A WALK AROUND BECHTEL PARK WITH EMILY URQUHART

It was author Emily Urquhart’s pup June that brought us out to the Bechtel Dog Park on a grey Saturday afternoon. We were greeted by a well-dressed poodle in boots and an orange jacket, and June and her new friend ran off while Urquhart and I opted for a slower pace.

“Walking is one hundred per cent part of my writing process,” Urquhart said as we followed the path on a loop around a cluster of trees. “[O]ften, when I’m walking, I’m working something out…something about the movement of walking forwards can sometimes shake things out in a way that, if I was sitting at a desk and trying to write, it just doesn’t work.”

Urquhart was born in Kitchener and lived in Waterloo until she was seven, when her family moved to Wellesley. After high school she studied art history and journalism, then ended up at Memorial University in Newfoundland where she completed a PhD in Folklore Studies and also met her future husband. It was his job at the University of Waterloo that brought them back to Ontario to settle with their family in Kitchener.

“I was always interested in folklore,” Urquhart said. “I had this huge Brothers Grimm silver-coloured book that I used to read as a kid a lot. And I was interested in my Irish culture and heritage, and that kind of naturally coincides with folklore.”

Urquhart’s understanding and exploration of folklore goes beyond the written stories of her youth, and includes visual art, gossip, rumours and even home decor and bumper stickers.

“[Folklore is] the way you’re signifying who you are to the world and the story you’re telling about yourself and your place in it,” Urquhart said. “Once you’ve got [folklore] under your belt, it kind of changes your worldview.”

Urquhart explored folklore in her third book, Ordinary Wonder Tales, published in 2022 and shortlisted for the 2023 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. She drew on her journalism background for her second book, The Age Of Creativity, published in 2020, in which she examined late-in-life creativity using her father, acclaimed painter Tony Urquhart, as the subject and inspiration.

Her mother, award-winning novelist and poet Jane Urquhart, is also an artistic presence in Urquhart’s life. She was in high school when her mother gained wide-spread notoriety for her novel Away, and people became interested in her last name and family.

“There was a rumour at university that my mom was Jan Arden because there was a broken telephone situation…someone said ‘Jane Urquhart,’ but [someone else] heard Jan Arden,” Urquhart said. “So, I’ve always had a kind of kinship with Jan Arden.”

From an early age, Urquhart was an avid reader and was also drawn to writing.

“I had teachers who [said] ‘oh, you’re such a good writer’…But I’d feel like, is that because my mom’s a writer, or is it coming from an authentic place?” she said. “But I knew I liked to do it, and I also knew that it didn’t pay any money.”

Pursuing a PhD allowed Urquhart to continue reading and writing, and also to have some security in the form of teaching. In addition to being a published author and a non-fiction editor at The New Quarterly, Urquhart is also a Professor of Creative Writing at Laurier where she coordinates the Edna Staebler Awards.

It was through The New Quarterly that Urquhart connected with other writers in the area. At the Wild Writers’ Festival in 2019, Urquhart was approached by novelist Carrie Snyder about forming a writer’s group along with author Tasneem Jamal. Urquhart agreed, and they have been writing and workshopping ever since.

“It’s so wonderful to have that community,” Urquhart said. “We write together, which I’d never done…I’ve been through two books with them now.”

Urquhart’s experience of community is one done directly with other people as she is not on any social media. In 2016 she made the decision to leave Facebook when she found the platform to be full of vitriol and in-fighting. She left Twitter not long after.

“It was getting me down,” Urquhart said. “Finally, I was like, no one’s inviting you to this party. You have to stop showing up.”

While she reads poetry daily and cites short stories as a favourite genre, Urquhart is also drawn to some less-expected media.

“I like to watch really trashy documentaries,” Urquhart said. “When I say documentary, people think, ‘Oh, that sounds smart.’ No, I like anything to do with catfishing…I’m really into cults. I just find it fascinating.”

Urquhart’s dog June came over to say a quick hello before going to greet a new arrival. Before adopting June from the Humane Society a year ago, Urquhart and her family rescued a dog from another agency; however, they were unable to keep him because of an aggressive response to walks.

