Placeholder: Introduction text for audio walk.
My name is Ceri Morgan. I invite you to share this audio-walk, which comes out of a project, entitled, ‘Heartlands/Pays du coeur: Geohumanities and Québec’s “regional” fiction. ‘Heartlands/Pays du coeur’ focuses on a particular region: l’Estrie and the Eastern Townships in southeastern Québec. Given the size of the region, the approximately 2km route of the audio-walk is symbolic, in that whilst it is shaped by the site it runs through, namely the lake front at Magog, it makes references to places further afield.
The route starts at Bâtiment Billy Connor near the playground on Pointe Merry at Parc de la pointe Merry in Magog. A club-house, Bâtiment Billy Connor is indicated by a sign featuring the words, ‘Club été’ (‘summer club’ in English) and ‘Halte de la patinoire’ (ice-skating pavilion). The route then follows the public path long the lake front for 45 minutes or so, with Lake Memphremagog a constant presence on your left, and Mount Orford in front of you.
The route ends at the picnic tables near the large bronze sculpture, ‘Libre’, by André Desjardins in parc de la Baie-de-Magog. Following this introduction, there are 5 sections corresponding to various parts of the route, plus a conclusion. Breaks between sections are indicated by repeated sounds of geese honking. You will hear narration by me, extracts from oral history interviews with current and former residents of the region, and creative prompts. You can take the walk at your own pace: stop, sit, pause, and repeat or skip sections. It is intended to be a companion rather than a guide.
I am a woman from the South Wales Valleys, a former coal-mining region in the UK. I grew up in a house full of books. I am une Québécoise d’adoption: at 21, I read Anne Hébert’s Kamouraska for a university class, and fell in love with the lower Saint-Lawrence landscapes within it. I have worked on Québec fiction ever since. Let’s take a walk with some of this literature and the history that shapes it. When I say ‘walk’, I mean any form of mobility – the disabilities scholar, Sue Porter taught me, ‘there are other ways to walk than on one’s feet’ (2015). We can also take a static walk, a walk in the imagination. There will be moments when you’re invited to make your own creative responses to what you see or hear: you can take up these invitations or ignore them, as you wish.
As noted earlier, the literature that will accompany us is from l’Estrie and the Eastern Townships. The administrative region of l’Estrie founded in 1981 is smaller than the region of the Eastern Townships, which dates from the late eighteenth century, with ‘township’ being a term used by the British government to refer to an area of land measuring 10 miles by 10 miles.
Bordering the United States, l’Estrie and the Eastern Townships are often popularly identified with Loyalist settlement, but the W8banakiak met and lived there seasonally long before the arrival of American settlers. The rich hunting grounds and network of waterways made the region an ideal location for exchanges, get-togethers, and celebrations. Various place names in the region attest to this indigenous presence, including ‘Memphremagog’, an adaptation of ‘mamhlawbagak’, meaning ‘large expanse of water’.
Non-indigenous settlers came to what is now l’Estrie and the Eastern Townships first from America, and then from Britain and other countries in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The region has historically been, and remains, then, a destination for rest and gathering with friends and family, leisure, and tourism. Today, people come from elsewhere in Québec, Canada, the US, and further afield for skiing, cycling, swimming, sailing, hiking, picnicking, food-and-drink tasting and other activities, depending on the season.
This project was ignited by my curiosity about what I term Québec’s literary heartlands, in a play around ‘heart’ that acknowledges the emotions sparked and fuelled by various places. The twenty-first century has seen an enthusiastic interest in regions like the Gaspé peninsula, Saguenay, and North Shore on the part of Qúebec’s writers, especially French-language authors. This turn to the regions represents a marked change from French- and English- language literature of the second half of the twentieth century, which tended to focus on Montreal. In contrast with other regions in Québec, however, L’Estrie and the Eastern Townships have had an internationally recognised connection with creative writing in both of Québec’s majority languages for over 60 years. A primarily English-language poetry scene reached its peak around the 1960s (Camlot and Luxton, cited in Morgan 2017), and included well-known writers Ralph Gustafson, D. G. Jones, and Michael Ondaatje. Many of these poets lived in, or had holiday cottages near, North Hatley. Several worked at College Champlain, Bishop’s University, or l’Université de Sherbrooke.
