Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life With the Tree-Planting Tribe by Charlotte Gill (Greystone Books)
In a year that saw the launch of the country’s richest prize for non-fiction, award-winning short story writer Charlotte Gill‘s memoir-cum-anthropological study, shortlisted for the inaugural Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize, epitomizes the often hazily defined category of “creative non-fiction.” Combining novelistic insight, research, and nearly two decades of first-hand knowledge of her subject, Gill offers an engrossing, at times meditative account of the makeshift society and piecework economy of tree-planters on Vancouver Island. A thoroughly Canadian story, Eating Dirt is not out of place alongside other classic memoirs of the bush by Susanna Moodie or Farley Mowat.
