One Good Thing
A Living Memoir
"One Good Thing" is a delightful hybrid of creative non-fiction and memoir. Written in sixty-four epistolary sections, it represents a search for hope and appeasement in a rapidly changing world. It is also a book of homage to gardening columnist extraordinaire Helen Chesnut of the Victoria Times Colonist, as each section focusses and expands on a particular gardening column of hers. Using a familiar "Dear Helen" structure, almost every piece in One Good Thing relates to the original gardening article that gave rise to it while, at times, ranging into a myriad of other topics, including the author's practice of creating art, personal and familial details, and comic riffs on a number of close-to-the-heart themes. The book focusses on finding personal "calm abidance" through the practice of gardening as mediated by the universal and personal practice of writing.
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.”
