May 2026
“Attentive to the writing life as both vocation and burden, Mom Camp traces reading and writing under pressure—false starts, subtle recalibrations, and moments of personal growth that unfold quietly across social life, family bonds, friendships, marriage, and sex. “I read a book by a woman who knows something will happen to her one day, and look: it does. She says she let herself happen.” In this debut, Véronique Darwin asks what it means to narrate a life, what it costs to hold competing selves at once, and how writing itself takes shape through the slow, intimate work of becoming. A debut of patience and emotional precision.”
Sheung-King, author of Batshit Seven
“Véronique Darwin’s Mom Camp is a generous exploration of womanhood in its many forms. Its stories—about everything from deep platonic friendships to the intricacies of parenting with a partner—are deeply strange, well-observed, and often laugh-out-loud funny. A remarkable debut from a writer to watch.”
Gabrielle Drolet, author of Look Ma, No Hands
“Véronique Darwin’s kaleidoscopic debut collection of stories shimmers with tenderness and comic grace. With clear-eyed precision and a taste for the absurd dressed up in plain clothes, Mom Camp’s dynamic cast of female leads bubbles over with funny, earnest questions about what it means to live each day in search of one’s truest self. Part fantasy dollhouse, part summer camp romp, part expansive blackbox theatre experiment—Darwin has created here something deeply courageous and loving. These stories are wiser than they know.”
Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross, author of The Longest Way to Eat a Melon
““Step inside the world of Mom Camp, a place both startlingly familiar and uncannily strange. Véronique Darwin’s debut is confident and perceptive about the lives women lead, or perhaps imagine they do. This is a charming, inventive, and funny collection that explores the infinite complexities of motherhood, sisterhood, and female identity.””
Alix Ohlin, author of We Want What We Want
“With playfulness and sparkling wit, Mom Camp stages investigations into identity and intimacy. In these stories, women gather—at camp, at a monastery retreat, in an art class—to parse who they are and where they belong. These are fictions of containment and eruption, where labels miss the mark, narratives grow holes, and forms are made to be broken. In this confident debut, Véronique Darwin locates magic in the messy particulars of existence; Mom Camp is a work of keen perception and vitality.”
Marisa Grizenko, writer of the Plain Pleasures newsletter
“‘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, author of Code Noir, judge of the Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence, on the story “Mom Camp”
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 empty-handed. 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.
Words:
Véronique 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.