You say house and wood falls over you like a cloak, your passion becomes windows. You say home and all memories gather.
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.