Ordinary Wonder Tales: Essays by 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. We tell ordinary wonder tales everyday.”
Emily Urquart knows her stuff. She holds a doctorate in folklore, and publications around the world have featured her writing. In this collection of essays, Urqhart examines the magical and the everyday side by side. In one childhood home, she felt that her room was haunted. In another essay, she discusses the stories surrounding a summer camp and how some of those stories turned into legend. In another, she describes the mysterious incident when nuclear waste ended up in an ordinary house without anyone realizing it for years.
Because Urquhart’s daughter has albinism and she often cared for her father, who experienced dementia later in life, themes and ideas around disability often feature in her essays. She describes the strange experience of genetic testing for her second child and the extreme aversion the hospital system had to the very idea that she might want to carry another disabled fetus to term. In another essay, she describes how her father’s memory loss worked as a sort of mental time travel. When her father woke up, he would sometimes think it was 30, even 50 years earlier than it was. But the next day, he might return to the present.
Urquhart’s aim is to show the magic of the every day shines on each page. Whether she’s discussing the day she took her daughter to an albinism conference, the night she spent in a UK hospital ward, or the time she drove her father back home in a snowstorm, there’s always something extraordinary about Urquart’s ordinary life. And she truly makes you feel like your life could be just as magical.
