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Ordinary Wonder Tales: Essays
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, psychics, chimeras, cottagers, and plague, Ordinary Wonder Tales reveals the essential truth: if you let yourself look closely, there is 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, psychics, chimeras, cottagers, and plague, Ordinary Wonder Tales reveals the essential truth: if you let yourself look closely, there is magic in the everyday.
240 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2022
21 people are currently reading
834 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 54 reviews
November 13, 2022
Beautiful prose, well researched but never boring. This was a wonderful book.
February 18, 2023
The beginning was a crawl, but by the end of the book I appreciated the world building that the beginning was. Some of the pregnancy chapters made me so uncomfortable and I think that’s a testament to her writing. The last half was so beautiful ahhh. I tried to start it at Christmas but didn’t and ate it on my flight from Halifax to Toronto in 2 hours.
May 20, 2023
I really wanted to love this collection of personal essays more than I actually did. As a huge fan of her mother, my expectations were set very high but aside from the first chapter about childhood and the belief in wonders, this collection fell a little flat for me.
Sadly I found myself often bored/uninterested as I listened to this book on audio read by someone other than the author. Did that make a difference, maybe? Overall I found the book a little too academic and less heartfelt than I was hoping for, even though there were chapters on pandemic life and parenting. It was a miss for me unfortunately.
Sadly I found myself often bored/uninterested as I listened to this book on audio read by someone other than the author. Did that make a difference, maybe? Overall I found the book a little too academic and less heartfelt than I was hoping for, even though there were chapters on pandemic life and parenting. It was a miss for me unfortunately.
December 20, 2022
Probably my favorite book of the year.
December 12, 2023
This book completes my reading goal for 2023 and was a nice way to finish. This set of essays focuses on the author's life while combining what she knows about her area of expertise, a doctorate in folklore. I enjoyed her stories which highlight Canadian events and also learned more about the history of fairy tales, which she prefers to call wonder tales. She elevates magical thinking and noticing the supernatural, more accepted by children and older people. It's certainly a unique novel and I can understand why it's getting critical attention but it won't be for everyone.
October 10, 2022
Once upon a time — which is often how magical tales begin — in a previous century when I was a reluctant young scholar, on many a Friday afternoon my English teacher uttered words that drove an icicle into my chest and froze my bay-boy heart: “For weekend homework, write an essay …”
Write an essay!
For frig sake, woesome words to hear, eh b’ys?
Yet, in this no-longer-brand-new century, here I am scribbling a half-arsed essay of sorts, remarking on a collection of essays — Ordinary Wonder Tales [Biblioasis].
Imagine that.
Dare I say, in those long ago, far, far away fairy tale times, part of the burden of composing an essay was handling a theme? Teacher’s voice — “…write an essay on the theme…”.
B’ys, oh b’ys.
(Emily my duck, forgive me if I err about the unifying theme of the essays in Wonder Tales.)
An aside: At Mr. Google’s house I inquired about the gods of writing. I discovered…well, discovered Thoth, a Greek deity favoring writers/(essayists), a god often depicted as “a man with the head of a baboon.”
Baboon head! ‘Nuff said, eh b’ys?
It would be silly of me to scribble something as lame as — ‘Here I am, a monkey’s descendant — nephew? — scribbling…”
So, I won’t. Aside finished.
The theme of Wonder Tales is — maybe — while we humans are partly the magical stuff of stardust, we are also partly the accumulated stuff of the tales we’ve heard, of the tales we tell: (“We tell ordinary wonder tales every day.”)
Am I even close?
Wonder tales frequently feature demons, be they firey-gobbed dragons or malevolent ink blots shaped like stingrays.
In “The Matter,” the shuff-off essay in this collection, a young girl sees an ominous dark glob seeping in from a high corner of her bedroom.
I have seen that demon darkness a thousand times —
I lie in bed staring at the ceiling. Suddenly — yes, suddenly, poof! — a black mass emanating unadulterated evil appears up in a corner and slowly spreads and sinks towards me until…
…well, I suppose if it blanketed me, smothered me, I’d be a goner. The Devil — as Granny used to say — would have me by the laps of the arse.
“Giving Up the Ghost” reminds many —most? — of us that some of our magical “stuff” is ghost stories.
Call them what you will — wraiths, tokens, spirit omens — collectively ghosts (and ghost tales) are as commonplace as sunsets. Sadly though, I fear most of us are not wired to see them.
Once upon another time I had an old landlady who walked casually among all manner of ghosts from the time she was a young girl living with her granny whose bedroom was haunted.
“Some nights,” my landlady said, “Nan’s room filled with a smell of lavender (What’s with spooks and lavender?) and a young maid appeared at the foot of the bed. She was Aunt Alice who died at age fourteen.”
Not so spooky. Just Aunt Alice, sure.
