Free to a Good Home

At turns poignant, hilarious and uncannily familiar, Free to a Good Home explores what it means to call a place home when life oddly mirrors a choose-your-own-adventure storybook. At eighteen, with $1,000 in her bank account, she moved to the West Coast from Ontario to find “her people.” She headed specifically to Davie Street—that’s where all the gays were! Finding a girlfriend proved to be elusive, but she learned a lot of Pet Shop Boys lyrics and studied everything by Jane Rule and Chrystos for guidance. 

Torti continued searching. Whether prepping chimpanzees breakfast in the Congo, searching for her own breakfast in the dumpsters of Vancouver’s back alleys or seeking a permanent address in Ontario’s unforgiving real estate market—with many other worldly adventures in between—Torti found that homesickness took up its own residence in her identity. While she longed for a home of bricks and mortar (or log or stone), she knew her greatest sense of home was to be found in a person, the missing her. 

Jules Torti

Jules Torti's work has been published in the Vancouver Sun, the Globe and Mail, Mabuhay, Coast Mountain Culture Magazine, Matador Network, Massage Therapy Canada, and Canadian Running. She contributes regularly to Realtor’s blog Living Room and is currently the editor in chief of Harrowsmith magazine. Her first handsome paycheck was for a lesbian erotica story, published in The Mammoth Book of Erotica (Running Press, 2000). She now lives happily ever after with her partner on the forty-fifth parallel north, exactly half way between the equator and the North Pole, in Lion’s Head, Ontario.