In reading and thinking about Best Canadian Essays 2025, edited by Emily Urquhart, I sought not only to understand Urquhart’s selections but also to explore the meaning of the essay as a literary form. What makes an essay “Canadian?” and why does this matter? 

This collection — curated by Urquhart after a year of careful reading, rereading, and arranging — occupies a space between identity, experience, and self-discovery. The themes may not be new, but by weaving personal narratives of Canadians into the collective consciousness, each essay amplifies a distinct voice; tells a story; and transforms the ordinary into something novel through an infusion of personality. 

In an interview with The Varsity, Urquhart — editor of nonfiction for The New Quarterly and a sessional lecturer in communication in the sciences at the University of Waterloo — explained how the ending to Robert Penn Warren’s long poem Audubon: A Vision, referenced in the collection’s introduction, influenced her editorial approach. “A boy, stood / By a dirt road, in first dark, and heard / The great geese hoot northward… Tell me a story / In this century, and moment, of mania,” the poem reads. 

Urquhart describes how Warren’s poem guided the collection toward recurring themes of landscape, mania, and story. As I read the selection, I was struck by how these motifs drew me into a quiet sense of wonder at how the best essays balance truth and conceit equally to convince and affect. I found that every choice in the collection served a larger truth — or at least a version of it — a glimpse into the elusive, often passive mental mindscape we call Canada.

Transience, place, and the self

One of the anthology’s standouts — Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s strikingly brief essay, “The Breathing Lands” — encapsulates a confluence of style, argument, and idea. Simpson addresses a second-person, ‘you,’ taking inventory of a shared, fraught and misaligned intimacy before using language to dissolve that connection, ultimately propelling herself toward “the Breathing Lands,” a place I interpreted as being northwards in contrast to the tortured ‘other’ who “went South, back to your revolution.” 

Urquhart, in acknowledging the essay’s profound poetics and its complex grief over the separation from a loved one, explained how “place” — in the context of Canada, as both a physical location and idea — is a matter of perspective, coming from all over the world or “from the ground beneath your feet.” This theme of transience also emerges in the collection: contemplating the temporariness of our relationships, the impermanence of place without the people we love, and the evolving nature of self.

This relationship between place and identity similarly appears in Mitchell Consky’s “Notes from Grief Camp,” where Consky — working at a summer camp for grieving children after his father’s passing — attempts to guide both them and himself to “find solace in the outdoors.” There is an interesting game of “the north wind blows,” — which I interpreted as self-referential to the larger ethos of the collection — pain shared, the recognition of happiness inside the intensity of grief, and the acceptance that “togetherness makes sorrow easier to bear.” 

Writing as mediation and negotiation

Certain people and spaces illuminate despair and alchemize it through writing as a mode of negotiation. 

When Consky leans against a cedar, he unravels first before being lifted by a “lightness.” Similarly, when Ariel Gordon leans against an old elm in “Rotten,” she reflects, “Maybe life is just standing as close as you can to a tree. Feeling connected to the world, for however long you’ve both got.” Here the pain from a cervix “rotten” with HPV, the anxiety surrounding book launches, and “climate-changed heat stress” are softened. 

In the collection’s first essay, Helen Humphreys’ “The Boiler Room,” a sudden silence in friendly conversation uncovers a hidden history of sexual abuse. Through writing, Humphreys relives and relieves this trauma, emerging with a deeper appreciation for her innocence and the limit beyond which the passive nature of the artist’s mind makes room for trespass. James Cairns, in “My Struggle and ‘My Struggle,’” uses writing and reading like tunnels leading to another side of himself, revisiting a tumultuous mid-life crisis against the looming spectre of death. 

In this collection, under the notion of transience and the fleeting nature of things, reading and writing mediate between the permanent and the ephemeral.

In Rebecca Kempe’s “The ‘Beauty’ of My Existence,” a pointed critique of the pressures placed on Black writers to produce work focused on their racial identity, the collection reaches a complex turning point. In turning away from writing as a subject to bring the conventions of Canadian publishing under critique, Kempe’s essay challenges the commodification of identity politics in Canadian publishing. What makes Kempe’s essay compelling is that it could easily fall into the very trap it criticizes by engaging with identity-based narratives in order to challenge them. Writing identity-based as resistance can inadvertently turn a writer into a token, presenting them as a “mouthpiece.” Yet, Kempe, ever self-aware, chooses to disrupt this by centring the body of her 11th grade self. 

This essay carries an earnest absurdity similar to Tom Rachman’s “Confessions of a Literary Schlub,” which humorously critiques the oddity of selling books in an era where being a good writer is no longer enough; writers must also be effective influencers. 

Children and Childhood

As in Kempe’s piece, the most undeniable marvel of Best Canadian Essays 2025 is the exploration of themes about and around children and childhood. Kempe mightily disturbs publishing conventions by tracing the fetishization of identity back to her experiences as a gifted Black child. Humphreys offers an affecting and unsettling examination of her girlhood, and how it was consumed as a human resource for pleasure. 

Michelle Cyca, in “Big Babies” challenges anti-child sentiment in public spaces, where babies are resented as much for crying as for laughing too loudly. Similarly, Vance Wright’s “Birth Stories, Adoption, and Myths” delves into the trauma of severance in the child adoption process, critiquing the social expectation of gratitude imposed on adopted children. 

In Best Canadian Essays 2025, the child emerges as both a symbol and a catalyst for reflection, subtly guiding the readers toward a more inclusive, compassionate, and vivid future. From the boy in Warren’s poem to the essays that centre on childhood perspectives, children serve as poignant reminders of humanity’s potential and the need for collective care in this century and moment of mania. Urquhart’s thoughtful curation challenges Canada to honour its young so that future generations can live freely — not as disruptions but as integral contributors to an evolving narrative. It is reconciliation foregrounded in a history of systemic harm to children. Through its exploration of place, identity, and community, the anthology gestures “northward” to a Canada rooted in renewal, responsibility, and hope — a signal we all ought to follow.