If ghosts are “hugs” — wandering souls — as Scandinavian fabled folklore suggests (so says author Urquhart), my dear old landlady risked being squeezed to death.
Speaking of hugs, physical hugs, humans heaving their arms around each other in intimate embrace…
…the Covid Pandemic altered their nature, perhaps forever. We learned to shun even a friendly squeeze. We pantomimed hugs through window glass.
Maybe, in the future when youngsters of the Pandemic say “Once upon a time,” added to their stardust and other fantastic stuff will be wonder tales stemming from Pandemic times. (Or am I miles off theme? Should I get out more often?)
Once upon a time, when a disease akin to a biblical plague spread through the land, there was a king whose portentous edict said beware of hugs (!) for they will bring you doom.”
Last words: an archaic definition of essay is “to try.”
B’ys, you know I do.
Thank you for reading.
Write an essay!
For frig sake, woesome words to hear, eh b’ys?
Yet, in this no-longer-brand-new century, here I am scribbling a half-arsed essay of sorts, remarking on a collection of essays — Ordinary Wonder Tales [Biblioasis].
Imagine that.
Dare I say, in those long ago, far, far away fairy tale times, part of the burden of composing an essay was handling a theme? Teacher’s voice — “…write an essay on the theme…”.
B’ys, oh b’ys.
(Emily my duck, forgive me if I err about the unifying theme of the essays in Wonder Tales.)
An aside: At Mr. Google’s house I inquired about the gods of writing. I discovered…well, discovered Thoth, a Greek deity favoring writers/(essayists), a god often depicted as “a man with the head of a baboon.”
Baboon head! ‘Nuff said, eh b’ys?
It would be silly of me to scribble something as lame as — ‘Here I am, a monkey’s descendant — nephew? — scribbling…”
So, I won’t. Aside finished.
The theme of Wonder Tales is — maybe — while we humans are partly the magical stuff of stardust, we are also partly the accumulated stuff of the tales we’ve heard, of the tales we tell: (“We tell ordinary wonder tales every day.”)
Am I even close?
Wonder tales frequently feature demons, be they firey-gobbed dragons or malevolent ink blots shaped like stingrays.
In “The Matter,” the shuff-off essay in this collection, a young girl sees an ominous dark glob seeping in from a high corner of her bedroom.
I have seen that demon darkness a thousand times —
I lie in bed staring at the ceiling. Suddenly — yes, suddenly, poof! — a black mass emanating unadulterated evil appears up in a corner and slowly spreads and sinks towards me until…
…well, I suppose if it blanketed me, smothered me, I’d be a goner. The Devil — as Granny used to say — would have me by the laps of the arse.
“Giving Up the Ghost” reminds many —most? — of us that some of our magical “stuff” is ghost stories.
Call them what you will — wraiths, tokens, spirit omens — collectively ghosts (and ghost tales) are as commonplace as sunsets. Sadly though, I fear most of us are not wired to see them.
Once upon another time I had an old landlady who walked casually among all manner of ghosts from the time she was a young girl living with her granny whose bedroom was haunted.
“Some nights,” my landlady said, “Nan’s room filled with a smell of lavender (What’s with spooks and lavender?) and a young maid appeared at the foot of the bed. She was Aunt Alice who died at age fourteen.”
Not so spooky. Just Aunt Alice, sure.
If ghosts are “hugs” — wandering souls — as Scandinavian fabled folklore suggests (so says author Urquhart), my dear old landlady risked being squeezed to death.
Speaking of hugs, physical hugs, humans heaving their arms around each other in intimate embrace…
…the Covid Pandemic altered their nature, perhaps forever. We learned to shun even a friendly squeeze. We pantomimed hugs through window glass.
Maybe, in the future when youngsters of the Pandemic say “Once upon a time,” added to their stardust and other fantastic stuff will be wonder tales stemming from Pandemic times. (Or am I miles off theme? Should I get out more often?)
Once upon a time, when a disease akin to a biblical plague spread through the land, there was a king whose portentous edict said beware of hugs (!) for they will bring you doom.”
Last words: an archaic definition of essay is “to try.”
B’ys, you know I do.
Thank you for reading.
February 7, 2023
That last essay...wow.
December 20, 2022
|| ORDINARY WONDER TALES ||
#gifted/@biblioasis_books
✍🏻
This book was completely spellbinding! I first discovered Urquhart a couple years ago when I read her book THE AGE OF CREATIVITY, it floored me, so when I saw she had written a new book I couldn't wait to read it and I was not dissapointed. Through personal stories she delves into the wonder and sense of magic that can be found in our everyday lives. With natural and supernatural elements this collection moved me in to look at situations through a different lense. I cannot reccomend this book and author enough!
