One Good Thing is a charming collision of memoir with the living, exuberant, and vulnerable natural world. Written in sixty-four short epistolary chapters, M.A.C. Farrant’s latest offering represents a search for hope and appeasement in a rapidly changing and often perplexing society. One Good Thing is also an homage to gardening columnist extraordinaire Helen Chesnut of Victoria’s Times Colonist, each section of the book focusing and expanding on one of her gardening columns.

Using a familiar “Dear Helen” structure, almost every piece in One Good Thing intimately and playfully relates to the gardening article that gave rise to it while simultaneously ranging into myriad other topics, including the author’s creative practice, personal and familial details, and comic riffs on a number of close-to-the-heart themes. With a mindful persistence that’s often hilarious, the book strives to find personal “calm abidance” through the practice of gardening as mediated by the universal and personal practice of writing.

Born in Sydney, Australia and raised in Victoria, British Columbia, M.A.C. Farrant is the acclaimed author of nine previous collections of satirical and humourous short fiction, and two works of non-fiction. Her writing has been widely anthologized in North America and has been dramatized for television; Farrant is also a frequent contributor to leading magazines such as Adbusters and Geist. Her 2004 memoir, My Turquoise Years, is being adapted into a stage play in conjunction with the Arts Club Theatre of Vancouver; production is slated for the 2011/12 season.

Farrant has taught fiction workshops in Canada and Australia. She was a visiting writer-in-residence at Macquarie University in Sydney. A full-time writer currently residing in North Saanich, B.C., she has also taught part-time at the creative writing department in the University of Victoria and reviews books for the Vancouver Sun and the Globe & Mail.

Farrant’s work is infused with acerbic wit and iconoclastic innovation. As the Globe & Mail has noted, “Farrant is better at startling us with unnerving, often misanthropic visions of everyday life than perhaps any other Canadian writer”.

BC Bookworld has called her “Canada’s most acerbic and intelligent humourist.”

M.A.C. Farrant's profile page

"Very readable — a complex thought written from the heart."
—Anny Scoones, Times Colonist

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"One Good Thing shows how garden-variety imperfections can still be instructive, delicious, even wonderful. They can distract us, momentarily perhaps, but to positive effect, from all that remains wrong and bleak and contested in the world."
—Kyle Wyatt, Literary Review of Canada