Poetry is still being written and performed in l’Estrie and the Eastern Townships – in French, as well as English – , by writers like Danielle Dussault, Jean-Francois Létourneau, Mélanie Bué, alias LEM, Angela Leuck, Steve Luxton, and Tanya Standish McIntyre. However, recent years have seen the region linked with fiction, especially literary and genre fiction. And so, it’s on fiction and creative prose that we’ll focus in this walk.
Let’s follow the path past the playground, the volleyball pitch, and the snack bar. Stop for a moment at the picnic tables between the snack bar and the ticket office. Look at Lake Memphremagog, the quay, called le Quai Macpherson, and the viewing tower at the end of the quay. I invite you to think about heights and depths. The other-than-human world is very present here: from dogs walking with their owners, to trembling aspen and white birch scattered along the lakeside, the falcon working to keep pigeons at bay, dragonflies in the air, bass in the waters. Write or draw, take a picture, film or sound recording of this other-than-human world. Or imagine the fantastical creatures in the waters or hidden in the mountains, like Memphre, the serpent monster said to live in the Lake. If you like, pause your listening for a few moments to give yourself time to respond to this creative prompt.
A dragon appears in Michèle Plomer’s Dragonville trilogy, which features a creature able to assume any form: human, geological, or fantastical. The novels connect Hong Kong in the early twentieth century, nineteenth-century Scottish Highlands, and twenty-first century l’Estrie via various waterways. Memphre itself features in the young adult novel by Anne Brigitte Renaud and Michèle Plomer, À l’eau. Here, the monster’s possible existence adds a frisson to the lake-swimming undertaken by the adolescent protagonist, who spends a summer in Magog to recuperate from an ice-skating injury, becoming unwittingly caught up in international intrigue in the process.
Let’s follow the zig-zag flower bed to the quay. As we do so, glance at the building that used to be the ticket office for the Orford Express to your right. A tourist train that ran for part of the year between Magog and Sherbrooke, the Orford Express offered passengers the opportunity to eat dinner aboard a form of transport no longer available in this part of the region. Yet the train remains a familiar and everyday sound, as freight is moved across the country. We hear this sound in Liane Keightley’s short story, ‘Triton and Tex’, part of the collection, Seven Openings of the Head. The train regularly causes the walls of the main character’s house to shudder. The trains in Keightley’s story are international everytrains, with names that do not seem to link them to anywhere. They are not the trains of Nick Fonda’s partly historical novel, Murder on the Orford Mountain Railway, which transport people and goods across tracks that are being newly prepared and laid in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Keightley’s trains simply pass through the landscape, like the cars that are a constant presence on the nearby road. Driving or being driven are regular features of the region’s fiction and daily life.
I propose we take a loop around le quai MacPherson. Walk to the end of the quay, keeping to the left of the ticket office as you face it. Pause for a moment, or climb the steps of the observation tower, which is called la tour Memphré, to the viewing platform. Think about journeys that repeat, turn back on themselves, or don’t go anywhere. Think about the frustrations and/or the pleasures these journeys provoke. Write, draw, speak or record such a journey, imagining where you might go or try to go and which mode of transport you might choose. Will you go sculling on Lake Memphremagog, like Louise Abbott in her creative nonfiction piece, ‘Water Baby’? Ski down Mount Orford? Or will you drive back and forth to Montreal, like the detectives in murder-mysteries by Louise Penny and Johanne Seymour, who regularly make the return trip between Montreal and the Townships in a day? Again, you may wish to pause the audio walk for a few moments at this point.
