One Good Thing - by M a C Farrant (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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

About the Author

M.A.C. Farrantis the author of seventeen works of fiction, non-fiction, and memoir, two plays, and over one hundred book reviews and essays. A trilogy of her "miniature fictions"--The World Afloat, The Days, and The Great Happiness--was published by Talonbooks between 2014 and 2019 and has won a number of literary prizes, including the City of Victoria Book Butler Book Prize. BC Bookworld called Farrant "Canada's most acerbic and intelligent humourist" and the Ottawa Citizen dubbed her "one of the best humourists in the land."