Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community

In this striking, elegant account, novelist and Anglican priest Helwig (Girls Fall Down) recalls how in spring 2022 her small churchyard in Toronto became the site of a homeless encampment. Finding shelter is a grueling and often senseless process for Toronto’s unhoused, according to Helwig, who calls it “a Lewis Carroll fantasia,” replete with mysterious calls from city staff that are later contradicted, permits that don’t exist, and a stance of “encouraging people to come indoors when there was no indoors... to come into.” The encampment at Helwig’s church quickly became a lightning rod for controversy, with the city sending an ominous vehicle called “the Claw” to remove tents and a nearby Montessori school emerging as a particularly sinister nemesis. Throughout, Helwig gracefully illuminates the encampment’s embattled residents; one particularly awful anecdote describes how a beloved dog is stolen from a resident by a Cruella de Vil–esque figure. Helwig recounts guarding tents, serving coffee, and standing by deathbeds as “the holder of sacred things,” whose job it was to redistribute the meager worldly possessions of the deceased to those who loved them and, as Helwig emphasizes, did indeed notice when they were gone. In crystalline prose, this sheds light on not only the struggles of the unhoused but the heartlessness of a society that would rather not see them at all. (May)