Let’s head up the other side of le quai MacPherson from the one we went down, past the Escapades cruise boat, the present-day equivalent of the paddle- and propellor- steamers that travelled Lake Memphremagog from 1850 until the 1950s. Let’s think about leisure and work. Fonda’s novel reminds us of l’Estrie’s and the Townships’ industrial history, which Guy Laperrière and François Thierry Toé inform us, is linked to mining, pulp, paper, asbestos (Laperrière 2009), the railway, and textiles (Toé 2016). According to Toé, technological developments overseas, the outsourcing of labour and other factors saw the first effects of deindustrialisation in the 1950s (Toé 2016). As Jean-Pierre Kesteman points out, by the turn of the millennium, the region was experiencing many of the traits associated with deindustrialisation worldwide, such as the decline of small towns, unemployment, and youth exodus (Kesteman 2006). The emptying out of the downtown has been experienced by large and small towns alike in the region. Like Paul, the protagonist of Patrick Nicol’s Les Manifestations, who is a local historian and archivist, we can walk along la Marquette in Sherbrooke’s historical city centre. We can imaginatively rebuild the workers’ houses that were constructed within walking distance of places of employment, then demolished and replaced by car parks. We can think about the wool being spun at Paton’s Factory, the stockings made in Kayser’s.
Back on le quai MacPherson, continue past the launching and landing dock, and the ticket office for aqua sports and leisure activities. Slow your pace for a few moments. Some manufacturing and heavy industries remain in the Townships and l’Estrie, of course, like the gravel industries in Stanstead. And we should be careful not to romanticise industrial working conditions that were often unhealthy or dangerous. The image of dust constantly settling on surfaces and needing to be swept away is one we find in novels like Robert Lessard’s Pat, mineur d’Asbestos. In another novel set in Asbestos (now Val-des-Sources), Cassie Bérard’s Qu’il est bon de se noyer, the former mine swallows up parts of the town. Newer industries in the region related to artisanal or organic produce like cheese, vegetables, wine, and beer make their way into some novels, such as Nathalie Roy’s Ça peut pas être pire… and Julie Myre-Bisaillon’s Des Réguines et des hommes.
As you rejoin the main path through the park, you’ll see an information point featuring a map of the lake front, along with directions to car parks (le stationnement du Moulin and le stationnement Cabana) and the beach called la plage des Cantons. Turn left and keep heading towards Mount Orford. Let’s think about maps, lines and contours: what they reveal, and conceal, conjure into being or efface. The border with the United Status cuts across Lake Memphremagog. The meaning and authority of the border are challenged or ignored by individuals or groups of people, or incorporated into regular routines.
Of course, the border has no meaning at all for animals, plants, and other forms of non-human, or natural, life. The arbitrary and contested nature of the border is one of the themes of William S. Messier’s Dixie. This atmospheric novel features a leaky border, across which animals, people and goods move, unnoticed or clandestinely, legally and illegally. Like Dragonville, Dixie traces through fiction the factual national and ethnic diversity of l’Estrie and the Eastern Townships in both the present and the past: the white family of its child protagonist, 7 year-old Gervais Huot, originally came from the Netherlands, the escaped convict Gervais encounters is from the United States, Léandre Pelletier, local banjo teacher is black, and there is a reference to the real-life cemetery at Saint-Armand, where free and enslaved blacks were buried.
L’Estrie and the Townships are linguistically as well as ethnically mixed, with either French or English predominant in particular villages or towns, and a broader range of languages present in others, notably Sherbrooke, an important pole of immigration in Québec. Given the longstanding presence of francophones and anglophones in the region, it is not surprising that we often have exchanges across French and English in fiction and creative nonfiction, suggesting relaxed and everyday social interactions. Some works attest to the presence of other languages, too: there is Dutch and Louisiana Creole in Dixie, Italian in Murder on the Orford Mountain Railway, Mandarin in Dragonville, and Mexican Spanish in À l’eau. These texts offer rich literary soundscapes, echoing material ones in a region that is both important for immigration and a tourist destination, receiving residents and visitors from many places in the world.
