The Eden Mills Writers' Festival is still fresh in the minds of attendees and presenting authors. Clare Hitchens, publicist for Wilfrid Laurier University Press and Young Adult Author Coordinator with the festival, did us a favour by agreeing to write up some of her recollections of Eden Mills for those of us who couldn't be there (boo!). Here, she recalls the first event she took in at the festival: important new voices in Canadian fiction.

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Crowds filled the streets and lawns of the village of Eden Mills (near Guelph, Ontario) on September 15 for the 25th anniversary of the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival. In a day that included literary stars like Joseph Boyden, Emma Donoghue, and Wayne Johnston, I started with the “Hot Young Writers to Watch” set, featuring Grace O’Connell, Iain Reid, and Saleema Nawaz (pictured in that order to the left).

It was O'Connell's second time at Eden Mills; the first time she was there as an emerging writer reading on the Fringe stage (the festival celebrates emerging writers each year with a literary contest and readings on this stage). Fringe readers often return as published authors; O’Connell is one of these, as is Alison Pick, Ania Szado, Cathy Marie Buchanan, Julie Wilson, and Erin Bow, to name a few. Of her return to the festival, O’Connell said, “... on the Fringe stage about six years ago, I read a story that was shortlisted in the competition and I was so nervous I nearly threw up beforehand. ... Kathleen Winter said something nice to me about my story afterwards and I nearly fainted because I love her work. Back then I could only dream of holding a real book I had written in my hand.”

The three authors read from stories built around family relationships, with common threads of love, loss, and regret. Magnified World (O’Connell) and Bone and Bread (Nawaz) both deal with the grief that follows the death of a family member, and the narratives move back and forth in time and place as both the characters and the readers piece together the unknown.

Iain Reid read from The Truth about Luck, his memoir about his staycation with his elderly grandmother. Wryly funny, Reid had the crowd in stitches as he gently lampooned his character in the book. Beneath the humour, though, was a tenderness and a wistfulness about what he hadn’t known of his grandma’s life. Of his co-readers on Sunday he said, “I like how both were able to create a lucid sense of place from such short excerpts.”

A sense of place is something that is distinct about the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival, set in the Eramosa River valley, full of lush greenery and rippling waters (and sketchy wi-fi). Said Nawaz, “My favourite part was spending a whole day in a place where it felt like books and writing are the most important things in the world—not only to me, but to everyone.”

And, of course, at the end of the day there was pie.

*Photo credit for first pic of the authors: Kathleen Ferguson

Clare Hitchens is the publicist for Wilfrid Laurier University Press in Waterloo, Ontario, and works with the Eden Mills Writers' Festival as the Young Adult Author Coordinator. She also sits on the Board of Directors for Facile, an organization that seeks to empower people with disabilities to take their place in the world through independent facilitation services.