Charlotte Gill's memoir of treeplanting, Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber and Life with the Tree Planting Tribe (Greystone, 2011) was shortlisted for the Charles Taylor Prize [See below] and then won the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize in 2012 [See below] and the 2012 Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award from the Canadian Booksellers Association, judged by independent booksellers and presented at the 2012 Libris Awards in Toronto. It also received the B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.
According to the National Post, "Gill was a tree planter for 17 years, first in Ontario, then in British Columbia; she estimates she has planted one million trees. Today, she teaches in the University of B.C.'s online creative writing program from her new home in Powell River, but she says she misses tree planting every day."
Ladykiller (Thomas Allen, 2005), her first collection of short stories, received the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and the Danuta Gleed Award in 2006. It was also a finalist for the Governor General's Award.
Born in London, England, and raised in the United States and Canada, Charlotte Gill is a UBC creative writing graduate whose work has appeared in Best Canadian Stories, The Journey Prize Stories, and many Canadian magazines, and has been broadcast on CBC Radio. Her non-fiction has been nominated for Western and National Magazine Awards.
Gill's father is Indian and her mother is English. They met in 1960s London, married and had three children. The family left England for North America hoping to leave behind the prejudice against interracial love as Gill relates in Almost Brown: A Mixed-Race Family Memoir (Viking $36 h.c.). Seeking the dream of life, liberty and happiness tears the family apart and results in a divorce, many grudges and decades of not communicating. Eventually Gill and her father reconnect.
Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe
Almost Brown: A Mixed-Race Family Memoir
by Charlotte Gill (Viking $36)
Review by Odette Auger (BCBW 2023)
Stacking filters of culture and personality creates a vignette effect, a technique Charlotte Gill employs when she explores themes of identity in Almost Brown. Gill’s father is the main subject of the vignette and the central theme that other threads wrap around.
Gill introduces her father in an extreme close-up, like an absorbed child watching a sleeping parent. She has reconciled with him after decades of estrangement. Moving into a slow pan of the detritus of her elderly father’s life, the sensation is like watching someone taking stock of a home, as Gill pores over her father’s house where he lives alone. In one poignant moment, she describes the “arsenal of medication on the south end of the coffee table.”
Drawing the reader in through a growing intimacy, Gill’s memoir unravels with a journal-like inventory of places, relations, interactions and roles. She holds her mother’s English Catholic upbringing in one hand and her father’s Jat Sikh heritage in the other. “In my family, we seldom talked about race,” writes Gill. “Our house was a refuge, the place where we could be ourselves, a unit, without differences and unevenness.” Though, when Gill reaches her teens, distinctions do arise in how she is treated differently from her brother—from fetching drinks for her dad, to a sharper eye on how she dresses.
Gill examines cultural disparities and similarities ranging from spiritual beliefs to communication and parenting styles. “From my dad, I’ve learned … what’s the point of lamenting one’s losses and setbacks if misfortune, just like happiness, springs from a divine source, the will of God? Put on a brave face! Suffer in style! This emotional restraint aligned very well with the British stiff upper lip.”
In the sixth chapter, a broader scope is introduced when Gill gives a concise history of how the partition of India has had intergenerational impacts on her family’s journey. With life chapters in India, Nairobi, Toronto and New York state, Gill includes the forks in that path such as when her father marries her white mother and her grandfather disassociates from them. A sense of loss seeps into the story. “It seemed like an unyielding way to be,” writes Gill of her grandfather. “But we didn’t know his heart. I didn’t know his history, the places he’d come from, all that he’d seen and done.” Her own father never mentions his youth in Kenya, and all events before his medical school training in the UK are muted.
And then Gill faces the disorienting responses from other people. “What are you?” is a question she faced many times and mixed-race readers of every kind will recognize the wide-ranging intentions, from friendly curiosity to toothy malice. Throughout, Gill shares the experiences she had at different ages and her different capacities for understanding. “They knew precisely what question to ask, almost right from the start. Why did I have dark circles around my eyes? Why were my lips purple and not pink? I began to see myself through other peoples’ eyes,” writes Gill.
