The Snag

FINALIST for the 2025 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize
A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year

In her memoir The Snag, the acclaimed, award-winning author of Shame on Me, Tessa McWatt, takes on personal and collective grief, and the solace and inspiration to be found in connecting with nature—and each other.

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.

As her mother’s dementia advances and she can no longer live independently, Tessa McWatt confronts personal and political losses, and finds herself wandering in a forest asking, how do we grieve? And what can we learn from nature and those whose communities are rooted in nature about not only how to grieve but also 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 tree’s life, all of which contribute to a thriving forest community. In this forest thinking, 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."Investigating the question of how we grieve, McWatt adeptly connects the personal and the political, the local and the global. In doing so, she illustrates how they are inextricably linked. . . . Her prose enacts her thematic interest in interdependence. . . . A heartfelt affirmation of the potential of storytelling to make connections and imagine better futures." —The Conversation

"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, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Toronto and author of Going to Seed

“A beautiful meditation on grief, the power of nature, and how communities recover from loss.” —Irenosen Okojie, author of Curandera

“Wise, bold, and deeply affecting.” —Stephanie Bishop, award-winning author of The Anniversary

“The Snag is a radical ecosystem of a book.” —Marchelle Farrell, therapist, gardener and author of the award-winning memoir Uprooting

“Tessa McWatt is simply one of the best writers available to us…. Her beautiful, unflinching prose is a truth we need in these times.” —Leone Ross, award-winning author of This One Sky Day

“The Snag is a raw and deeply personal exploration of trauma, grief, and environmental destruction…. A profound must-read text on the yearning for radical change.” —Victoria Pratt, Creative Director, Invisible Flock and Land Body EcologiesTESSA McWATT is the author of seven novels and two books for young people. Her fiction has been nominated for the Governor General’s 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 General's Award. She has been a resident at the Sacatar Institute in Brazil and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy.  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. Born in Guyana, she grew up in Canada, and now makes her home in London, England.1

Invocation


“Oh, help.”

This must have been the first human prayer ever uttered.

In the quiet of early morning on an open plain, someone woke. Feeling the earth beneath her head, looking into the sky as the sun rose, she felt an indescribable longing. Or perhaps it was later in the day, on a meaningless trek towards the end of hunger, step after step along the savannah, with the sun bearing down, when she might have whispered, “Oh, help.”

I am in a pine forest, not on a scorching savannah. I’m not hungry or in immediate pain, with nothing obvious to pray about, or so I thought until I heard myself utter those two words. Oh, help, I said to a patch of moss on a rock that looked like a place I could lie down and rest. Oh, help, to the spore-leaf bed before me. Oh, help, because I had no other words.

I am here in a forest, overwhelmed with something like love or fear. But the vibration of a voice—even my own—seems to stabilize me.

It’s 2021, and I have come to Ontario, from my home in the United Kingdom, to see my elderly mother, my family, friends. Allowed to travel now that I am fully vaccinated, the virus’s variants—Delta, Beta, all the Greek alphabet to come—quelled by human science. For now.

This is the countryside I miss throughout the year in London. This is what I long for when I put in my regular calls to my mother and ask her what the weather is like. Every time she tells me: “Oh, the leaves. Oh, the leaves,” from the moment they appear in May to the height of their fullness in August, just before yellow touches their tips, and then the urgency in her voice in October when, oh, crimson, fragile and perched to fall, they are like her. Leaves grow and die like feelings, it seems, and she has turned my attention to the trees.

She and I spoke on the phone every day during the Covid pandemic. We would talk about what she was eating, the weather, the young admirers—she joked—who were hiding under the couch while we had our call. She still knows how to tell a joke and then giggle to show me that she’s not completely over the edge. But the conversational loop we’re on grows tighter and tighter every week. She doesn’t go out much. She forgot to renew her home insurance, my sister told me. Sometimes she is lost behind the gauze of time.

She gave away her piano many years ago, complaining of tinnitus. But a few days ago, as I packed her books and photos and other personal things for her move, my mother studied the sheet music—books upon books of Chopin, Beethoven and Liszt—that she had played as a young woman in British Guiana. Then suddenly her fingers moved across the score on her lap, as though on a piano keyboard. Dexterous, ageless, precise fingers, as she hummed the melodies, held her breath and raised her hands at rests, counting beats, starting again in arpeggios.

My mother is in touch with the invisible.

Every day of the year that I couldn’t go back to Toronto, she would laugh as she picked up the phone. When I asked her what was so funny, she would tell me that I had some kind of radar and always called just when she was doing something she wasn’t supposed to do, like taking out the garbage without putting on gloves, or putting things in the wrong recycling bin.

Her laughter is viral.

On a recent call she’d been laughing so hard she couldn’t speak, and it was contagious. I began giggling too, and we giggled until both of us were convulsing on our respective sides of the Atlantic. When we started to breathe properly again, she told me she was laughing because she knew that the thing she had been staring at before I called was important, but for the life of her she couldn’t remember what it was. The more she stared at it, there on the table beside her bed, the more she got the giggles. Why was this small object on a cord so necessary? She described the thing for me—fits in the palm of your hand and has a button, and a cord to wear like a necklace.

The thing that had sent my mother into a fit of laughter was her medical alarm. I took a breath. My mother is laughing to death, I thought. I wanted to learn how to do that: to loosen like skin, hair, teeth, arpeggios, crimson leaves and time, and still get the giggles.

Instead, I am combustible with facts. Books are piled high beside my bed and writing desk, and I read into the night and for large portions of the day. Articles upon articles, blogs, scientific papers—on trees, on mushroom networks, on dis­appearing species, on oceans, on neurobiology, on prayer and what to do in a crisis. I need to hold onto facts as they slip away from my mother.

She has learned invisible lessons from the cycling of the leaves. Those on the silver birch before me now on the forest path, waiting for the sun to make them shimmer, have a forbearance I want to learn. If we feel we are connected to plants in their company, it’s because they have neurotransmitters not unlike our own. These leaves are a comfort to me as I make sense of loss.