Encampment
Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
ONE OF THE GLOBE AND MAIL'S BEST BOOKS OF 2025
WINNER OF THE 2025 TORONTO BOOK AWARD
"Striking, elegant." – Publishers Weekly, ★ STARRED Review
An activist priest provides sanctuary for an encampment of unhoused people in her churchyard
The housing crisis plaguing major urban centres has sent countless people into the streets. In spring 2022, some of them found their way to the yard beside the Anglican church in Toronto’s Kensington Market, where Maggie Helwig is the priest. They pitched tents, formed an encampment, and settled in. Known as an outspoken social justice activist, Helwig has spent the last three years getting to know the residents and fighting tooth and nail to allow them to stay, battling various authorities that want to clear the yard and keep the results of the housing crisis out of sight and out of mind.
Encampment tells the story of Helwig’s life-long activism as preparation for her fight to keep her churchyard open to people needing a home. More importantly, it introduces us to the Artist, to Jeff, and to Robin: their lives, their challenges, their humanity. It confronts our society’s callousness in allowing so many to go unhoused and demands, by bringing their stories to the fore, that we begin to respond with compassion and grace.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