“He was sweet, actually, in the house, but…he wouldn’t go in our yard, so he had to be walked…whenever I walked him, he attacked me,” Urquhart said. “I had leather gloves, they were split open, my parka was split open. I was on the ground trying to shield my face and he had my hand and he didn’t let go.”

The experience did not deter Urquhart from dogs, however. 

“I just got obsessed or something after that,” Urquhart said. “I was thinking about dogs, I only watched things about dogs, and then I started writing about it.”

Part of that writing process included painting a watercolour of the destroyed gloves and using visual art as research. What started as memoir turned into a fairy tale.

“I don’t know if the stories I’ve been writing connect as one piece or if they’re connected stories,” Urquhart said. 

“But they all have some sort of supernatural…element threaded through them.”

While the move to writing fiction might be new for Urquhart, her background in folklore and careful powers of observation honed through journalism will no doubt mean she is right at home navigating these creative waters.

CREATING AND RECREATING COMMUNITY

Trigger warning: sexual assault

When I moved to Kitchener in 2019, I had one friend, my roommate, a friend from college. My hometown of Burlington didn’t seem to have many marginalized people like me, and I was hoping to really find my people once I settled into my new home in a more diverse city.  

Imagine my disappointment when I learned that community isn’t found without effort. I’m naturally introverted, so I only made one other similarly marginalized friend, as opposed to the masses I assumed would flock to me. He gave me support, but he could not be community.     

Eventually, my new friend and I started attending events run by our community. We both enjoyed it, and I found it easier to put myself out there with my friend by my side. We both felt safe and we both felt increasingly connected; the more we went out, the more people would recognize us and talk to us. For the first time in my life, I finally understood what a “safe space” was supposed to feel like. When you’re part of a marginalized group, you deal with a lot of harm from the outside—so it felt good to finally be insulated from that.  

And then, last summer, that changed.   

I was sexually assaulted by a prominent member of my community.   

I no longer feel safe at community events even tangentially related to this person; I’ve been to a couple since The Incident, and it feels weird. Everyone knows this person—he has a good reputation and is charming, funny and outgoing. Everyone loves him.   

No one knows what happened between us. So why would they think otherwise?    

Still, everyone’s favourable opinion of him cuts deep. It makes me angry that no one sees what I saw.  I wonder: if they knew, would that change things? Would it change how people see him? Or would their opinions, already formed, stay rigid? Would they stand by this charming, charismatic, outgoing monster—or worse, feel sorry for him for losing his connection with me?   

I don’t know. I guess it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that a space that was my launching point into my own community no longer feels safe to me. And I have to figure out where to go from here.  

That doesn’t feel good. That doesn’t feel fair.   

I didn’t do anything wrong.  

So, now what? How do I reclaim this space that was so meaningful for so long? After all, this person is a part of the same community—he has the same rights as I do to access and enjoy these spaces. He also has a right to feel safe.  

In the months since I was assaulted I’ve been asking myself: what’s the solution? In this ongoing process, what’s the best way forward?  

Is it for the community to be aware of what happened and make their own decisions? For a time, I did consider this, putting him on blast and telling the world who he is. But I didn’t. I’m better than a knee-jerk reaction like that.  

Is it for him to voluntarily ostracize himself from the community for the foreseeable future? That doesn’t feel great – that feels punitive, and I’m not sure that would really show who I am and what I value.   

Is it for me to move on and heal and forgive and forget? It doesn’t feel very fair for the onus to be on me. It doesn’t feel fair that I have to fight for my own sense of safety when I was the one assaulted. But – what else is there? If I can’t expect the community or this person to do the work, who will?   

So far, I’ve been trying a combination of slowly informing the community—if it comes up in conversation, I don’t shy away from telling people. The more people I tell, the stronger I feel, and it gives the community a chance to come to their own conclusions.   

I am also finding new community spaces unrelated to him. I’ve mostly stopped going to events related to this person, but I’ve started going to different community events—mostly with the same friend I made when I first moved here.   

