Canadian Writers Abroad

Eden Mills Writers’ Festival

Ever since Leon Rooke opened a literary festival in his hometown of Eden Mills in 1989, I’ve been meaning to go. That’s what happens when you live abroad: on your annual leave home, there is too much to cram in within a short time. And that time just never seemed to extend to a September literary festival. As well, as a writer trying keep up with who is writing what, I’ve always found lit festivals and reading series a bit stressful.

About ten minutes into the first session on Sunday, September 7, 2025, on the lawn of The Cottage, where I’d gone to hear three authors (Catherine Bush, Pratap Reddy, Damian Tarnopolsky) talk about the short story (“Short Stories, Big Ideas”), I realized I was relaxed. Rather than straining to understand, to catch up, I was listening while admiring the nod of tall yellow flowers, while eyeing the slow water behind the readers, while smiling at the presence of dogs and children. I’d kicked off my shoes and settled onto our emergency blanket, joining the dressed-down crowd. The radio news we’d listened to on the way there faded in the light of this pleasant literary talk.

The moderator, Greg Rhyno, freshened things up by not having the three authors read one after the other, but asking questions of all three before and after each reading. While discussing her collection of stories, Skin, novelist Catherine Bush (who was the 2024 Writer-in-Residence/Landhaus Fellow at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society in Germany) said about the past and place: “places in the past are inaccessible” and while we cannot attain the past, we can capture a place at a particular moment through fiction. Pratap Reddy and Damian Tarnopolsky took this up, talking about memory and that writing of past and place is a remaking of the lost. During the discussion of ideas and stories, Bush talked about how stories press things up against each other that might not go together, to create a charge, or as she said, “the energy of compression.” Tarnopolsky called it juxtaposition. For Reddy, questions of past and place returned to his central theme of immigration. From the various forms of the short story, to the satisfying idea that one story can contain different possible worlds, to the necessity of “the swerve” or the swing to an unpredictable place — the panel discussion was interesting, enlightening, pleasant, and cheerful. And appropriately disturbing, as several times Bush mentioned that her collection moves from the human to a “more than human world.”

I then headed to The Meadow for “We Are the Ghost in the Machine,” where a panel alternately terrified us on the topic of Artificial Intelligence and tried to persuade us to, well, relax. Moderator Antonio Michael Downing quoted Sheila Heti’s take on AI — why do we approach it with fear rather than curiosity? He made this example: if you have published a book that went to the Library of Congress, then your book has been used for AI language learning, and therefore you have paid into AI already, and if you had paid for a bicycle, you would use it, so we might as well use AI. An audience member pointed out the problem with this is that we have no agency over AI: it is not like a bike that we can take in for repairs or lock up and walk away from — we have no control over it as individuals. While Downing (and Heti) sided with Sean Michaels, whose book is about a poet collaborating with AI, the other panelists (Vass Bednar, Dr Christopher DiCarlo, Colleen Stanley) were very good at inspiring fear and dread. On one issue the panel agreed: we need legislation to … to what exactly? Was it privacy? Moderation? Moral guidelines? Apparently AI makers are scraping even what I am writing here.

Things got more grim, and appropriately, the clouds brought a chill wind for the next session in The Meadow: “True North Unsettled: A Conversation on Democracy” with Mark Bourrie, Andrew Coyne, David A. Robertson, Ariel Sim, and Karin Wells, with moderator Jessica Johnson. Essentially, everything’s gone to hell: Bourrie on Poilievre and the rise of autocracy, Coyne on the failures of our parliamentary system, Wells on the law that is too slow and failing us, and Robertson questioning whether democracy and reconciliation can ever reconcile.

Fortunately the day ended with Thomas King’s launch of his book, Aliens on the Moon, about what happens after aliens land on the moon. Funny, yes of course, but also reflective, and he gave answers sharp enough to make you squirm on your uncomfortable perch. King informed us that at 82 he’d rather be at home and this festival will likely be his last. Asked what thought he would like readers to take away from his novel, he replied, “Now what?”

And that was the theme for the day: Now what are we going to do about it? About AI, about democracy and autocracy, about climate change and fiction….

The festival takes over an entire street of the village, and then some. The road in was closed by a police car, and volunteers directed the parking. Vendors sold everything from cards to jewellery to books and food. There are four venues, which means, frustratingly, that events take place concurrently (17 events on Sunday), and I thus had to miss out on things that interested me. Too much all at once is hardly a worthy critique. But I do have a genuine complaint or suggestion: rent chairs to people who can’t or didn’t bring them. It’s a long day outdoors without a seat. Or a cup of tea.

This post is one of a series about writers getting out and about, abroad in the broadest sense of the word. While Eden Mills is in Ontario, as am I right now, there are upcoming posts by writers abroad who have attended cultural events in the country of their expat home. Are you out there? Join in.

• Catherine Bush, Skin (Goose Lane, 2025); Landhaus Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society; Bush’s note on the book that she worked on while there: The Book of Life.
• Pratap Reddy, Remaindered People and Other Stories (Guernica Editions, 2025)
• Damian Tarnopolsky, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster (Freehand Books, 2024)
• Greg Rhyno, Who By Water (Cormorant Books, 2025)
• Antonio Michael Downing, Black Cherokee (Scribner Canada/Simon & Schuster, 2025); Christopher DiCarlo, Building a God: The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and the Race to Control It (Archambault); Sean Michaels, Do You Remember Being Born? (Penguin Random House Canada, 2025); Vass Bednar; Colleen Stanley
• Mark Bourrie, Ripper: the Making of Pierre Poilievre (Biblioasis); Andrew Coyne, The Crisis of Canadian Democracy (Sutherland House Books, 2025); David A. Robertson, 52 Ways to Reconcile: How to Walk with Indigenous Peoples on the Path to Healing (Penguin Random House Canada, 2025); Karin Wells, Women Who Woke Up the Law: Inside the Cases that Changed Women’s Rights in Canada (Second Story Press, 2025)
• Thomas King, Aliens on the Moon (Harper Collins Canada, 2025)
• Other Featured Writers at this year’s festival (about 50)
• Another view of the festival by Alison Gadsby at Substack