November 21, 2022

Ordinary Wonder Tales, by Emily Urquhart

‘I don’t think I just imagined her, the woman I was left alone with in the last few minutes before I was taken into surgery. I don’t know if she was a nurse, or some kind of technician, but she seemed terribly official, sitting at a table with paperwork while I contemplated the IV needle stuck in my hand. “Section?” she asked me, and I told her yes. “What for?” I said, “The baby’s transverse.” Lying across my womb, its little bum wedged in at the top and refusing to budge no matter how much I stood on my head, played soothing music into my pelvis, or shone a flashlight into my vagina. “Well,” said the woman at the table, sorting through her papers. “Kids will screw you somehow. If it wasn’t that, it would be labour, then they’d grow up to be teenagers. They always find a way.” “But it’s all worth it, right?” I asked her. “No.” She put down her papers. “I don‘t think it is.” Then she got up, left through a different door, and I never saw her again.’ —from my 2010 essay LOVE IS A LET-DOWN, first published in The New Quarterly

“She was a witch,” I said to my husband on Friday night as I was reading Emily Urquhart’s essay collection Ordinary Wonder Tales. (Our baby from the essay is now actually a teenager and was out babysitting somebody else’s children down the street.) “The woman from the hospital who told me that kids always screw you. You remember.”

And he did. Even though he hadn’t been there when it happened, had already been whisked away to get read for the surgery that would deliver our first child into the world, even though these were throwaway comments that someone had made almost fourteen years ago now, but those commets had haunted us, especially in those difficult months after her birth when I was afflicted with what I now know was postpartum depression, and they’d felt like a curse.

“If that was a story, she would have been a witch,” I said, Urquhart’s stories blowing my mind with their illumination of the links between ordinary and extraordinary, how the otherworldly lessons of fairy tales (or “wonder tales”) have much to teach us about our own experiences. Experiences including pregnancy, parenthood and living through a pandemic underlining that we’re all more connected to these stories than we might have imagined, to all that came before us, to superstition, signs and omens, and folklore. We’re all old wives, at heart, is what Urquhart is saying.

Urquhart, whose academic background in folklore informed her first book Beyond the Pale (she is also author of a celebrated book inspired by her artist-father), brings that same approach to these beautiful essays exploring the sublime edge of ordinary experiences including an ectopic pregnancy, childhood memories of a ghostly presence, sightings of her elder half-brother after his death in his 30s, a violent assault delineating the dynamic of woman as prey, an amniocentesis in an essay called “Child Unwittingly Promised,” a radioactive house in Port Hope, Ontario, and her father’s dementia against the backdrop of the Covid-19 Pandemic.

These essays—beautiful, rich and absorbing-will change the way you see your place in the world, and they’ll leave you noticing all the magic at its fringes.