Not wanting to “see colour” can be viewed as a survival strategy, an attempt to move above prejudice and distinctions. Gill describes it succinctly, through the ways of her English mother who “never mentioned skin tone or race—not hers, ours, or our father’s. ‘I only saw you as mine,’ she says even now.” As a mixed-race reader, I recognize this mom, whose ability to rise above such prejudice set the benchmark. It’s admirable, and perhaps even a convenient conditioning, to sidestep ugliness and uncomfortable truths. This led to a disconnect for Gill: “I lived semi-gratefully in the gap, if not purely Caucasian, then sufficiently off-white to be lumped in with my peers in the majority. I didn’t protest or correct.” Gill describes sun tanning with her white friends, applying sunscreen needlessly. “It took me quite a while to realize that I wasn’t a white girl, at least not all the way through—a painfully slow epiphany that wouldn’t resolve for quite some time, if it ever did at all.”
Undercurrents are unspoken and curious children will seek truths in their own way. “We destroyed our things almost as quickly as they came in the door,” says Gill. “We cut them to ribbons, hungry to understand how things worked beneath the surface.” Similarly, children will also express discord in one way or another, and Gill and her siblings were no different. “We ripped heads off dolls and bashed our Rubik’s cubes with hammers. These objects were inadequate substitutes for the things they were meant to make up for,” writes Gill. “We macerated our belongings as a form of protest, a response to something brewing in our house like a bad ferment, if only we had the words to describe it.”
Gill grows up to claim those words, and in this memoir, she includes details that she later revisits to get a clearer view; a watchful tone is a constant presence in her writing. As a young girl, Gill notes her father’s weekends away in passing. These absences, however, are made concrete when she later describes her mother sifting through the family credit card statements. Secrets are uncovered and her parents separate; after their divorce, a deepening silence emerges between Gill and her father.
Her own path bends firmly away from his expectations—pursuing degrees in writing, not health sciences and spending summers tree planting, as shared in her second book, Eating Dirt (Greystone Books in association with the David Suzuki Foundation, 2011). Gill’s family has always been on the move, and similarly, her individual path circles back to a deeper and new understanding of her mother and father. By the end of the book, Gill has disentangled the differences and disconnections in her family story with the fine-tuned focus required to unravel knots. 9780735243033
Odette Auger, a member of Sagamok Anishnawbek through her mother, lives as a guest in toq qaym ɩxʷ (Klahoose), ɬəʔamɛn qaymɩxʷ (Tla’amin), ʔop qaymɩxʷ (Homalco) territories. She was recently awarded first place for Best Environmental Coverage by the Native American Journalism Association (NAJA), along with two awards in Best Column (second place) and Best Feature category (third place).
BOOKS:
Ladykiller (Thomas Allen, 2005)
Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber and Life with the Tree Planting Tribe (Greystone Books in association with the David Suzuki Foundation, 2011). (Cloth ISBN 978-1-55365 977-8, Ebook ISBN 978-1-55365-793-4, $29.95) Paperback, (Greystone Books in association with the David Suzuki Foundation, 2012) $19.95 978-1-55365-792-7
Almost Brown: A Mixed-Race Family Memoir (Viking, 2023) $36 h.c. 9780735243033
[BCBW 2023]
According to the National Post, "Gill was a tree planter for 17 years, first in Ontario, then in British Columbia; she estimates she has planted one million trees. Today, she teaches in the University of B.C.'s online creative writing program from her new home in Powell River, but she says she misses tree planting every day."
Ladykiller (Thomas Allen, 2005), her first collection of short stories, received the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and the Danuta Gleed Award in 2006. It was also a finalist for the Governor General's Award.
