One Good Thing Front Cover

Paperback / softback
ISBN: 9781772012842
Pages: 200
Pub. Date: February 15 2021
Dimensions: 7.5" x 5" x 0.5"
Rights: Available: WORLD
Categories
Non-Fiction / LCO011000

  • BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women
  • GARDENING / Essays & Narratives
  • HUMOR / Form / Essays
  • LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Letters

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One Good Thing
A Living Memoir
By M.A.C. Farrant

One Good Thing is a charming collision of memoir with the living, exuberant, and vulnerable natural world. Written in sixty-four short epistolary chapters, M.A.C. Farrant’s latest offering represents a search for hope and appeasement in a rapidly changing and often perplexing society. One Good Thing is also an homage to gardening columnist extraordinaire Helen Chesnut of Victoria’s Times Colonist, each section of the book focusing and expanding on one of her gardening columns.

Using a familiar “Dear Helen” structure, almost every piece in One Good Thing intimately and playfully relates to the gardening article that gave rise to it while simultaneously ranging into myriad other topics, including the author’s creative practice, personal and familial details, and comic riffs on a number of close-to-the-heart themes. With a mindful persistence that’s often hilarious, the book strives to find personal “calm abidance” through the practice of gardening as mediated by the universal and personal practice of writing.

"Very readable — a complex thought written from the heart."
—Anny Scoones, Times Colonist

"One Good Thing shows how garden-variety imperfections can still be instructive, delicious, even wonderful. They can distract us, momentarily perhaps, but to positive effect, from all that remains wrong and bleak and contested in the world."
—Kyle Wyatt, Literary Review of Canada

By M.A.C. Farrant

M.A.C. Farrant is the author of sixteen books: thirteen collections of satirical and philosophical short fiction; one novel, The Strange Truth About Us; a novel-length memoir, My Turquoise Years; a book of humorous essays, The Secret Lives of Litterbugs; and the stage adaptation of My Turquoise Years, which premiered at Vancouver’s Arts Club Theatre in 2013.

Read more about M.A.C. Farrant


news | 2024-03-19
All Lit Up on One Good Thing