For more of my book content check out instagram.com/bookalong
#gifted/@biblioasis_books
✍🏻
This book was completely spellbinding! I first discovered Urquhart a couple years ago when I read her book THE AGE OF CREATIVITY, it floored me, so when I saw she had written a new book I couldn't wait to read it and I was not dissapointed. Through personal stories she delves into the wonder and sense of magic that can be found in our everyday lives. With natural and supernatural elements this collection moved me in to look at situations through a different lense. I cannot reccomend this book and author enough!
For more of my book content check out instagram.com/bookalong
May 18, 2023
As the name would suggest, Ordinary Wonder Tales set out to be an exploration of wonder tales and how they then parallel to Emily Urquhart’s ordinary life. Although the tales themselves never fail to attract and enchant, the inevitable attempts at parallels almost always ended up being forced, dull and not as insightful as I would have liked from a well-researched folklorist. All in all, an ambitious prompt that stranded in an insufficient narrative.
January 1, 2024
This is my platonic ideal of a book of essays, in which the author writes about an area of expertise intertwined with stories of her own life. The writing was stunning, and I have been on a bit of a fairytale/folklore kick recently so this was doubly compelling. My standout chapters were Ordinary Wonder Tales and Child Unwittingly Promised
August 26, 2023
I read this book last week in Algonquin park. I read this book beside a crackling fire and used it to fan the flames. I read this book after Lu and I surprised a moose on a riverbank and ran half laughing half screaming into the forest. I read this book while a lone wolf stood in our dark campsite. I read this book while listening to the rain on canvas. Thanks to @kimfahner who somehow manages to put the right books into my hands at the right time. It is a book I will gift to so many special people.
“a beautiful ode to both the natural world and the supernatural one, and all of the ways in which our human hearts traverse the space between these special places.”
Get this book and take it into the forest.
“a beautiful ode to both the natural world and the supernatural one, and all of the ways in which our human hearts traverse the space between these special places.”
Get this book and take it into the forest.
October 10, 2023
I loved these essays, which were mind-opening, personal and beautifully written. Like mother, like daughter!
May 14, 2024
3 1/2
September 19, 2023
At first glance, Ordinary Wonder Tales by Emily Urquhart may seem like a book appealing to only academics. It’s a book of essays, a notoriously challenging genre that rarely hits the bestseller list unless it’s written by a celebrity or David Sedaris, but this collection focuses on a somewhat obscure topic too; folklore. However I had read reviews written by Urquhart before, so I knew she was a good writer, and her mother is the famous Canadian novelist Jane Urquhart (writing talents are inherited, right?) thus my decision to pick up this book was an easy one. I knew it wouldn’t be a thrilling page-turner, but I also knew I would likely enjoy it and learn something too. I’m happy to report it was a good choice, and I’d like to recommend this one to other thoughtful readers looking for a pleasant reading challenge.
Book Summary
Ten essays comprise this slim collection of non-fiction essays. Each story begins with a little drawing by fantastic illustrator Byron Eggenschwiler, who has also illustrated an adorable children’s book I reviewed here. The essays all include memories or stories from Urquhart’s personal life interspersed with her research on folklore; its patterns, definitions, examples, and modern-day research and interpretation of these stories and why they are still in existence today. The first essay titled “The Matter” is about a haunted bedroom in a rented house in France that Urquhart slept in when she was three years old. As an adult and academic, she returns to this memory and tracks down others who slept in that room before and after her, interviewing them and asking if they recall the same spirits she did. Here, she spools out into wider theories of haunted narratives in addition to a recent story of bringing it up on a playdate and scaring another parent’s child with her belief in ghosts. “Chimera” is the tale of her miscarriage, but also of the superstitions women used to engage in before modern medicine, the rituals and talismans utilized to ward off evil spirits and keep an unborn child safe. My favourite essay, “Years Thought Days” is about the slow decline of her father into dementia, but also the malleability of memory, and the common mythology of supernatural time narratives that see heroes disappear for different periods of time in parallel worlds. Many of her personal narratives involve memories of lockdown in the pandemic with two young kids, which as a mother of young kids myself, was a perspective I appreciated reading about.
My Thoughts
What elevates this book from good to great is Urquhart’s impressive ability to link interesting stories from her own life (emphasis on interesting) to a theory or fact she wants to discuss around folklore. As I mentioned above, it’s an obscure topic, a quirky one that may appeal to some, but the inclusion of her own life stories are what propelled me through this book, so I was more than happy to stop every few paragraphs to learn about some fascinating folklore research. And she excels at both; the research is clearly well done and thorough, a wide range of people and sources are quoted, but only in short amounts so it was never overwhelming; just enough to prove a point or elaborate on a point Urquhart had already made. It was the perfect balance between personal narrative and scholarly anecdotes.