Born in London, England, and raised in the United States and Canada, Charlotte Gill is a UBC creative writing graduate whose work has appeared in Best Canadian Stories, The Journey Prize Stories, and many Canadian magazines, and has been broadcast on CBC Radio. Her non-fiction has been nominated for Western and National Magazine Awards.
Gill's father is Indian and her mother is English. They met in 1960s London, married and had three children. The family left England for North America hoping to leave behind the prejudice against interracial love as Gill relates in Almost Brown: A Mixed-Race Family Memoir (Viking $36 h.c.). Seeking the dream of life, liberty and happiness tears the family apart and results in a divorce, many grudges and decades of not communicating. Eventually Gill and her father reconnect.
Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe
Almost Brown: A Mixed-Race Family Memoir
by Charlotte Gill (Viking $36)
Review by Odette Auger (BCBW 2023)
Stacking filters of culture and personality creates a vignette effect, a technique Charlotte Gill employs when she explores themes of identity in Almost Brown. Gill’s father is the main subject of the vignette and the central theme that other threads wrap around.
Gill introduces her father in an extreme close-up, like an absorbed child watching a sleeping parent. She has reconciled with him after decades of estrangement. Moving into a slow pan of the detritus of her elderly father’s life, the sensation is like watching someone taking stock of a home, as Gill pores over her father’s house where he lives alone. In one poignant moment, she describes the “arsenal of medication on the south end of the coffee table.”
Drawing the reader in through a growing intimacy, Gill’s memoir unravels with a journal-like inventory of places, relations, interactions and roles. She holds her mother’s English Catholic upbringing in one hand and her father’s Jat Sikh heritage in the other. “In my family, we seldom talked about race,” writes Gill. “Our house was a refuge, the place where we could be ourselves, a unit, without differences and unevenness.” Though, when Gill reaches her teens, distinctions do arise in how she is treated differently from her brother—from fetching drinks for her dad, to a sharper eye on how she dresses.
Gill examines cultural disparities and similarities ranging from spiritual beliefs to communication and parenting styles. “From my dad, I’ve learned … what’s the point of lamenting one’s losses and setbacks if misfortune, just like happiness, springs from a divine source, the will of God? Put on a brave face! Suffer in style! This emotional restraint aligned very well with the British stiff upper lip.”
In the sixth chapter, a broader scope is introduced when Gill gives a concise history of how the partition of India has had intergenerational impacts on her family’s journey. With life chapters in India, Nairobi, Toronto and New York state, Gill includes the forks in that path such as when her father marries her white mother and her grandfather disassociates from them. A sense of loss seeps into the story. “It seemed like an unyielding way to be,” writes Gill of her grandfather. “But we didn’t know his heart. I didn’t know his history, the places he’d come from, all that he’d seen and done.” Her own father never mentions his youth in Kenya, and all events before his medical school training in the UK are muted.
And then Gill faces the disorienting responses from other people. “What are you?” is a question she faced many times and mixed-race readers of every kind will recognize the wide-ranging intentions, from friendly curiosity to toothy malice. Throughout, Gill shares the experiences she had at different ages and her different capacities for understanding. “They knew precisely what question to ask, almost right from the start. Why did I have dark circles around my eyes? Why were my lips purple and not pink? I began to see myself through other peoples’ eyes,” writes Gill.
Not wanting to “see colour” can be viewed as a survival strategy, an attempt to move above prejudice and distinctions. Gill describes it succinctly, through the ways of her English mother who “never mentioned skin tone or race—not hers, ours, or our father’s. ‘I only saw you as mine,’ she says even now.” As a mixed-race reader, I recognize this mom, whose ability to rise above such prejudice set the benchmark. It’s admirable, and perhaps even a convenient conditioning, to sidestep ugliness and uncomfortable truths. This led to a disconnect for Gill: “I lived semi-gratefully in the gap, if not purely Caucasian, then sufficiently off-white to be lumped in with my peers in the majority. I didn’t protest or correct.” Gill describes sun tanning with her white friends, applying sunscreen needlessly. “It took me quite a while to realize that I wasn’t a white girl, at least not all the way through—a painfully slow epiphany that wouldn’t resolve for quite some time, if it ever did at all.”
