Workshop: Making a Scene: Using Visual Prompts to Create Rich Imagery in Your Writing

With Emily Urquhart

In this workshop, we will use visual art and photography as prompts to create rich, textured imagery in your writing. You will be guided through a series of slides coupled with specific questions about how and what you see. There is no experience necessary in writing or art to engage with these exercises. My creative writing students benefit from applying this illustrative technique to their fiction, poetry, and memoir, but it also helped my mathematical physics students improve their descriptive writing skills. All you need to participate in this workshop are your preferred writing tools.

If this format poses an accessibility issue, please contact EMWF in advance and we/Emily will work to adapt the workshop to your needs.

$50 (save 10% if you buy more than one)

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Emily Urquhart is the author of three books of nonfiction including the essay collection, Ordinary Wonder Tales, a finalist for the 2023 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. She is a five-time National Magazine Award nominee for her journalistic work and has won gold and silver. She lives in Kitchener, Ontario with her husband and two children where she is a nonfiction editor for The New Quarterly and teaches creative writing and science communication at the University of Waterloo. Presently, she is the editor of Best Canadian Essays 2025, forthcoming from Biblioasis.

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Ordinary Wonder Tales
By Emily Urquhart
Published by Biblioasis

A journalist and folklorist explores the truths that underlie the stories we imagine—and reveals the magic in the everyday.

“I’ve always felt that the term fairy tale doesn’t quite capture the essence of these stories,” writes 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.” In this startlingly original essay collection, Urquhart reveals the truths that underlie our imaginings: what we see in our heads when we read, how the sight of a ghost can heal, how the entrance to the underworld can be glimpsed in an oil painting or a winter storm—or the onset of a loved one’s dementia. In essays on death and dying, pregnancy and prenatal genetics, radioactivity, chimeras, cottagers, and plague, Ordinary Wonder Tales reveals the essential truth: if you let yourself look closely, there is magic in the everyday.