Reading Encampment
On Maggie Helwig's new book, Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community.
I read Maggie Helwig’s new book Encampment this weekend. I devoured it in two sittings, even though I had a dozen other things I should have been doing instead, including sleep. I can’t remember the last time I read a book with such grateful urgency. Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project, probably, which was quite some time ago.
If you’ve read her work you know that Helwig is an extraordinary writer, and here, she meets her subject with a steady, humane force that is spellbinding. As the title suggests, the book is about the tent encampment that unhoused people built in her Kensington Market churchyard, and which she presided over as its priest for two years. But Encampment is also about Toronto, and about how municipal politics works (or, more often, doesn’t), and very much about how we all navigate grief and loss as the world around us careens into catastrophe.
Having lived away from Toronto for a long stretch of time, Encampment answers the question that has haunted me daily since I returned in 2017: What happened to this city? Never an especially warm place, and certainly not one that has ever shown kindness to the poor, Toronto has been stripped of any vestiges of organized care for its residents, and lately even of the basic recognition that almost no one can afford to live here. The situation is dire and it is awful, and no amount of blithe civic boosterism can obscure this fact.
My father knew this, and it is why, on his deathbed, he made me promise that I would not let his schizophrenic son become homeless. I spent the next five years trying to fulfil that promise, hurling myself against an endless maze of economic and procedural walls that are designed to make even the most robust advocacy efforts feel impossible. Eventually, I succeeded—my brother now has both stable housing and appropriate medical care—but only because I literally made it my job to fight for him, and with him, for half a decade. Otherwise, he might have been an encampment resident, reviled by the only city he has ever known.
If you haven’t yet, please read this book. Encampment is available from Coach House Books, or you can place a hold on one of eight copies at the Toronto Public Library.