Undercurrents are unspoken and curious children will seek truths in their own way. “We destroyed our things almost as quickly as they came in the door,” says Gill. “We cut them to ribbons, hungry to understand how things worked beneath the surface.” Similarly, children will also express discord in one way or another, and Gill and her siblings were no different. “We ripped heads off dolls and bashed our Rubik’s cubes with hammers. These objects were inadequate substitutes for the things they were meant to make up for,” writes Gill. “We macerated our belongings as a form of protest, a response to something brewing in our house like a bad ferment, if only we had the words to describe it.”
Gill grows up to claim those words, and in this memoir, she includes details that she later revisits to get a clearer view; a watchful tone is a constant presence in her writing. As a young girl, Gill notes her father’s weekends away in passing. These absences, however, are made concrete when she later describes her mother sifting through the family credit card statements. Secrets are uncovered and her parents separate; after their divorce, a deepening silence emerges between Gill and her father.
Her own path bends firmly away from his expectations—pursuing degrees in writing, not health sciences and spending summers tree planting, as shared in her second book, Eating Dirt (Greystone Books in association with the David Suzuki Foundation, 2011). Gill’s family has always been on the move, and similarly, her individual path circles back to a deeper and new understanding of her mother and father. By the end of the book, Gill has disentangled the differences and disconnections in her family story with the fine-tuned focus required to unravel knots. 9780735243033
Odette Auger, a member of Sagamok Anishnawbek through her mother, lives as a guest in toq qaym ɩxʷ (Klahoose), ɬəʔamɛn qaymɩxʷ (Tla’amin), ʔop qaymɩxʷ (Homalco) territories. She was recently awarded first place for Best Environmental Coverage by the Native American Journalism Association (NAJA), along with two awards in Best Column (second place) and Best Feature category (third place).
BOOKS:
Ladykiller (Thomas Allen, 2005)
Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber and Life with the Tree Planting Tribe (Greystone Books in association with the David Suzuki Foundation, 2011). (Cloth ISBN 978-1-55365 977-8, Ebook ISBN 978-1-55365-793-4, $29.95) Paperback, (Greystone Books in association with the David Suzuki Foundation, 2012) $19.95 978-1-55365-792-7
Almost Brown: A Mixed-Race Family Memoir (Viking, 2023) $36 h.c. 9780735243033
[BCBW 2023]
Articles: 3 Articles for this author
Danuta Gleed Award
Press Release (2006)
The Writers' Union of Canada and John Gleed are pleased to announce that Charlotte Gill is the recipient of the $10,000 DANUTA GLEED LITERARY AWARD for Ladykiller (Thomas Allen Publishers). Judged the best first English-language collection of short fiction by a Canadian author published in 2005.
The Judges Greg Hollingshead, Dave Margoshes and Judith McCormack said of their first choice, "Ladykiller, is a startling collection of stories that explores some of the darker undercurrents of urban existence. Charlotte Gill's characters - reckless, restless, predatory, self-destructive and stuck in relationships and situations they don't know they've chosen - inhabit a bleak emotional landscape where being angry is the only way they can feel anything at all as they inch towards disaster, unable to stop themselves. Gill writes with skill, flare and a certain hard precision, producing mercurial prose. This is a striking debut.";
The DANUTA GLEED LITERARY AWARD is given in celebration of the life of Danuta Gleed, a writer whose short fiction won several awards before her death in December 1996. Danuta Gleed's first collection of short fiction, One of the Chosen, was posthumously published by BuschekBooks. The Award is made possible through a generous donation from John Gleed; founder of JetForm Inc., in memory of his late wife, and is administered by The Writers' Union of Canada.
