet by chance one sunny afternoon. With Jack’s help, Lucy escapes her abusive common-in-law husband, but the young lovers soon become caught up in the nightmare of drug addiction and find themselves homeless. Stumbling along day by day, Jack and Lucy live only for the last Wednesday of every month, when the welfare checks are issued. Horrifying but darkly comic, Welfare Wednesdays is a love story like no other, a blistering tale of hope but perhaps not exactly redemption. "Taking her makeup kit to the living room, Lucy threw herself down on the couch and got to work. She had neglected to shower but that didn’t mean she could skip the makeup. Busy with the creams and brushes, she wondered who had started this time-consuming and expensive ritual. Had cavewomen smeared charcoal and berries on their faces to make themselves more attractive to cavemen? What difference would it make? They could smear themselves with dung and men would still chase them around. It was men who should wear the makeup, those hairy, ugly beasts. Lucy blinked at herself in the mirror and the watery blue eyes blinked back. She picked up her eyeliner pencil and, for reasons she could not fathom, did her best to make herself attractive for the cavemen of this world. Why couldn’t some plucky woman do them all a favour and shoot Estée Lauder? They would save enough money on cosmetics to put an end to world hunger and still have more than enough cash left to put Mary Kay on the moon."

Chris Walter, a recovering drug addict and hope-to-die punk rocker, began writing purposefully in 1998 after realizing that his life up to that point had been meaningless. His first published novel, Punk Rules OK went largely unnoticed except by detractors, inspiring him to take a DIY approach to the game. With help from his girlfriend who worked at a printing shop, he started GFY Press and began to write, publish, and distribute a steady stream of fiction novels and music biographies. After kicking drugs to the curb in 2001, GFY Press expanded to include unschooled troublemakers Simon Snotface, Stewart Black, and an Australian, Drew Gates, drawing further criticism from the established literary industry. More than twenty titles and fourteen years later, Chris Walter and GFY Press remain unrepentant and committed.