Eden Mills ‘comes alive with stories’
Village hosted Eden Mills Writers Festival Sept. 18 to 20
EDEN MILLS – “With panel discussions on writer’s craft and current affairs featuring dozens of Canada’s most compelling authors, and space to simply enjoy the natural beauty of Eden Mills, the [Eden Mills Writers’ Festival] offers a rare chance to unplug, take in new ideas and allow conversations to unfold.”
That’s in part how the festival’s artistic director Kali Pearson and manager Meredith Sweeney describe the annual event, which took place from Sept. 18 to 20.
“We believe stories offer a path to finding ourselves and understanding others, immersing us in new ways of thinking and experiences beyond our own,” they state.
On Saturday, the festival held five workshops at libraries in Rockwood, Guelph and Halton that explored conversation through storytelling, pathways to getting published, creative non-fiction, poetry and short stories.
On Sunday, the main day of the festival, Eden Mills transformed into a literary haven, with the entire village closed to traffic and immersed in festival attractions including six different areas for author panels and workshops, a children’s area newly named after Robert Munsch, a food court, and “Publishers Way” with a book signing table and many authors and other local vendors’ tables.
The panels throughout the day explored a wide range of themes including grief, the housing crisis, family secrets, coming of age, climate change, eco-collectivism and feminism.
TOP LEFT: Eden Mills Writers Festival board chair Melanie Flake, Guelph/Eramosa Mayor Chris White and councillor Steve Liebig welcomed guests to the festival in the same place it all began in 1989. TOP RIGHT: Tara Ross, left, hosted a panel on the Geography of Grief with authors Mai Nguyen (Cleo Dang Would Rather Be Dead), Michelle Porter (A Glacier’s Guide to Dying) and Nicholas Herring (Your Breath in Charcoal). Each author discussed how they fictionalized their own experiences of grief, and how doing so offered a kind of therapeutic release. There are many different ways to grieve – and no right way or wrong way, said Nguyen. Porter described Métis ways of relating and the cyclical nature of grief: “Grief is the grounds upon which new life will spring,” she said. All three wove humour into their writing and the panel, and Herring said candidly: “Grief sucks. It just sucks, and you don’t really learn anything from it.” ABOVE LEFT: Kai Cheng Thom reads from her book The Shapeshifter’s Guide to the Galaxy as Bridget Raymundo, Kelley Armstrong and Jackie Khalilieh listen on. ABOVE RIGHT: This panel about Myth, Magic and the Search for True Love took place in a new area at the festival, The Clearing, and featured Kelly Anderson (The Wild Beneath), Bar Fridman-Tell (Honeysuckle), Colin McAdam (Daphnis and Chloe) and host Melanie D. Marshall. Photos by Robin George
Sunday kicked off on the steps of Eden Mill’s old general store (built in 1877) – the same place the festival was born in 1989, back when it was “a small intimate gathering with a handful of authors,” board chair Melanie Flake told the small group gathered at Barden and York streets.
“The village is about to come alive with stories,” Flake said, inviting attendees to “let curiosity lead you to entirely new places.”
This year’s festival theme was “come curious, leave inspired.”
Guelph/Eramosa councillor Steve Liebig reflected on the 2006 Eden Mills Writers Festival, when Margaret Atwood was in attendance, and he quoted her poem Spelling: “A word after a word after a word is power.”
Liebig said he could see a lot of power in the village on Sunday, and encouraged everyone to “enjoy the power that is the Eden Mills Writers Festival.”
This panel about censorship included Su Chang (The Immortal Woman), former Doctors Without Borders president Dr. Joanne Liu (Ebola, Bombs, and Migrants) and Ashraf Zaghal (Seven Heavens Away), with host Kim Echlin. TOP LEFT: There was also an empty chair reserved for Dawit Isaak, an Eritrean-Swedish journalist, playwright and poet who was arrested during a crackdown on independent press in Eritrea and has been incarcerated for over two decades without charges or trial. TOP RIGHT: Ashraf Zaghal described how he builds Jerusalem from the bottom up in his novel Seven Heavens Away: “I want to show everything – embrace the nuance,” he said, describing the two vastly different realities on the city’s east and west sides. ABOVE RIGHT: Liu, left, said she picked Ebola, bombs and migrants as the three areas to focus her book on because of the lessons within each of these humanitarian crises. Ebola offered the blueprint for responding to COVID-19, the U.S. airstrike that destroyed a medical trauma centre in Afghanistan in 2015 showed that even places for healing are not safe, and the Mediterranean refugee crisis shows that there is no wall too high, no forest too dangerous, and no sea too perilous to stop parents from seeking a better life for their children.
Mayor Chris White said, “I can’t tell you how proud we are to have this premier event in Eden Mills, which seems to be getting better every year.”
Festival additions this year included two new areas for author panels: the Clearing, nestled between trees at the end of Cedar Street near the festival’s year-round headquarters, Rivermead, and The Lawn, an open space on Chapel Street between the children’s area and Publisher’s Way.
There was also a new Sip and Shop in the Eden Mills Community Hall, where attendees could enjoy spirits from Spring Mill Distillery and John Sleeman & Sons while browsing tables with information about book clubs, writers’ retreats, anarchist literary journals and more.
Also new this year were community open-mic sessions and the Guelph Film Festival’s Pocket Cinema.
Vaidehi Giridhar, left, and Emily Xu were two of the winners of the Children‘s and Teen’s Poetry Contest and shared their poems during the festival.
