Jill Mandrake

All Night Gas Bar illuminates the hardships of a working Vancouver class

By: Jill Mandrake, SFU Alumni   The collection of memoirs called All Night Gas Bar began its its journey in the mid-1970s: author Ernest Hekkanen sent it around to dozens of publishers, only to receive just as many rejections.  Then the manuscript sat at the bottom of an archival box for almost forty years, until Hekkanen eventually dusted off the pages and had them published, for the benefit of university students across the ages.         All Night Gas Bar chronicles a struggling, twenty-something writer, enrolled in UBC’s Creative Writing Department.  In order to support his wife and…

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