Encampment

Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community

By: Maggie Helwig

Narrated by: Maggie Helwig

We think, maybe, that homelessness is some kind of stable state, like being housed except without housing. Without really considering it, most people do imagine that people who are homeless live in, if not one place, at least in one condition, that their days are in some way predictable. But homelessness is, more than anything else, a life of constant displacement.

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.

©2025 Maggie Helwig (P)2025 Coach House Books

Critic reviews

“Encampment is an urgent call for compassion, part memoir, part homily. In eloquent prose, it takes us on Helwig’s journey as an Anglican priest and activist into complex engagement with city staff, lawyers, politicians, and the unhoused community she works tirelessly to learn from and assist.”—Martha Baillie, author of There Is No Blue

“If you have seen a homeless person or an encampment and wondered who, why, or how, this is the book for you. Maggie Helwig’s storytelling from the front lines of Toronto’s housing tragedy is vivid, vital and profoundly human.”—Shawn Micallef, author of Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto

“Helwig is a priest, human rights activist, poet, caregiver, friend, mother, Mother. And she is, most admirably, a reader—a reader of sacred texts, yes, but also a reader of a city, of a neighbourhood, of bureaucracy, of poetry, of law by turns incensing and nonsensical, and of a community frequently deemed illegible or illegitimate in their living because the living looks different. With this book, Helwig maps a space for difference. Encampment enacts the gesture of a hand reaching out to meet another, of a question being formed, and of a need—however difficult to translate its utterance—that is listened to with respect and responded to with attention. Reader to reader, Helwig asks us: How might we better live together?”—Claire Foster, Type Books