In the end, ten women worked with us to develop oral histories about their life in the industry. Helen interviewed Lillian Day, Agnes Pike and Lit Clarke. Frances worked with Louise Belbin and her daughter Violet Green, Louisa Flowers, Bernice Duffett and Rose Furlong. Fellow FishNet member Jane Robinson spoke with Denyse Sheppard and Nellie Croft. Strong as the Ocean does not tell the whole story of women and their work in the Newfoundland and Labrador fisheries. But the stories that are told here - of cold November days on the beach, rough seas at early morning and tired feet at shift end - teach us about women's endless days of work in the industry, at home, and in the community.

In this book women are historians. They reflect on their own work environments, and how their labor is valued. The women analyze the relationships among managers and workers, and between husbands and wives. They consider society's view of women's work, and of fisheries workers. Many critical themes emerge from their chronicles.

Some people have asked us about the steps we took to prepare the stories for publication. First we talked with each woman to establish some background information about her work. Those conversations helped provide the focus for an

audiotaped interview. We usually prepared for the interview by thinking about four or five broad questions that might capture a woman's story, but more questions always emerged as we probed for details. We had decided to use lots of photographs in the book, so all the women agreed to have their picture taken and to search through their family albums.

After each interview, the tapes were transcribed. The transcripts often consisted of 45 pages of text, and we had planned for an average of nine pages per story. It was always a challenge to pare down the pages. Sometimes we cut information or anecdotes at the request of women; sometimes we suggested text that could be deleted based on the needs of readers. So though the text has been abbreviated for a variety of reasons, we were guided by our belief that each story belonged to the storyteller; it was her voice. When we edited the text, transitional words were added, repetitions deleted or sentence structures altered only when it was vital to meaning.

Sometimes a speaker was unhappy when she saw her "dialect" in print. This created a dilemma for us. Oral histories are celebrations of a speaker's life and language. They are not told in standard English; oral language has its own unique grammar, communication patterns and organizing devices. Though it might be possible to transform a book of oral histories from rural Newfoundland and Labrador into conventional written form, that wasn't the book we had set out to do.