We’ve arrived at la Place Memphré, near the level crossing. The observation point here has a ramp as well as steps. Go up the ramp or else down to the beach, called la Plage de l’ouest. The air can smell coastal here. Touch the sand and the water, or listen to the different sounds of moving from paved path to wooden floored observation platform. Feel the different surfaces under foot or wheel. Prepare to pause your listening as you write or draw, record, photograph, or film a sensoryscape: this doesn’t have to be informed by sight, smell, sound, or touch. Tastes abound in the region’s fiction and creative nonfiction, from Coaticook ice-cream in À l’eau to sugar pie in Louise Penny’s The Cruellest Month.
Let’s continue on towards Mount Orford, past the clock, past the plant sculpture and fountain of Memphre on our right, and another viewing platform on our left. This part is the longest stretch of the walk. Rest, if you wish to, on or near one of the many benches lining the path in front of the restaurant and hotel and beyond, and enjoy the proximity to the Lake. Let’s reflect a little further on plants and the non-human, or natural world. Trees are ever-present in both real and literary geographies of l’Estrie and the Eastern Townships, despite extensive deforestation due to settlement, lumber, pulp and paper mills, and hydroelectric developments created to power various manufacturing industries. We encounter a murdered body lying in Fall leaves on the opening page of Louise Penny’s Still Life, warring long-term residents, second home owners, and police officers driving along tree-lined roads in Denis Coupal’s Blindshot, and children playing in abandoned houses and cabins in the woods in David Clerson’s En rampant. We can envisage these literary trees as sentinels or witnesses. Several writers have played with a tension between the beautiful natural landscapes of l’Estrie and the Eastern Townships and a violence or threat concealed within them. Three Pines, setting of Penny’s murder-mysteries, is a famous example, with its village green, pond, church, bookstore, bakery, and bistro that is also a bed and breakfast. Described as having been founded by Loyalists, Three Pines appears an idyllic place of sanctuary and peace, where all are welcome, and residents support each other. Villagers are a mix of anglophones and francophones, suggesting the ethnolinguistic diversity of the real-life Townships. Social diversity is also embodied by several of the main characters, including a gay couple and a black psychologist turned bookstore-owner.
Penny’s Three Pines is off grid in that it neither features on maps nor has any mobile phone coverage, most visitors stumbling across it on their way to somewhere else. Readers are therefore taken into a fairy tale world far beyond the stresses and strains of daily life. However, we soon learn of the dangers lurking underneath the apparently perfect surface, as murdered body after murdered body is found over the course of the tens of bestselling novels that make up the series.
In contrast to the stunning natural settings found in the work of several writers, certain novels feature degraded landscapes. For example, Johanne Seymour’s Kate McDougall murder-mystery quintet offers a mundane and often bleak world of desolate lakes and forests, fast-food outlets, scrap yards, and the unremarkable imaginary village of Perkins, where the police headquarters are situated. Examples of Québec’s rural noir, Seymour’s novels trace the real-life economic decline experienced within the region, in the wake of factory and railway closures in the later decades of the twentieth century. This decline is indicated in the novels by a run-down hotel that has fallen out of favour with the tourist trade, the attentions of which have been centred elsewhere following the construction of a new road.
We can read the degraded landscapes found in some examples of fiction of as effects of human impact on the environment. In this context, criminality refers to natural devastation. This natural devastation is traced in, for example, the paper factories concealed amongst woodlands in Alexie Morin’s memoir, Ouvrir son coeur. However, there are instances of creative prose in which nature can be said to exert a kind of revenge on human extractive practices. Coupal’s Blindshot, which blends the murder-mystery with the western, can be read as a cautionary tale for humans seeing the region only as a leisurescape, trophy hunting ground, or opportunity to make money via corrupt business practices. The affluent Montrealers who build a huge secondary residence in the region demonstrate their lack of knowledge of the rural via their house’s unsympathetic design and positioning. Birds wound themselves by crashing into an enormous picture window, and a local hunter repeatedly trespasses upon the family’s land, complaining that the house was built on an important trail for deer.