Religion is very lightly touched upon in this book, although I would have thought folklore was basically another way of labelling what people find in religious texts so I was bit surprised it didn’t play a larger role. Regardless, in “Giving up the Ghost” which is a story about her brother dying, she does acknowledge the fact that many people believe in superstitions and legends, yet those beliefs are seen as ‘weird’, when people’s religious beliefs (also based on superstitions and legends) are somehow acceptable:
“I might believe in fairies and you might believe in God and another person might think both ideas are ridiculous, but in matters of faith, who is to say which of us is right or wrong? The difficulty inherent in metaphysical experiences is that believing in God is acceptable in North American society but seeing your dead brother at the dog park is considered taboo and strange, possibly pathological.”
-p.126 of Ordinary Wonder Tales by Emily Urquhart, ARC edition
So much of folklore is still a mystery, including why it still persists today despite our incredible advances in technology and science. But as Urquhart suggests, these unknowns are what colour our life, it’s what adds the ‘wonder’ to our ordinary existence. Her thoughtful analysis and warm storytelling work together to create a fantastic read, no matter what your belief system.
To read the rest of my reviews, please visit my blog:
https://ivereadthis.com/
Sign up for my newsletter here: https://ivereadthis.com/subscribe/
Or follow me on social media!
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Ivereadthis/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCD6E...
Book Summary
Ten essays comprise this slim collection of non-fiction essays. Each story begins with a little drawing by fantastic illustrator Byron Eggenschwiler, who has also illustrated an adorable children’s book I reviewed here. The essays all include memories or stories from Urquhart’s personal life interspersed with her research on folklore; its patterns, definitions, examples, and modern-day research and interpretation of these stories and why they are still in existence today. The first essay titled “The Matter” is about a haunted bedroom in a rented house in France that Urquhart slept in when she was three years old. As an adult and academic, she returns to this memory and tracks down others who slept in that room before and after her, interviewing them and asking if they recall the same spirits she did. Here, she spools out into wider theories of haunted narratives in addition to a recent story of bringing it up on a playdate and scaring another parent’s child with her belief in ghosts. “Chimera” is the tale of her miscarriage, but also of the superstitions women used to engage in before modern medicine, the rituals and talismans utilized to ward off evil spirits and keep an unborn child safe. My favourite essay, “Years Thought Days” is about the slow decline of her father into dementia, but also the malleability of memory, and the common mythology of supernatural time narratives that see heroes disappear for different periods of time in parallel worlds. Many of her personal narratives involve memories of lockdown in the pandemic with two young kids, which as a mother of young kids myself, was a perspective I appreciated reading about.
My Thoughts
What elevates this book from good to great is Urquhart’s impressive ability to link interesting stories from her own life (emphasis on interesting) to a theory or fact she wants to discuss around folklore. As I mentioned above, it’s an obscure topic, a quirky one that may appeal to some, but the inclusion of her own life stories are what propelled me through this book, so I was more than happy to stop every few paragraphs to learn about some fascinating folklore research. And she excels at both; the research is clearly well done and thorough, a wide range of people and sources are quoted, but only in short amounts so it was never overwhelming; just enough to prove a point or elaborate on a point Urquhart had already made. It was the perfect balance between personal narrative and scholarly anecdotes.
Religion is very lightly touched upon in this book, although I would have thought folklore was basically another way of labelling what people find in religious texts so I was bit surprised it didn’t play a larger role. Regardless, in “Giving up the Ghost” which is a story about her brother dying, she does acknowledge the fact that many people believe in superstitions and legends, yet those beliefs are seen as ‘weird’, when people’s religious beliefs (also based on superstitions and legends) are somehow acceptable:
“I might believe in fairies and you might believe in God and another person might think both ideas are ridiculous, but in matters of faith, who is to say which of us is right or wrong? The difficulty inherent in metaphysical experiences is that believing in God is acceptable in North American society but seeing your dead brother at the dog park is considered taboo and strange, possibly pathological.”
-p.126 of Ordinary Wonder Tales by Emily Urquhart, ARC edition
So much of folklore is still a mystery, including why it still persists today despite our incredible advances in technology and science. But as Urquhart suggests, these unknowns are what colour our life, it’s what adds the ‘wonder’ to our ordinary existence. Her thoughtful analysis and warm storytelling work together to create a fantastic read, no matter what your belief system.
To read the rest of my reviews, please visit my blog:
https://ivereadthis.com/
Sign up for my newsletter here: https://ivereadthis.com/subscribe/
Or follow me on social media!
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Ivereadthis/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCD6E...
May 5, 2023
I picked this up right after I finished The Snow Child (which is a folktale retelling) as I was in the mood for more folklore and wow did this deliver. Emily Urquhart is a journalist and folklorist and she melds her personal narrative and elements of folklore so seamlessly it really makes you keen to find the magic in every day life. She begins the essay collection with her experience with a ghost that visited her in a house they lived at temporarily as a child, moves on to pregnancy, loss, the pandemic and brings it around each time to different elements of folklore like doors to the underworld, chimeras, psychics and more that can exist side by side our own reality, if we want to see it, believe in it. I found the mix of memoir, her folklorist studies and reflections on our world and experience just pitch perfect. This is exactly what I want to experience when I reach for a book of essays and if you’re at all interested in folklore, folktale retellings or unique spins on personal memoir—this might be for you, too.
