Mom Camp Veronique Darwin 9781998336319

A debut collection of interconnected fiction that delivers a frothy, philosophical take on modern female archetypes.

In elementary school math, she was given a worksheet with six connected squares in the shape of a T, so she drew one girl in each box. When Jeanne was told to cut around the shape, and fold and tape the squares into one cube, she couldn't decide whether to keep the girls outside, looking away from each other, or trapped inside, looking in. Her solution was to rip it up and eat the pieces. The six characters have lived inside her ever since.

An unnamed woman retreats to sort herself into the various roles she has played (Sister, Friend, Server, Lover); another woman, Jeanne, checks into a hotel-turned-escape room emptyhanded. These parallel narratives lead a parade of interconnected stories and a novella featuring women of all ages who feel divided between their various roles and their past and present selves. With warmth and humour, the stories in Mom Camp reposition selfhood as rooted in relationship and explore the phenomenology of consciousness-and what it means to be the narrator of your own life.

Veronique Darwin has published stories in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and PRISM International and was runner-up for the 2024 Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph, where she completed a mentorship with Sheila Heti. Her humour pieces and essays about writing have appeared in Geist, carte blanche, and Porter House Review, and she has written book reviews for EVENT, The Fiddlehead, and The Literary Review of Canada. She writes, teaches, and makes theatre with friends in the mountain town of Rossland, British Columbia. Mom Camp is her first book.

"'Mom Camp'"is a surprising and moving, smartly cinematic story. Enigmatic in all the right places, it is delivered in a voice both wry and wise. Memorable."-Canisia Lubrin, judge of the Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence, on the story "Mom Camp"