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"'I've always felt that the term fairy tale doesn't quite capture the essence of these stories,' writes Emily Urquhart. 'I prefer the term wonder tale, which is Irish in origin, for its suggestion of awe coupled with narrative. In a way, this is most of our stories.' In this startlingly original essay collection, Urquhart reveals the truths that underlie our imaginings: what we see in our heads when we read, how the sight of a ghost can heal, how the entrance to the underworld can be glimpsed in an oil painting or a winter storm--or the onset of a loved one's dementia. In essays on death and dying, pregnancy and prenatal genetics, psychics, chimeras, cottagers, and plague, Ordinary Wonder Tales reveals the essential truth: if you let yourself look closely, there is magic in the everyday."
List of contents
The Matter
Lessons for Female Success
Chimera
Ordinary Wonder Tales
Child Unwittingly Promised
Giving up the Ghost
Nuclear Folklore
The Plague Legends
Adrift
Years Thought Days
Notes
Acknowledgements
About the author
Emily Urquhart is a journalist with a doctorate in folklore. Her award-winning work has appeared in
Longreads,
Guernica, and
The Walrus, and elsewhere, and her first book was shortlisted for the Kobo First Book Prize and the BC National Award for Canadian Nonfiction. Her most recent book,
The Age of Creativity: Art, Memory, my Father and Me, was listed as a top book of 2020 by CBC,
NOW Magazine and
Quill & Quire. She is a nonfiction editor for
The New Quarterly and lives in Kitchener, Ontario.
Summary
Shortlisted for the 2023 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction
A journalist and folklorist explores the truths that underlie the stories we imagine—and reveals the magic in the everyday.
“I’ve always felt that the term fairy tale doesn’t quite capture the essence of these stories,” writes Emily Urquhart. “I prefer the term wonder tale, which is Irish in origin, for its suggestion of awe coupled with narrative. In a way, this is most of our stories.” In this startlingly original essay collection, Urquhart reveals the truths that underlie our imaginings: what we see in our heads when we read, how the sight of a ghost can heal, how the entrance to the underworld can be glimpsed in an oil painting or a winter storm—or the onset of a loved one’s dementia. In essays on death and dying, pregnancy and prenatal genetics, radioactivity, chimeras, cottagers, and plague, Ordinary Wonder Tales reveals the essential truth: if you let yourself look closely, there is magic in the everyday.
Foreword
- Print run: 5,000
- Co-op available
- Advance reader copies
- Edelweiss digital review copies
- North American TV & radio campaign
- Online and social media campaign and giveaways.
- Excerpts in LitHub, Electric Lit
- Key audience outreach: feminist interest and media, folklore associations
Additional text
Praise for Beyond the Pale
“[Urquhart] isn’t afraid to make the personal political, to delve into her particular experience while also acknowledging its limits and investigating what lies beyond them. Urquhart’s as interested in championing individuality as she is in embracing our shared humanity. But she never shies away from the fact that cherishing both can be a knotty, contradictory affair.”
—Globe & Mail
“A courageous and ambitious book. Beyond the Pale offers an intimate account about raising a daughter with albinism, a lucid portrait of related genetic, medical and social issues, and a disturbing reminder of the brutal violence that many people with albinism continue to face today.”—Lawrence Hill, author of The Book of Negroes and Blood: The Stuff of Life
“A brave, thoughtful, clear, and always graceful journey through the terrifying randomness of genetics and the unexpected ways genetic anomalies can mark not just children, but all the lives around them.”
—Ian Brown, author of The Boy in the Moon: A Father’s Search for his Disabled Son
“A graceful, perceptive rendering of a misunderstood condition.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Folklorist Urquhart writes poetically and movingly about her daughter … readers will weep and smile.”
—Booklist