January 18, 2023
Ordinary Wonder Tales is an exquisite collection of essays by Emily Urquhart. Urquhart is a folklorist, editor and journalist. She is also the talented daughter of two well-known Canadian creatives – Jane and Tony Urquhart, a small background detail that is only relevant in that it helps to explain the thoughtful blend of academia and creativity so evident in her approach to the material. Urquhart addresses story-telling as a way of understanding the world around us. The stories we tell ourselves often integrate our personal experiences with tropes drawn from folklore and legend.
These essays examine a collection of memories that include some of life’s most difficult and most tender moments. Paired with Urquhart’s understanding of creativity, memory and belief, she elevates tiny shards of life and holds them up for our study and reflection.
Drawing upon legend, folklore and magic, Urquhart reveals the workings of our hearts and memories with compassion and deep insight. Her essays are replete with important life details, as she writes movingly about the loss of her brother, an ectopic pregnancy, infertility, parenting and Alzheimer’s. This is a rare and accomplished collection. Highly recommended.
These essays examine a collection of memories that include some of life’s most difficult and most tender moments. Paired with Urquhart’s understanding of creativity, memory and belief, she elevates tiny shards of life and holds them up for our study and reflection.
Drawing upon legend, folklore and magic, Urquhart reveals the workings of our hearts and memories with compassion and deep insight. Her essays are replete with important life details, as she writes movingly about the loss of her brother, an ectopic pregnancy, infertility, parenting and Alzheimer’s. This is a rare and accomplished collection. Highly recommended.
December 29, 2022
Folklorist Emily Urquhart lives up to the promise of her book’s title, injecting wonder into to subject matter that may seem ‘ordinary.’ Her collection of essays, which form a memoir of sorts, juxtapose Urquhart’s personal experiences with ghost stories and other legends and folktales. This marriage of theme and form creates a reading experience that goes beyond simple essays, broadening the audience of the book.
For many readers who might chose fiction over essays, Urquhart’s collection provides a satisfying compromise. These tales are wondrous and haunting, written in a beautifully descriptive style, drawing upon centuries’ worth of storytelling traditions. Fans of short stories, folk tales and memoir will all find plenty to love in this collection.
For many readers who might chose fiction over essays, Urquhart’s collection provides a satisfying compromise. These tales are wondrous and haunting, written in a beautifully descriptive style, drawing upon centuries’ worth of storytelling traditions. Fans of short stories, folk tales and memoir will all find plenty to love in this collection.
March 4, 2025
Read about half the book. Probably would have finished if I didn't recently decide to be more selective with my time reading. So little time..
July 12, 2024
Emily Urquhart is a Kitchener-based journalist and folklorist, which is to say, she is more than unusually interested in stories and how stories are told. Not only that, but she is the daughter of novelist Jane Urquhart and painter Tony Urquhart, so she grew up watching artists tell stories for a living.
Ordinary Wonder Tales, Urquhart’s third book of non-fiction, takes readers through the milestones in her life, from childhood to middle-age, while also introducing the legends and folk tales we’ve elaborated to help understand those milestones.
This book brings to mind Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work, which explores episodes in the Potawatomi scientist’s life where her Indigenous heritage and her botanist training intersect and where they diverge. The result is fascinating. Similarly, Urquhart’s combination of personal essays and folk tales allows her to recount the specifics of her life in quiet but moving prose but also to note how and why her experiences are universal, a part of a heritage of stories.
The book opens with Urquhart recounting the family story of the apparition — an “inky fluid mass” — that sometimes appeared in her borrowed bedroom in the village of Flavigny-sur-Ozergain in the Burgundy region of France when she was three. Urquhart was staying there because her father Tony was on sabbatical from teaching fine art and had borrowed the house from a colleague, as had other colleagues and friends. In the essay, Urquhart interviews the other children who stayed in that haunted bedroom, but also talks about the studies on the ability of young children to believe in almost anything and the key differences between a ghost story (or “personal haunting narrative”) and a fairy tale.
As the narrator of Ordinary Wonder Tales ages, so do her stories. The next essay recounts Urquhart’s experiences with sexual violence, comparing them not only with old European ballads but also the TV show Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. The ballads constitute a kind of horrible warning for women about abuse, rape and murder whereas SVU posited a world where women reporting sexual violence were treated with respect and dignity.
Next come the stories of a woman of child-bearing age: losing a child, having dubious encounters with the medical profession, having a child with a genetic condition and then deciding to have another child. These are bloody essays, but Urquhart’s way of thinking/feeling her way through the things that happened to herself and her loved ones, her way of turning them into stories, protects the reader.
