The two words in the title of Tessa McWatt’s latest book do a lot of work for seven letters. 

The Snag: A Mother, A Forest and Wild Grief (Random House Canada, available now) is the second work of nonfiction from the London-based author of seven novels and two books for young people. Written while she was increasingly alarmed by the state of the climate at the same time as her mother developed dementia and was unable to continue living on her own, The Snag is an exploration of how to exist in this difficult moment, globally, and how learning to grieve can ultimately allow us to continue to live. 

McWatt insisted on calling this book The Snag, over the initial objections of her publisher, for its multifaceted meaning. A snag can be many things: in common usage, it is a hitch or complication, but in the forest, it is an aging tree that in the final stages of its life cycle is an integral part of the forest’s communication network and a source of life. In The Snag, McWatt also uses it as a metaphor for an elder, and often one in particular – her mother. 

When asked which meaning she had in mind for the title, McWatt doesn’t hesitate. “All of it. All of it in all its ambiguity,” she says, speaking via video from her home in London last month. “My publishers at first thought, there’s no way that you can have that title, but I really dug in, and I won.”

The book is similarly multifaceted. It is a story about confronting the changing stages of life, as McWatt travels back and forth between the United Kingdom and Canada to support her family as they grapple with the change in their mother’s living situation. This personal story is accompanied by others from McWatt’s life over this time period and the years preceding it, including the deaths of her father and of two friends – more sources of personal loss and grief. But the personal dovetails with a larger story about the collective grief of humanity as the climate crisis continues to make its presence known with forest fires, devastating heatwaves, droughts, floods, and melting ice sheets. 

There was an urgency that compelled McWatt to write both The Snag, her second work of nonfiction, and Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging, her first entry in the genre (which was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award and the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction). But unlike Shame on Me, which she felt compelled to write to remedy her exclusion from the broader societal conversations about race, The Snag began as a project propelled by a need, as she puts it, to expose certain truths and facts about the climate. Because of the speed with which climate change was revealing these truths and facts, however, the project changed. 

“All of a sudden we were in [climate] crisis in the press, and so I thought, no, whatever I need to say is about a post-apocalyptic thing,” McWatt says. “When it’s all done, what are we going to do? We can’t stop this. This is what will happen. … And that’s where the grief came in.”

Faced with difficult moments of loss on the personal and collective scale, McWatt turns to and finds solace in the forest. Black-and-white photographs of trees, taken by the author herself, punctuate the book’s pages. Always captivated by the forest as a child, from time spent outdoors camping with her family, McWatt’s fascination with trees was heightened during the pandemic and its lockdowns. 

Walks in the woods got her thinking more about the different types of trees that comprised it, and in her extensive reading about forests, she came upon the snag. 

“Forest snags – the oldest trees, those that look nearly dead, the gnarled, pocked, twisted bodies of wood – are responsible for the most important communication in the forest of whispers,” she writes. “Old trees emit chemical signals to younger ones. They are the key sources of fungal connections that regenerate seedlings. They send warning signs, help others through sickness, pass on wisdom for survival. They are the mother trees.”

McWatt, whose Instagram handle is @snagsforlife, sees in the snag, and in her mother, an example of how to continue living with hope and resilience in the face of ever-increasing personal and global challenges. 

And that’s what she hopes readers take from her latest work. We are all, collectively, in a moment of grief because of our heating planet whether we realize it or not, she says. Acknowledging and feeling the grief is a necessary step to be able to move on from it. 

“Without grieving, there’s no love or action. There’s no next step. You just get stuck in the grief,” McWatt says. 

She turns again to the example of her mother, who, now 91, has been living in a care home for a year. 

“Because she is learning how to survive and thrive and yet die, [my mother] has become a metaphor for the way to live in the rest of the world that is so difficult. I was completely worried about her, but she’s been the example of resilience,” she says. “She’s a model for me, like the snag – she’s a snag.” 

Living long enough and presently enough to become a snag, choosing to continue living, come what may – that is an ambitious life goal.