Other novels and stories offer a natural world that is simply indifferent to human activity, from the coyote nonchalantly crossing the border in Messier’s Dixie to the corn growing exuberantly to the annoyance of the protagonist of Keightley’s story, ‘Ten-Cent Packs’.
I invite you to think about interdictions and challenges to interdictions. Retracing some of your steps if you wish, look at the signs along the lake front: no swimming in certain areas, no setting anchor, no smoking or vaping – these last two seem ironic given that one of the past industries in the region was the manufacturing of matches. Propose some counters to these prohibitions. What would you like to see people encouraged to do? Alternatively, make a found poem from the words on one or more of the information noticeboards. Choose 12 words that seem to stand out to you. You can arrange them how you wish, but one possible form is to have 3 words in the first line, 2 words in the second, 1 word in the third line, 1 word in the fourth, 2 words in the fifth, and 3 words in the final line. This form offers a pleasing symmetrical shape on the page, but opt for whichever form feels right for you. Again, you may wish to pause the audio walk as you respond to the prompt.
You’ll have noticed that this part of the path is lined with banners featuring extracts from literary and historical texts. We’ve entered the section of the park called, ‘Paroles d’ici’, after a project by la Ville de Magog that celebrates some of the writers and artists of the region. You can find texts by these writers in la Bibliothèque Memphrémagog. Housed in the former l’Église Sainte-Marguerite-Marie, the library, with its beautiful stained-glass windows featuring a daisy motif, is situated in the Tisserands (Textile-workers) quarter of Magog. The town’s industrial history is also represented by la Maison Merry museum, located in the oldest house in urban Magog. The house was built by Ralph Merry III, an American who fought on the side of revolutionary troops, on land purchased from Nicholas Austin. A Loyalist, Austin was one of many settlers who looked to expand their wealth north of the border. He set up a grist- and saw- mill at what was then known as the Outlet, and is now la Pointe Merry.
Take some time to look at the banners lining the path and read the quotations on them. Make your way to a picnic table or bench. Choose a quotation and offer a creative response. This response can be a written text, a photograph, a song, a sound recording, or a drawing – whichever you prefer. Which quotation did you choose, and why? Again, pause your audiowalk if you wish.
With the car park (le Stationnement Cabana) on our right, let’s continue heading towards Mount Orford whilst looking out for the bronze sculpture in the green space amongst the trees to the left of the paved path. There is so much variety in fiction and creative nonfiction on and of l’Estrie and the Eastern Townships, from literary fiction to counter-cultural writing, chick lit to science fiction, murder-mysteries to memoir. This literature offers us hundreds of ways of thinking about and experiencing the region. Subverting popular assumptions about regional literature as parochial and introspective, twenty-first century fiction and creative nonfiction is ambitious, frequently joyful – even when dealing with grisly topics – , and outward-looking. One commonality in the hundreds of books set in the region is an attachment to place; an attachment I have come to share through the pleasures of reading, talking, and walking in cafes and along lake fronts, recording studios and woodlands.
I wait for the bus in the dusk, in front of the tiny cafe where the only drinks on sale are filter coffee, soda, and Red Rose tea. I choose tea, and the waitress sets it down, points with her little finger to the sugar and cream. I look in vain for milk but don’t dare ask for some. The waitress is already serving poutine to another customer. My outsider-ness must be obvious to the regulars, but I’m accepted without comment. No-one stares.
Script is written and read by Ceri Morgan, with extracts from oral history interviews undertaken by Eleni Polychronakos with current and former residents of the region.
The French translation is by Margeret Rigaud.
Sound is by Philip Lichti, with additional contributions from Kelcey Swain and Yannick Guéguen.
The script for the audio-walk was recorded at Birmingham Podcast Studios, UK, and engineered by Paul Hadsley.
The audio-walk and associated research are supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellowship. There is a digital map linked to this project, which features readings by selected authors of extracts of novels and memoirs set in l’Estrie and the Eastern Townships. Like this walk, the map only represents a small percentage of the hundreds of texts set in the region, offering a partial glimpse of the broad range of literary landscapes available.