The last part of the book focuses on the coronavirus pandemic and the history of plague tales, but also her father’s descent into dementia and the nature of memory.
Urquhart has treated the diagnosis of her daughter’s albinism in her first book, Beyond the Pale: Folklore, Family, and the Mystery of our Hidden Genes (2015), and her father’s Alzheimer’s disease in The Age of Creativity: Art, Memory, My Father and Me (2020), but these essays add to that material instead of re-treading it.
Beyond telling stories about stories, Urquhart does something else interesting in Ordinary Wonder Tales: she sets the fairy tales she is recounting in places she knows intimately. So that house in France reappears when she needs a starting place for a hero. Later, a maiden finds sanctuary on the banks of the Skeena River in British Columbia where Urquhart camped when she was pregnant with her second child. Urquhart notes that this interior decorating is completely involuntary: “What flickers to life in my mind’s eye as I read or listen to a story comes unbidden. I could no more conjure them on purpose than I could stop them from appearing.” Still, it’s a neat trick.
Ordinary Wonder Tales is a quietly charming book about all the ordinary tragedies in a life. Urquhart’s essays help us understand the stories we tell ourselves, while also being satisfying as stories themselves.
(This review appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press's Books Section on February 12, 2022.)
Ordinary Wonder Tales, Urquhart’s third book of non-fiction, takes readers through the milestones in her life, from childhood to middle-age, while also introducing the legends and folk tales we’ve elaborated to help understand those milestones.
This book brings to mind Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work, which explores episodes in the Potawatomi scientist’s life where her Indigenous heritage and her botanist training intersect and where they diverge. The result is fascinating. Similarly, Urquhart’s combination of personal essays and folk tales allows her to recount the specifics of her life in quiet but moving prose but also to note how and why her experiences are universal, a part of a heritage of stories.
The book opens with Urquhart recounting the family story of the apparition — an “inky fluid mass” — that sometimes appeared in her borrowed bedroom in the village of Flavigny-sur-Ozergain in the Burgundy region of France when she was three. Urquhart was staying there because her father Tony was on sabbatical from teaching fine art and had borrowed the house from a colleague, as had other colleagues and friends. In the essay, Urquhart interviews the other children who stayed in that haunted bedroom, but also talks about the studies on the ability of young children to believe in almost anything and the key differences between a ghost story (or “personal haunting narrative”) and a fairy tale.
As the narrator of Ordinary Wonder Tales ages, so do her stories. The next essay recounts Urquhart’s experiences with sexual violence, comparing them not only with old European ballads but also the TV show Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. The ballads constitute a kind of horrible warning for women about abuse, rape and murder whereas SVU posited a world where women reporting sexual violence were treated with respect and dignity.
Next come the stories of a woman of child-bearing age: losing a child, having dubious encounters with the medical profession, having a child with a genetic condition and then deciding to have another child. These are bloody essays, but Urquhart’s way of thinking/feeling her way through the things that happened to herself and her loved ones, her way of turning them into stories, protects the reader.
The last part of the book focuses on the coronavirus pandemic and the history of plague tales, but also her father’s descent into dementia and the nature of memory.
Urquhart has treated the diagnosis of her daughter’s albinism in her first book, Beyond the Pale: Folklore, Family, and the Mystery of our Hidden Genes (2015), and her father’s Alzheimer’s disease in The Age of Creativity: Art, Memory, My Father and Me (2020), but these essays add to that material instead of re-treading it.
Beyond telling stories about stories, Urquhart does something else interesting in Ordinary Wonder Tales: she sets the fairy tales she is recounting in places she knows intimately. So that house in France reappears when she needs a starting place for a hero. Later, a maiden finds sanctuary on the banks of the Skeena River in British Columbia where Urquhart camped when she was pregnant with her second child. Urquhart notes that this interior decorating is completely involuntary: “What flickers to life in my mind’s eye as I read or listen to a story comes unbidden. I could no more conjure them on purpose than I could stop them from appearing.” Still, it’s a neat trick.
Ordinary Wonder Tales is a quietly charming book about all the ordinary tragedies in a life. Urquhart’s essays help us understand the stories we tell ourselves, while also being satisfying as stories themselves.
(This review appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press's Books Section on February 12, 2022.)
April 6, 2023
The cover caught my attention on the recent releases display at the library, so I didn't really know what I was getting into when I started this one. I misunderstood the title and thought they were fairy tales in every day life or everyday life told in fairy tales. I'm not sure where that assumption came from.
What the book contains is a series of essays by the author about her memories and regular life events, and weaves into them some of the ways the themes or concepts intersect with folklore, which is her literary expertise/research area. None of the essays really has anything profound to depart. The topics they deal with, and even her writing style and narrative approach is ordinary, as the title suggests. Yet the essays held my attention and I was interested. For me, it was a bit like reading a well-crafted diary or journal. "Here's this aspect of my life, and here's a folklore tale that relates" or "this theme is also represented in folklore" with an emphasis on the contemporary, not the folklore. Folklore is the lightly woven thread through the essays, the "schtick" if you will. The essays are really about the author's experiences. And for me, they worked.
