The Snag: A Mother, a Forest, and Wild Grief

(Hardback)

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Every day, we hear about and experience griefs, large and small, in our families, friendships, communities, and worldwide. The grief of a loved one passing. The grief of a way of life ceasing to exist. The grief of global pandemic, war, climate collapse.

In The Snag, the acclaimed author of Shame On Me, Tessa McWatt, takes on personal and collective grief, and climate change, in her much-anticipated second nonfiction book.

As her mothers dementia advances and it becomes apparent that she can no longer live independently, Tessa considers griefs personal and political, and finds solace in trees. She asks: How do we grieve And: What can we learn from nature and those whose communities are rooted in nature about how to grieve and how to live

From the newest seedling, to the oldest snag in the forest, there is meaning to be found in every stage of a trees life, all of which contribute to a thriving forest community; it is in this metaphor that Tessa begins to find answers to her questions about how to live (for each other), how to grieve (radically), and how to die (with love and connection).

The Snag is an essential book about living and dancing and singing and praying, even in the face of unimaginable sadness, and in this way, growing together and supporting one another, like the trees in the forest.

Reviews

In The Snag, Tessa McWatt dwells in powerful contradictions as she brings us along through her complex journeys of grief and joy across continents, offering multilayered and much-needed insight into connection and belonging beyond ourselves. Making the global intimate and the familial expansive, this book is a poignant lament for what we are losing and a call to care for what we have not yet lost.

-- Kate Neville, author of Going to Seed

Praise for Shame on Me:

She is one of our greatest black female writers Shes a deeply thoughtful woman and deeply radical in her thinking. Shes not on the fence about her politics.

-- Monique Roffey * The Observer *

Praise for Shame on Me:

Political, personal, intellectual, and critical.

-- Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other

Praise for Shame on Me:

Eloquent and moving.

-- Barbara Taylor * The Guardian *

Praise for Higher Ed:

Tessa McWatt brings the traditional campus novel bang up to date This polyphonic novel owes an obvious debt to Zadie Smiths White Teeth, but nevertheless [McWatt] manages to make this exuberant but bittersweet tale something all of her own.

-- Lucy Scholes * The Observer *

Author Bio

Tessa McWatt is the author of seven novels and two books for young people. Her fiction has been nominated for the Governor Generals Award, the City of Toronto Book Awards, the OCM Bocas Prize, and the Society of Authors Volcano Prize. She is one of the winners of the Eccles British Library Award 2018, for her memoir: Shame on Me: an anatomy of race and belonging, which won the Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction 2020 and was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Prize and the Governor Generals Award. She has been a resident at the Sacatar Institute in Brazil and the Rockefeller Foundations Bellagio Center. Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, she is also a librettist, and works on interdisciplinary projects and community-based life writing. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.