One Good Thing: A Living Memoir

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.

Author: M. a. C. Farrant
Publisher: Talonbooks
Published: 02/15/2021
Pages: 200
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.45lbs
Size: 7.40h x 4.90w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9781772012842

About the Author
M.A.C. Farrant is the author of sixteen works of fiction, non-fiction, memoir, two plays, and over one hundred book reviews and essays. Her memoir, My Turquoise Years, which she adapted for the stage, premiered in 2013 at the Arts Club Theatre's Granville Island Stage in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her novel, The Strange Truth about Us: A Novel of Absence, was chosen by the Globe and Mail as a Best Book of 2012. The World Afloat: Miniatures, a collection of very short fiction, and volume one in a trilogy of miniature fiction, was published by Talonbooks in the spring of 2014 and won the City of Victoria Book Butler Book Prize for that year. The Days: Forecasts, Warnings, Advice, volume two in the series, was published by Talon in the fall of 2016 and was a finalist for the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize for 2017 and the 2017 ReLit Award. The third collection in the series, The Great Happiness, appeared in the spring of 2019. Farrant's work has been nominated for or won many awards, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, the Van City Book Prize, the National Magazine Awards, the ReLit Award, the Gemini Awards, the Victoria Book Prize (three times), and two Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards. She has taught writing at the University of Victoria, the Victoria School of Writing, and the Banff Centre for the Arts, and was writer-in-residence at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. "Farrant's work is infused with iconoclastic innovation" (Globe and Mail). The Ottawa Citizen has called Farrant "one of the best humourists in the land." BC Bookworld has called her "Canada's most acerbic and intelligent humourist." She has been described in print on numerous occasions as "the bizarro Alice Munro."