I kept thinking of Sarah Polley's Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory, but this essay collection is likely more relatable to Canadian women's experiences, and Sarah Polley's is a bit more exceptional (as in, unusual). This one has the volume on low, that one has it louder. I enjoyed reading both.
What the book contains is a series of essays by the author about her memories and regular life events, and weaves into them some of the ways the themes or concepts intersect with folklore, which is her literary expertise/research area. None of the essays really has anything profound to depart. The topics they deal with, and even her writing style and narrative approach is ordinary, as the title suggests. Yet the essays held my attention and I was interested. For me, it was a bit like reading a well-crafted diary or journal. "Here's this aspect of my life, and here's a folklore tale that relates" or "this theme is also represented in folklore" with an emphasis on the contemporary, not the folklore. Folklore is the lightly woven thread through the essays, the "schtick" if you will. The essays are really about the author's experiences. And for me, they worked.
I kept thinking of Sarah Polley's Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory, but this essay collection is likely more relatable to Canadian women's experiences, and Sarah Polley's is a bit more exceptional (as in, unusual). This one has the volume on low, that one has it louder. I enjoyed reading both.
June 24, 2025
A beautiful wrap-around cover design & a jacket description that sold me, but overall didn’t quite hit the promises. This is a collection of ten essays combining brief elements of folktales the author references as “wonder tales” amid her own research & life. Urquhart is a Canadian journalist with a doctorate in folklore. This collection was written during Covid, which is woven into the essays. There are explorations of memory, loss, parenting, & some supernatural possibilities. My favorite is by far the final piece titled “ Years Thought Days” about her father’s descent into dementia (told with deep understanding, compassion, & even wonder) & “Giving Up the Ghost” was a tenderly honest discussion about losing her brother (whom she barely got to know). A few others were somewhat interesting, but half were pretty dull, & I struggled to get through them.
Quotes:
“We will continue to carry our talismans, whisper our prayers, & chant our incantations, but ultimately human beings hold no sway over the natural world.”
-“Bereavement ravages your mind. Logic slips. You mourn your loss—the person you knew & the one you invented, & eventually, as the years pass, they fuse into the same being.”
-“Dementia is characterized by forgetting but it’s also a long period of remembering, a return, it seemed, of people and ideas that have been important to you over your lifetime.”
Quotes:
“We will continue to carry our talismans, whisper our prayers, & chant our incantations, but ultimately human beings hold no sway over the natural world.”
-“Bereavement ravages your mind. Logic slips. You mourn your loss—the person you knew & the one you invented, & eventually, as the years pass, they fuse into the same being.”
-“Dementia is characterized by forgetting but it’s also a long period of remembering, a return, it seemed, of people and ideas that have been important to you over your lifetime.”
September 12, 2023
What a pleasant surprise from a book I picked up at random from the library!
I like how the author parallels events from her own life with fables, fairy tails, legends and “wonder tales.” Her descriptions imbue ordinary things with a dreamy surreal quality while still landing an emotional impact - ranging from paranormal experiences, grief, parenting, dementia, grief and environmental degradation, to illness.
One of the most apt titles I’ve ever encountered. I picked it up because some friends in my writing group are integrating extraordinary experiences into their prose. I thought they may find Urquhart’s book instructive. I surmised correctly and will recommend this book highly.
(A caveat is that I’d give it 4.5. There’s a bit of clarity lacking about the timeline for a contaminated site, but it’s a very minor concern.)
I like how the author parallels events from her own life with fables, fairy tails, legends and “wonder tales.” Her descriptions imbue ordinary things with a dreamy surreal quality while still landing an emotional impact - ranging from paranormal experiences, grief, parenting, dementia, grief and environmental degradation, to illness.
One of the most apt titles I’ve ever encountered. I picked it up because some friends in my writing group are integrating extraordinary experiences into their prose. I thought they may find Urquhart’s book instructive. I surmised correctly and will recommend this book highly.
(A caveat is that I’d give it 4.5. There’s a bit of clarity lacking about the timeline for a contaminated site, but it’s a very minor concern.)
January 1, 2023
I enjoyed this collection - though I will admit that I wasn’t so sure at first. The first essay is the least of the collection - but I get that it is setting the stage for what is to follow.
I thoroughly enjoyed her musings and the melding of her personal life and her academic interests… and being a woman of a certain vintage - enough older, but not too much older, than the author herself - there was so much of which she spoke that I could relate to personally.
I do want to especially thank her for never using the name of ‘he’ in the second essay, titled Lessons for Female Success. He does not deserve to have his name uttered, ever.
