Encampment

MARCIE'S PICK

This book should be required reading for all Torontonians and human beings. Maggie Helwig, a poet, fiction writer, and Anglican Priest, lives a unique and multifaceted life. Her heart radiates loving kindness, though she’s likely unaware of it—it’s simply who she is.

Maggie’s words and humanity brought me face-to-face with my own biases about what I thought was true about being unhoused and/or mentally ill. Never have I learned so much in a single volume from someone I would feel privileged (and hope) to meet one day. -MB

CLAIRE'S PICK

Helwig is a priest, human rights activist, poet, caregiver, friend, mother, Mother. And she is, most admirably, a reader—a reader of sacred texts, yes, but also a reader of a city, of a neighbourhood, of bureaucracy, of poetry, of law by turns incensing and nonsensical, and of a community frequently deemed illegible or illegitimate in their living because the living looks different. With this book, Helwig maps a space for difference. Encampment enacts the gesture of a hand reaching out to meet another, of a question being formed, and of a need—however difficult to translate its utterance—that is listened to with respect and responded to with attention. Reader to reader, Helwig asks us: How might we better live together? -CF

An activist priest provides sanctuary for an encampment of unhoused people in her churchyard.

We think, maybe, that homelessness is some kind of stable state, like being housed except without housing. Without really considering it, most people imagine that people who are homeless live in, if not one place, at least in one condition, that their days are in some way predictable. But homelessness is, more than anything else, a life of constant displacement.

The housing crisis plaguing major urban centres has sent countless people into the streets. In spring 2022, some of them found their way to the yard beside the Anglican church in Toronto’s Kensington Market, where Maggie Helwig is the priest. They pitched tents, formed an encampment, and settled in. Known as an outspoken social justice activist, Helwig has spent the last three years getting to know the residents and fighting tooth and nail to allow them to stay, battling various authorities that want to clear the yard and prefer to keep the results of the housing crisis out of sight and out of mind.

Encampment tells the story of Helwig’s lifelong activism as preparation for her fight to keep her churchyard open to people needing a home. More importantly, it introduces us to the Artist, to Jeff, and to Robin: their lives, their challenges, their humanity. It confronts our society’s callousness in allowing so many to go unhoused, and it demands, by bringing their stories to the fore, that we begin to respond with compassion and grace.

Paperback | 176 pages | 5.00" x 7.50"