Down to This
Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown
For some young men, climbing Everest or sailing solo into polar seas isn’t the biggest risk in the world. Instead it is venturing alone into the deepest urban jungle, where human nature is the dangerous, incomprehensible and sometimes wildly uplifting force that tests not only your ability to survive but also your own humanity.
One cold November day, Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall heads out on just such a quest. He packs up a new tent, some clothes, his notebooks and a pen and goes to live in Tent City, twenty-seven lawless acres where the largest hobo town on the continent squats in the scandalized shadow of Canada’s largest city. The rules he sets for himself…
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March 8, 2005Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall's first book was an account of the year he spent in deep cover, living with the homeless in Toronto's infamous Tent City. Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown was nominated for the 2005 Pearson Writers' Trust of Canada Non-Fiction Prize, the Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize, the Trillium Award and the City of Toronto Book Award. The following year, he was awarded the Knowlton Nash Journalism Fellowship at Massey College and also played the role of Jason - a bad-mannered, well-dressed journalist - on CBC-TV's The Newsroom. He currently teaches writing at the University of Toronto's School of Continuing Studies. Ghosted is his first novel.
Ghosted
Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall