Celebrating 30 years of a totally awesome event of which I was woefully ignorant until now
The first thing I found astonishing about the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival was that at the top of the schedules given out at the entrance was written the phrase: “Celebrating 30 Amazing Years!” As a fellow who had, prior to about two weeks ago, never even heard of Eden Mills, let alone their annual celebration of authors, I wondered how a literal lifetime’s (mine, to be precise) worth of literary jubilees had passed me by, unnoticed. For me, of course, the answer was simple: I’m shamefully unaware of a great many things, and rounding a corner in my brain to discover a vast howling void of ignorance is nothing new. But just in case you’re in a similar boat (in regards to the Writers’ Festival particularly, not necessarily the howling void), I’ll try to describe for you what it was like, and why you should certainly attend the 31st Amazing Year if at all possible.
Eden Mills, it turns out, is a breathtakingly lovely little village just outside Guelph. You have to walk down a medium-length road to get in (well okay, you don’t have to, there’s a shuttle, but I highly recommend the walk) because there isn’t nearly enough parking in the village itself to accommodate everybody, which gives you time to notice things like the crumbling stone walls upon hills and the far-off gurgling of a river and to make sort of lame jokes about how it’s probably going to be a Children of the Corn or Wicker Man sort of situation and you’ll in all likelihood find yourself fleeing back along this very road come sunset, some abominable fiend(s) in pursuit. But then you turn the corner and feel almost ashamed of yourself for having said such things, because what you get is this totally gorgeous street of splendid houses and trees and smiling people bustling around and there is indeed a river running through all of it, giving opportunity for quaint bridges and ducks. And it all feels like you’ve entered some strange little hamlet out of a fairy tale. If you can think of a better spot for a writers festival, I’d like to hear it.
The day was spent in sort of a dreamy wander-from-place-to-place sort of way. It was grey and cold and often the authors were bundled up in blankets as they waited their turns behind the microphones, just their heads sticking out, which was obviously pretty endearing. The wind made the trees (plentiful, and with those leaves that are silvery underneath and green on top — in other words, just the sort of leaves you want wind playing with) rustle and shift more or less constantly, and given that the speakers were often pointing right at them, it was easy to imagine them sort of soaking up the stories they were being told, so that a sufficiently clever AI could hear the tales just by watching video of how the leaves vibrated and moved while the authors were reading. The wind was sort of a constant companion for the day, actually, and would occasionally remind us it was there by whistling and moaning across microphones, occasionally obliging the readers to stop and wait for it, eliciting laughter from the audience (this was particularly noticeable during Heidi Sopinka’s reading of her novel, The Dictionary of Animal Languages, as the breeze seemed to be petitioning for its own linguistic interpreter).
In terms of the festival’s layout, the town had basically converted the main street into a sort of market thoroughfare, with stalls and signing booths lining both sides. Famous faces — obsessively Wikipedia-ed in the days (okay, hours) prior to the event — would loom suddenly out of the crowd, occasionally causing me to twist my upper body awkwardly to watch them pass while my feet kept walking, giving me the momentary appearance of someone being torn in half and probably ruining my chances of having chill conversations with these people when I met them later on under more relaxed circumstances.
There was a green room of sorts in the form of a large house, which someone had generously offered for the purpose and in which authors and staff mingled, drinking wine and coffee and scarfing down hors d’oeuvres (in retrospect, I may have been the only one scarfing). This was an excellent opportunity for me to show off my considerable social skills, as I lurked on the porch more or less alone, eavesdropping on conversations through the windows and hoping that eventually the house would become so crammed with people that one or two would be ejected by sheer pressure, causing them to tumble, horror-struck, into my waiting clutches and be forced to endure inane questions about their lives until they could concoct plausible excuses and depart. Occasionally this did happen, and I actually managed to have some pretty interesting (for me) conversations with organizers and authors alike about the event, the town, and writing in general. A.F. Moritz gave me some wise advice about how to get into reading poetry. Brad Woods was kind enough to finish a story about a wise old fish who grants wishes, the ending of which I had been obliged to miss earlier in the day.
I learned that Eden Mills is well on its way to being totally carbon-neutral, that it has a town crier (with a bell and everything), and that it may be haunted after all. I heard about a few in-the-works projects which I’m pretty sure I was tacitly sworn to secrecy about, but which we should all look forward to reading in the next few years. I developed a fascination-for/crush-on Billy-Ray Belcourt, who I’m pretty sure is just smart as all heck and writes soul-shredding poetry and has this terrific laugh by which I was able to sort of pinpoint his location at all times like one of the creatures from A Quiet Place (2018) until I realized those creatures weren’t meant as role models and forced myself to stop. And so the day went, soaked in stories and conversation and small-town charm. Eventually the sun even came out, presumably lured by a particularly cheerful tale told by someone, someplace, and soon enough we all hopped on a complimentary shuttle back to downtown: bittersweet in the reddening light, but massively convenient.
Obviously, of course, these scattered impressions in no way do justice to the event, but I hope they’ve conveyed the simple truth that I had a really, really good time at the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival, and would urge essentially anyone with even the slightest interest in writing, reading, being read to, stories, conversation, people, different points of view, creeks, trees, skulking on porches, and complimentary shuttle buses to attend next year. See you there.
Article by Calder Hutchinson.
Feature photo courtesy of Eden Mills Writers’ Festival.
Photos by Karen K. Tran/The Ontarion.