Dear Current Occupant

CHELENE KNIGHT is the author of the memoir Dear Current Occupant, winner of the 2018 Vancouver Book Award. Her novel, Junie, won the 2023 City of Vancouver Book Award, andwas longlisted for the inaugural Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and shortlisted for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction. Her essays have appeared in many literary journals and newspapers, including The Globe and Mail and The Walrus. Knight is the founder of Breathing Space Creative. Born and raised in Vancouver, she now lives in Harrison Hot Springs, British Columbia.

"From Vancouver-based writer Chelene Knight, Dear Current Occupant is a creative nonfiction memoir about home and belonging set in the 80s and 90s of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Using a variety of forms including letters, essays and poems, Knight reflects on her childhood through a series of letters addressed to all of the current occupants now living in the twenty different houses she moved in and out of with her mother and brother. From blurry non-chronological memories of trying to fit in with her own family as the only mixed East Indian/Black child, to crystal clear recollections of parental drug use, Knight draws a vivid portrait of memory that still longs for a place and a home. Peering through windows and doors into intimate, remembered spaces now occupied by strangers, Knight writes to them in order to deconstruct her own past. From the rubble of memory she then builds a real place in order to bring herself back home."