For more information, visit www.writersunion.ca.
Eating Dirt shortlisted for the 2012 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction
Press Release (2012)
Vancouver, BC - January 10, 2012. Greystone Books is delighted to announce that Charlotte Gill's Eating Dirt (Greystone Books in association with the David Suzuki Foundation, Cloth ISBN 978-1-55365-977-8, Ebook ISBN 978-1-55365-793-4, $29.95) has been shortlisted for the 2012 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction.
Jurors Stevie Cameron and Susan Renouf made the announcement on behalf of the three-person jury (which also includes Allan M. Brandt) and read the citation they wrote about Charlotte Gill's book:
"Only a writer as skilled as Charlotte Gill could make the back-breaking work of planting more than a million seedlings sound like one of life's essential adventures. In a carefully balanced story of science, business and friendship, and one that is surprisingly unsentimental, Gill shares her love for Canada's boreal forests, the tragedy of their disappearances and the grueling work involved in replacing them. Reader, you might finish this book feeling relieved you don't plant trees -- but you will be wishing you could.";
The other four finalists announced by the prize jurors are: Wade Davis, author of Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest, published by Alfred A. Knopf Canada; JJ Lee, author of The Measure of a Man: The Story of a Father, a Son, and a Suit, published by McClelland & Stewart; Madeline Sonik, author of Afflictions & Departures: Essays, published by Anvil Press; and Andrew Westoll, author of The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary: A Canadian Story of Resilience and Recovery, published by HarperCollins Publishers. The prize consists of $25,000 for the winner and $2,000 for each of the runners up. The winning book will be announced on Monday, March 5th 2012.
About Eating Dirt: Charlotte Gill offers up a slice of tree-planting life in all of its soggy, gritty exuberance, while questioning the ability of conifer plantations to replace original forests that evolved over millennia into complex ecosystems. She looks at logging's environmental impact and its boom-and-bust history, and touches on the versatility of wood, from which we have devised countless creations as diverse as textiles and airplane parts.
Eating Dirt also eloquently evokes the wonder of trees, which grow from a tiny seed into one of the world's largest organisms, our slowest-growing "renewable"; resource. Most of all, the book joyously celebrates the priceless value of forests and the ancient, ever-changing relationship between humans and trees.
Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize
Prfess Release (2012)
Vancouver, BC - May 14, 2012. Greystone Books is delighted to announce that Charlotte Gill's Eating Dirt (Greystone Books in partnership with the David Suzuki Foundation, Cloth ISBN 978-1-55365-977-8, Ebook ISBN 978-1-55365-793-4, $29.95) has won the 2012 Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize.
Established in 1985 to celebrate British Columbian writers and publishers, the B.C. Book Prizes are administered by the West Coast Book Prize Society. Winners were announced on Saturday, May 12, 2012 at SFU Woodwards, Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, Vancouver. Each category winner was rewarded with a prize of $2,000.
About Eating Dirt: Charlotte Gill spent twenty years working as a tree planter in the forests of Canada. During her million-tree career, she encountered hundreds of clearcuts, each one a collision site between human civilization and the natural world, a complicated landscape presenting geographic evidence of our appetites. Charged with sowing the new forest in these clear-cuts, tree planters are a tribe caught between the stumps and the virgin timber, between environmentalists and loggers. In Eating Dirt, Gill offers up a slice of tree-planting life in all of its soggy, gritty exuberance, while questioning the ability of conifer plantations to replace original forests that evolved over millennia into complex ecosystems. She looks at logging's environmental impact and its boom-and-bust history, and touches on the versatility of wood, from which we have devised countless creations as diverse as textiles and airplane parts. Eating Dirt also eloquently evokes the wonder of trees, which grow from a tiny seed into one of the world's largest organisms, our slowest-growing "renewable"; resource. Most of all, the book joyously celebrates the priceless value of forests and the ancient, ever-changing relationship between humans and trees.