As mentioned in my Canada haul post, I chose Ordinary Wonder Tales (2022) by Emily Urquhart after looking through all the books in a bookshop that had ‘Canadian author’ or ‘Canadian press’ slips in the top of them. This one turned out to be both, published by Biblioasis which, like Emily Urquhart, is based in Ontatio.
Well, I’m so glad I picked out Ordinary Wonder Tales – I thought it was a fantastic book, and exactly the sort of thing I love: an essay collection that skilfully combines personal memoir with the author’s particular expertise. In this case, that is folklore – Urquhart has a doctorate in folklore, and a wide-ranging knowledge of examples from around the world. Better still, she is excellent at explaining them in an accessible way, filled with curiosity.
In each essay, Urquhart takes incidents from her own life, and the contemporary world more broadly, and intertwines it with folklore from the centuries. It is such a brilliant idea for giving depth and intrigue to stories which would be interesting on their own. For example, in ‘Lessons for Female Success’, she recounts different experiences she has had of violent men – most surreally, being tasked with removing the graffittied name of a serial killer from bunkbeds as a camp counsellor, alongside equally shocking but more common interactions with male violence:
He took my hand in a strong and painful grip. I pulled away, hard, and freed myself. The white mitten that I’d been wearing fell to the ground. I felt a rush of air, as if a sudden gust of wind had blown from the shadows behind me. I turned slightly to see a blur of movement. It was a second man running towards me from an opposite shadowy corner than the first. I wondered if I had been screaming and if the man was coming to my rescue. He was not. He threw me to the ground with a full-body slam. My tailbone bore the initial impact of my fall. Then, the back of my skull hit the pavement. I heard a high-pitched ringing in my ears. I struggled, kicked, and bit, but the men overpowered me. I had two thoughts in quick succession: first, I thought I might die. Second, I thought, No, my voice will save me. By then I could hear myself screaming. I didn’t know if I was using words in English or Ukrainian or Russian or if I was shrieking into the abyss. I thought I was saying, “No, no, no.” I might have been asking, “Why?”
In another instance in this essay, Urquhart and her friend are flashed by man waiting in an alleyway – and the shock of that moment is compounded by the unsympathetic dismissal by police officers. Even when another police officer later apologises for this dismissiveness, it puts the weight of it back onto her: “I guess what I’m asking is, do you want him to apologize to you in person, or in writing, or what? Do you want this man to lose his job? He’s got a family, but, you know, if that’s what you want.” Alongside her own experiences, this essay explores Child ballads – a collection of 305 British sung poems, collected by 19th-century folklorist Francis James Child and drawn from four centuries before that.
I first encountered them in graduate school and was immediately taken by their imagery and gory drama. The action in these tales is present-tense and immediate, the past a vague and unmentioned country. The stories focus on a central event and begin at the height of the tension – an incident that is, almost always, sexually violent. These are sorrowful songs where women are raped, punished to death for loving the wrong man, abducted by vicious relatives and strangers, and burned at the stake for affairs of the heart. The narrator never editorializes; she offers the story but no analysis or comment.
It’s interesting that Urquhart mentions that lack of editorialising, because the same thing strikes me about her own writing too. Urquhart’s approach to memoir is always restrained. She tells us what happens, she explains how she felt, but she knows that the stories do not need grandstanding conclusions. We can conclude for ourselves. Nor does she draw unduly heavy-handed comparisons between the folklore and the aspects of memoir. Obviously there are some comparisons, but mostly she reveals these simply by telling the stories of her life and of centuries of tradition alongside each other. They interweave, with Urquhart’s pacing expertly flowing from one to the other. It shows how her experiences are simultaneously deeply personal and eternal.
Another chapter explores Urquhart’s experience of pregnancy – including the devastation of miscarriage, as well as giving birth to her two children. Alongside her experiences of antenatal care (or perhaps ‘care’), she tells the story of a miller’s daughter who is inadvertently promised to the devil, and her continuing attempts to escape him – and the violence she experiences because of it. It is so compelling, even when the comparisons are less direct. The stories, alongside each other, give such richness and pain and significance to each other.
It’s hard to single out the most moving or thought-provoking sections – I don’t have space to tell you about chapters concerning her father’s dementia (brilliantly told alongside folklores of ‘years become days’ where someone goes to the underworld or another world for a short period and returns to find many years have past), or plague legends told alongside her Covid experiences, or the long shadow of radiation, or (the weakest in the collection in my opinion, and the first, which doesn’t give the best sense of the book) hauntings in her childhood home. But I’ll end with an essay that hit me hardest, since it concerns her brother.
After he died, I began to see my brother with surprising frequency. These appearances were not ghostlike apparitions, nor were they dreams. Instead, I saw him in the bodies of strangers. He was waiting for the traffic light to turn so he could cross at a busy intersection. A man tipped his hat skyward to read a street sign and my brother’s face hovered beneath the brim. He was the token collector at the subway entrance, the lone soup-eater in the basement food court of a downtown shopping mart.
Her accounts of her relationship with Marsh and his sad, premature death are somehow all the more moving because they were not closely bonded siblings. There is nuance and generosity to her examination of their relationship and his abbreviated life, related alongside bereavement hallucinations – not seeing spectres, but seeing your loved ones’ faces in other people’s. They are common and largely unspoken, and I found Urquhart’s exploration of them very poignant – partly because they seemed to bridge a distance that had existed in their actual knowledge of each other. It’s another example of Urquhart using honesty as a tool that gives depth and detail, rather than simply exposure.
Urquhart has such a fascinating slant on the world. I think Ordinary Wonder Tales would have been an excellent, immersive, resiliently honest collection if it simply included her autobiographical experiences. Incorporating the folklore elements makes it something really special. It shows the long, long history of humanity, and of making narrative from human (often women’s) lives, as a background to one individual’s most poignant, intriguing or traumatic moments. Each essay is so cleverly structured, and with such artistic restraint that amplifies the power of each account. I long to read more by Urquhart in the same vein, and urge you to seek it out – if you’re in Canada, that’ll be pretty easy. If, like me, you suffer the misfortune not to live in Canada, then I hope you’ll manage to track it down nonetheless.