I thoroughly enjoyed her musings and the melding of her personal life and her academic interests… and being a woman of a certain vintage - enough older, but not too much older, than the author herself - there was so much of which she spoke that I could relate to personally.
I do want to especially thank her for never using the name of ‘he’ in the second essay, titled Lessons for Female Success. He does not deserve to have his name uttered, ever.
March 20, 2023
Emily Urquhart is a marvellous writer, placing her personal story in the wider context of the legends she knows so well. A folklorist has such a different p.o.v than a poet or a Jungian…
It is fascinating how “legends can be “memorate [personal narrative], fabulate [true legend], and chronicate [personal narrative not supernatural, based in fact]”.
“A memory maligner invents memories for secondary gain, but a confabulator makes up the stories of their past and believes them to be true.”
“It is memory that creates the peculiar, elastic properties of time” Claudia Hammond, Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception
These Ordinary Wonder Tales are wonderful. That touching last story, "Years Thought Days", brought me to tears.
It is fascinating how “legends can be “memorate [personal narrative], fabulate [true legend], and chronicate [personal narrative not supernatural, based in fact]”.
“A memory maligner invents memories for secondary gain, but a confabulator makes up the stories of their past and believes them to be true.”
“It is memory that creates the peculiar, elastic properties of time” Claudia Hammond, Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception
These Ordinary Wonder Tales are wonderful. That touching last story, "Years Thought Days", brought me to tears.
November 17, 2023
A wonderful collection of work which seamlessly intertwine, yet stand-alone as thought-provoking essays.
We begin at childhood and explore Urquhart’s initial experiences with folklore and otherworldly encounters, immerse ourselves in stories throughout her life which are weaved with relevant folklore stories and superb research, and come full circle in the final essay.
I greatly enjoyed the prose and messaging throughout, in which I diligently underlined so I can dip back in.
My two personal favourite essays are Chimera and Years Thought Days. Both topics sit closely with my personal experiences and honoured them in a heartfelt way.
We begin at childhood and explore Urquhart’s initial experiences with folklore and otherworldly encounters, immerse ourselves in stories throughout her life which are weaved with relevant folklore stories and superb research, and come full circle in the final essay.
I greatly enjoyed the prose and messaging throughout, in which I diligently underlined so I can dip back in.
My two personal favourite essays are Chimera and Years Thought Days. Both topics sit closely with my personal experiences and honoured them in a heartfelt way.
July 29, 2025
Urquhart weaves fantasy and reality together very adeptly in this collection of essays. A scholar in folklore, she shows about how myths of imperiled girls, plague, and time portals connect with real-life experiences from her own life and the life of her family.
As a fan of and writer of mythology, I really enjoyed how Urquhart connected the threads of fairy tale genres to lived experience. In particular, the final essay about her father's struggles with dementia and a genre of folklore known as "Years Thought Days" made some profound statements about time -- how humans construct it, and how we lose the ability to make sense of it.
As a fan of and writer of mythology, I really enjoyed how Urquhart connected the threads of fairy tale genres to lived experience. In particular, the final essay about her father's struggles with dementia and a genre of folklore known as "Years Thought Days" made some profound statements about time -- how humans construct it, and how we lose the ability to make sense of it.
May 25, 2023
Ordinary Wonder Tales (9781771965057) These are essays by a young Canadian woman who has a background in Journalism and has a doctorate in 'folklore'. She's very observant and these are lovely stories of magical things and ghosts and the wonder of the world around us. Her essays range from experiences in her childhood, her student years, her time living in Newfoundland, her time as a mother during the pandemic and lastly her time with her father who has dementia. four out of five stars. I really enjoyed it.
July 10, 2023
There's very slight blurriness to the syntax here, which is distracting at first, but then blends into the reading experience. Apart from that, an excellent collection, both poignant and erudite. There have been so many books about real life fairly tales, but Emily Urquhart avoids the cliches, creating a truly original treatment of the topic. She is at her best on topics that touch her directly, especially the pieces on genetic counselling and on dementia.
May 27, 2023
What an unbelievably gorgeous, smart, and hauntingly beautiful book. I can’t believe I almost didn’t read it because I wasn’t totally convinced from the description of it and feared it might be kind of woo-woo.
“He’d taught me that the world can be both real and imagined and life can be given and hoped for and you must remember to look, to truly look, and see what is front of you, and, to see beyond it as well.”
“He’d taught me that the world can be both real and imagined and life can be given and hoped for and you must remember to look, to truly look, and see what is front of you, and, to see beyond it as well.”
June 9, 2023
These are essays by a young Canadian woman who has a background in Journalism and has a doctorate in 'folklore'. She's very observant and these are lovely stories of magical things and ghosts and the wonder of the world around us. Her essays range from experiences in her childhood, her student years, her time living in Newfoundland, her time as a mother during the pandemic and lastly her time with her father who has dementia. four out of five stars. I really enjoyed it.
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