Thanks to the project’s consultants, Rachel Bouvet, Julien Bourbeau, and Cheryl Gosselin.
Thanks to la Traversée, atelier de géopoétique, la Ville de Magog (Section patrimoine et culture), and la Maison Merry, with special thanks to Anne Brigitte Renaud and Marie Lemonnier.
Thank you to le Conseil des Abénakis d’Odanak/Abenaki Council of Odanak for corrections to elements of the script.
Thanks to writers participating directly in the project for their words, expertise, and generosity.
Thanks to participants who kindly shared their knowledge and experiences of the region via oral history interviews.
Thanks to Eleni Polychronakos, research assistant to the project.
Thanks to Sarah Burgoyne, discussions with whom helped shape the form of the audio-walk.
This walk was designed during an unusually mild late autumn, and scripted and revised in early and mid-summer. It may feel like a dream during wintry months.
I am grateful to all writers who have written about l’Estrie and the Eastern Townships, offering me many months and years of happy reading.
Finally, thanks to the residents of l’Estrie and the Eastern Townships, for making me feel so at home whilst overseas.
Abbott, Louise, ‘The Life and Times of a Water Baby’, in Water Lines: New Writing from the Eastern Townships of Quebec, ed. by Angela Leuck (Georgeville, QC: Studio Georgeville, 2019), pp.77-81
Bérard, Cassie, Qu’il est bon de se noyer (Montréal : Éditions Druide, 2016)
Clerson, David, En rampant (Montréal : Heliotrope, 2016)
Coupal, Denis, Blindshot (Montreal: Linda Leith Publishing, 2019)
Fonda, Nick, Murder on the Orford Mountain Railway (Montreal: Baraka Books, 2021)
Hebert, Anne, Kamouraska (Paris : Éditions du Seuil, 1970)
Keightley, Liane, ‘Triton and Tex’, ‘Ten-Cent Packs’, in Seven Openings of the Head (Montreal: Conundrum Press, 2007)
Kesteman, Jean-Pierre, « Ruralité et mondialisation dans les Cantons-de-l’Est du Québec. Le regard de l’historien, » Journal of Eastern Townships Studies, 29-30 (2006), 5-20.
Laperrière, Guy, Les Cantons-de-l’Est (Québec, QC : Presses de l’Université Laval, 2009)
Lessard, Robert, Pat, mineur d’Asbestos (Sherbrooke, QC : Éditions Naaman, 1987)
Messier, William S., Dixie (Montréal : Éditions Marchand de feuilles, 2013)
Morgan, Ceri, Writing, Talking and Walking Québec’s Eastern Townships (London: The British Library, 2017)
Morin, Alexie, Ouvrir son cœur (Montréal : Le Quartanier, 2018)
Myre-Bisaillon, Julie, Des réguines et des hommes (Montréal : Hurtubise, 2018)
Nicol, Patrick, Les Manifestations (Montréal : Le Quartanier, 2019)
Penny, Louise, The Cruellest Month (London: Headline, 2007)
_____, Still Life (London: Headline, 2005)
Plomer, Michèle, Dragonville (Montréal : Éditions Marchand de feuilles, 2011-13)
Porter, Sue, ‘Walking in someone else’s shoes’, Walking Studies Today workshop, Keele University, 26 May 2015
Renaud, Anne Brigitte, et Michèle Plomer, À l’eau (Magog, QC : Éditions Chauve-souris, 2020)
Roy, Nathalie, Ça peut pas être pire (Montréal : Éditions Libre Expression, 2016)
Seymour, Johanne, Le cri du cerf (Outremont, QC : Éditions Libre Expression, 2005)
Toé, François Thierry, « Trame historique du textile à Coaticook (1971 à nos jours) », Journal of Eastern Townships Studies, 46 (2016), 59-74
This work is supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellowship [grant number: AH/T006250/1]. Ethics approval number: 0341
