“A kind of paradise”: Writers festival makes a return to Eden Mills and inspires community

The events of the day kicked off with a lively performance from Kween & The Kween Company.PHOTOS BY ELENI KOPSAFTIS

“A kind of paradise”: Writers festival makes a return to Eden Mills and inspires community and imagination

The Eden Mills Writers Festival featured a stunning selection of work, including debut novels from new authors and excerpts from U of G’s own Creative Writing MFA program

ELENI KOPSAFTIS

If you drive out of Guelph along Highway 7 for long enough, you’ll start to notice the treelines getting denser and the river flowing faster. If you did so on Sept. 11 and hit the right twists and turns, you’d have found yourself in the middle of a tiny village absolutely bustling with people gathered for the Eden Mills Writers Festival.

Just east of Guelph, the village of Eden Mills is a picturesque community along the Eramosa River housing about 350 people. Life there is “beautiful and simple, a kind of paradise,” says their website. During an opening speech, mayor Christopher White remarked to festival attendees that the village “finally got Wi-Fi.”

Every year on the second Sunday after Labour Day, the Eden Mills Writers Festival brings in folks from all over Ontario and gives local writers and publishers the opportunity to showcase their work. Its organizers have been hard at work for over 34 years now, and since then they’ve strived to celebrate the power of words and nurture the next generation of writers.

After a two-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, readers and writers alike were eager to be back.

This year, the festival opened with a performance by Kween alongside members of The Kween Company. Inspired by Jamaican carnival festivals, the dancers gathered attendees to the town center and encouraged the crowd to shout ‘yeah-o’ along with them.

Following was a day packed with readings and talks by local writers across the village. At 1:45 p.m. outside The Mill was the Emerge! Event, featuring students from the University of Guelph’s Creative Writing MFA program, including Fatima Amarshi, Erica Isomura, Emily Kellogg, Quinn Mason, Michael Melgaard, and Blessing Nwodo. Each student read excerpts of their work, whether it be striking chapters from their novels or evocative pieces of their poetry.

The presenting MFA students were welcomed by Canisia Lubrin, a U of G professor, poet, writer, and editor who said she was happy to see the crowd’s faces in the flesh instead of as pixels on a screen.

“We’re really proud of the trailblazing work and accomplishments by our growing number of alumni,” said Lubrin. “They come from many places and offer a wide range of imaginations and experiences to the program, so this is really wonderful for me to be able to welcome these six members of the cohort this year.”

In their work, many of the students tackled societal challenges, like racism, sexism, and patriarchy. Nwodo’s short story excerpt flipped the script on women’s experiences with harassment and gender inequality. Rather than men preying on women, the story’s ‘simults’ preyed on men.

In the excerpt, a man heads home after dark, trying to look brave, crossing the street opposite of a group of taunting women, placing his keys between his fingers, getting ready to yell ‘fire’ instead of ‘help’ “because that was what people would respond to.” The next day, he walks home with a woman who tells him that men who walk alone at night are stupid.

“The world is dangerous for men and there’s no need for you guys to go out of your way to invite danger,” said the character. “You, on the other hand, are smart to walk home with me. You’re not like other men.”

Afterwards, Isomura read the poetry she’d written during the height of the pandemic which tackles mental health and climate grief. Before presenting her piece Remember when Amazon.com only sold books, she explained that she hailed from British Columbia and that the wildfires there have had a massive effect on the environment.

“Dopamine can trick my brain, but it can’t trick my lungs, my chest. It hurt so bad when wildfire smoke rose,” read Isomura. “As white people stared at my asian face before complaining about made-in-China goods taking too long to ship from Amazon during the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, in an elementary school class, a child asks if they’re called Gen Z because they’re the last generation on the planet E.”

Between events, festival attendees could walk along Publisher’s Way where The Bookshelf, Guelph’s own local bookstore, sold signed copies of the many works presented at the festival. Additionally, authors and publisher booths lined the street with a myriad of novels to sell.

Sylvia Barnard was one such author, showcasing her debut novel Rhubarb, Strawberries, and Willows. Having been to the Eden Mills Writers Festival two times before, Barnard put up a booth of her own now that she has a book to sell.

“When I was a kid, I wrote poetry which was terrible–it was that teenage, painful poetry–but I always loved to tell stories, and I lost that when I was working,” Barnard said to The Ontarion. “I knew [the novel] was going to be historical fiction because that’s what I really enjoy reading, and then I discovered that right where we were living on the Spanish River there had been a train deraillement in 1910.”

And so Barnard wrote her gripping tale of time travel and romance based on the Spanish River Train Disaster near Sudbury, Ontario.

“Writing is very much an isolating job. You spend your whole day in front of your computer and that's all you're interacting with. So to be able to sit down with other authors and go ‘oh yeah I had this problem’ and ‘my experience with publishers was the same’ has been great.”

The local writing community–from within U of G’s Creative Writing program and out–is brimming with talent and inspiration. Every single speaker, author, and publisher has their own unique story to tell, and the Eden Mills Writers Festival allows them to tell those stories to the world.

“I’ve done other events where I’ve shown my book, but they've been at farmer’s markets, christmas markets, harvest markets, or music festivals, so there's always something else [going on]. It’s nice to have the focus just on books and on authors,” said Barnard.

“It’s just been so well organized and I really feel supported … Kudos to [the organizers]. It shows that they've really worked hard and long to have this happen.”

The Eden Mills Writers Festival website can be found at edenmillswritersfestival. ca with future event information and ways to support the organization. You can find Barnard’s work and information on where to buy Rhubarb, Strawberries, and Willows on her website at www.sbarnardauthor.ca.