In Sixteen Homes, Catherine Owen pulls together the ideas, words and images that surround our understanding of home and housing. Asking questions about transience and about how long it takes to set down roots, Owen set out not to write a memoir but to reflect on a society that has priced many out of their home cities. Moving between diary entries, essays, poetry and photographs, Owen shares her path from her struggles with housing as a young mother to the security she now feels. From her parents’ purpose-built home in Vancouver – co-owned with another family – to Delilah – the century-old house she now owns in Edmonton – Sixteen Homes moves through the many places Owen has lived, considering what these types of experiences mean for our ideas of belonging. All along she invites the reader to consider what it is that turns a house into a home and who it is that gets to have one.

In 2021, a friend invites Sharon Butala to join her on a road trip — together they will drive the thirteen hundred kilometers from Calgary to Winnipeg, stopping as they please along the way. Sharon, relieved for a change of scenery during the isolating pandemic years, is keen to see again some of the locations that have been significant to her life on the prairies, including the ranch she lived on for thirty-three years with her husband before his death. But along the way, the sites they visit — landmarks of Indigenous history, places where her ancestors struggled to eke out a living — prompt Sharon to unearth her own personal history. She sifts through memories of a difficult childhood, of traumas deeply buried, of relationships both complicated and gratifying. Taking stock of the people and places she has lost and left behind brings her to the ultimate confrontation — with mortality — which she explores with uncommon wisdom and frankness. Her most intimate work to date, Butala’s How to Breathe Water is a love letter to the lands and waters of the prairies and a stirring exploration of the places and moments that mark and mold our lives.