At the end of the day, creating community safe spaces takes effort. It takes effort to find, effort to create, and effort to maintain. And, as I’ve learned, it takes a lot of effort to reclaim. But I don’t think it should be one person taking on all the reclamation—that’s what community is for. We look out for each other. We protect each other from harm—from the outside and from within.  

That’s what I wanted to find here. That’s what I’ve worked for. And that’s what I will rebuild for myself.   

I had three copies of The Way of the Wielder in a local bookstore. When I stopped by recently, I noticed all had sold, which made me very happy.

Long story short, I just heard back from them with next steps. Turns out, they want five more copies of book 1, plus two copies each of books 2 and 3!

I'm very happy about that (despite the somber mood I'm in today)! 🥹 🥳

#WritingCommunity #Writer #Author #SelfPublishedAuthor #LocalAuthor

LOCAL AUTHOR REFLECTS ON FOURTH BOOK FOR CHILDREN

On June 24, Waterloo-based author, Jennifer Harris, released The Witching Hour, a new picture book about a family of witches. This is Harris’ fourth children’s book.  

Harris said her inspiration for the book was twofold. 

“Like many parents, I had a child who was not the best sleeper. We all have those moments of walking around feeling a bit like a zombie when you have one of those children. So that kind of stayed with me quite deeply,” Harris said.  

What brought the story to life was when the line, ‘In the witching hour, the sun slides down’ came to Harris one morning.  

“I started to think about a family of witches and what they would do if they had this kind of fussy child, what kind of magic would they use to calm a baby,” Harris said.  

“Because of that initial line, [it became] this very rhythmic story that had a lulling quality to it, even as things became more and more out of control,” she said.  

For Harris, this is often how her creative process begins. 

“It feels very organic that once I have a line that I really love, that I think would resonate with a child, create a mystery, or be a good hook, then it kind of unspools logically that there’s a story that’s going to follow from that,” Harris said.  

Harris always knew she wanted to write creatively; however, it took some time to find a genre that worked best. 

“I had come across this reference to a woman who had stitched a quilt of the solar system in the nineteenth century, and the idea where she wanted to use it to educate people about science,” she said. 

While Harris originally considered writing an academic paper about the woman, she quickly realized that a picture book would be a more effective way to capture the attention of a larger audience. 

“As soon as I thought that it clicked in my head, and the first few lines came to me, and I knew that this was the right way to tell this story,” Harris said.  

Outside of writing children’s books, Harris is an English Language and Literature professor at the University of Waterloo. 

Harris began teaching nineteenth-century American literature and transitioned into children’s literature courses based on increasing student interest.  

“People tend to think of children’s literature as simplistic, but, in fact, it’s an incredibly sophisticated medium. Picture books aren’t that different from poetry, and then they have to do this additional work of capturing the interest of a child,” Harris said. 

Harris noted a key component of her courses is working with students to understand how the books they read as children shaped how they see the world.  

“Writing and reading for children is so crucial. We know that the number of books in a child’s house will predict their academic outcome. We know that the number of hours children spend reading a week directly translates to academic outcomes,” Harris said. 

“Looking at the content of those books and thinking what that means for the child in terms of how they understand their world is incredibly powerful,” she said. 

#childrensLiterature #englishLanguage #englishLiterature #jenniferHarris #literacy #localAuthor #safinaJennah #theWithcingHour #universityOfWaterloo

I've got another fantastic @canconsffh to look forward to this year 🤩 Between panels, fundraising through The Book Purge, and a little bit of behind-the-scenes work I'll be keeping busy. Good thing I got myself that caffeine pass 😉

#conventionweekend #authorevent #ottawaevent #ottawa613 #cancon #literatureconvention #localauthor #ottawaauthor #thebookpurge

How Authors Can Get More Media Coverage by Sarah Ramsey

Sarah Ramsey shares tips on how to get more media coverage. It all starts in your local area, try reaching out to the community and see what happens!
https://writersfunzone.com/blog/2025/05/09/how-authors-can-get-more-media-coverage-by-sarah-ramsey

#WritingTips #journalism #journalist #localauthor #localpress
@indieauthors