Reviewed by Timothy Niedermann
The word essay conjures up thoughts of a schoolwork assignment—a well-researched, objective analysis of one thing or another delivered with a scholarly tone. And, per the rules of rhetoric, it would also conclude with an assessment, the sober opinion of the writer on the essay’s subject.
Best Canadian Essays 2025 breaks that mould. Editor Emily Urquhart, an essayist herself, is a creative writing professor at the University of Waterloo and non-fiction editor at The New Quarterly. The essays that she has selected are anything but academic. Instead, they are all very personal. The subject matter runs the gamut: from teenage adventures in intimacy, to collecting antique postcards, performing poetry, working in a massage parlour, promoting one’s writing.
Each essay shares with the reader the writer’s emotions in a given situation, removing any shred of cold, scholarly distance and replacing it with lived experience. And Urquhart has been resourceful in choosing stories that are unlikely to have been experienced by most people, though analogues to one’s one life can surely be found as one reads. In “the Boiler Room,” Helen Humphreys writes about a sort of affair (kissing, no sex) she had at age seventeen with her high school’s much, much older janitor. In “Complimentary, Free of Charge,” Jiin Kim describes his immigrant family’s first visit to a sit-down restaurant in Canada. “We are All Animals at Night” is a look at writer Lana Hall’s years working in a massage parlour, where she finds a greater sense of togetherness with her co-workers than she felt during her later life in the corporate sector.
Other stories deal with being an adopted child getting to know one’s birth mother, an obsession with Karl Ove Knausgaard, a black girl forced over and over again to recite a poem she had written, and the agony experienced by a writer when she loses her notebook.
These essays present no seamless argument intended to persuade, no iron-clad conclusion. What they present is a series of unusual experiences, each essay delving deeply into the writer’s state of mind as they confront their emotional reaction to what they are going through.
Best Canadian Essays 2025 is published by Bibioasis.
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