The Future with Catherine Leroux

Catherine Leroux is the author of three highly praised novels and an innovative sequence of short stories. Her first novel, La marche en forêt (2011), was a finalist for Quebec’s Booksellers’ Prize. Her bestselling second novel, The Party Wall, a translation of Le mur mitoyen, won the France–Quebec Prize in the original and, in translation, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Dublin IMPAC Award. In the United States, The Party Wall was a prestigious Indies Introduce selection. Leroux’s story sequence, Madame Victoria, won Quebec’s Adrienne Choquette Prize and was a finalist for the Booksellers’ Prize. Her novel, L’Avenir, won the Jacques Brossard Prize and was a finalist for the Imaginary Horizons Prize. Catherine Leroux works as a translator and editor in Montreal. She was awarded the 2019 Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation. L’Avenir has now been translated into English by Susan Ouriou as The Future. Published by Biblioasis, The Future was released in the fall of 2023.  It is now short listed for CBC's Canada Reads championed by author Heather O'Neill.
https://biblioasisbookshop.com/item/N8KJ1y9ScrwyM7ez4DnvLw/lists/L9Zzzb3Vt5iU
https://www.cbc.ca/books/meet-the-canada-reads-2024-contenders-1.7073689

Transcript

Welcome to All Write in Sin City, a podcast about writers and writing in the Windsor-Detroit region. Your podcasters today are Irene Moore Davis, author, educator, and local historian. Sarah Jarvis, former bookseller, publishing rep, and literary festival chair. 

And me, Kim Conklin, Windsor-based writer and filmmaker. Thank you for joining us. Catherine Leroux is the author of three highly praised novels and an innovative sequence of short stories. 

Her first novel, La Marche en Forêt, was a finalist for Quebec's Booksellers Prize. Her best-selling second novel, The Party Wall, a translation of Le Mieux Mitoyen, won the France-Quebec Prize in the original and in translation was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Dublin Impact Award. In the United States, The Party Wall was a prestigious Indies Introduce selection. 

Leroux's story sequence, Madame Victoria, won Quebec's Adrienne Choquet Prize and was a finalist for the Booksellers Prize. Her novel, L'Avenir, won the Jacques Brossard Prize and was a finalist for the Imaginary Horizons Prize. Catherine Leroux works as a translator and editor in Montreal. 

She was awarded the 2019 Governor General's Literary Award for translation. L'Avenir has now been translated into English by Susan Oryu as The Future. Published by Biblioasis, The Future was released in the fall of 2023. 

Welcome, Catherine. Thank you so much for having me. In an alternate history of Detroit, the city was never surrendered to the U.S. That's the premise. 

The novel is set in a place still called Fort Detroit. It has some similarities to the real-life Detroit, such as pollution, poverty, urban decay, and the legacy of racism, but there are also some major differences. What inspired you to write this novel? It really, I would be happy to tell you that I had this grand idea for an alternate history, you know, the drawing from the French past of Detroit, but really it sort of happened by a strange detour where I initially chose to write about Detroit. 

I became interested in the, you know, the situation that Detroit was in in the present and what I felt like it meant for all cities around the world, but I had written a few novels, including The Party Wall, that took place where the characters would theoretically not be Francophones. They lived in the States, they lived in Mexico, and so I had to write dialogue in a way that felt very neutral to me because I didn't, it didn't make sense to give them any sort of like colorful local expressions because, well, they're not speaking local French or, you know, or French from friends, French, they just, they speak, they're in this sort of linguistic no man's land is what I mean, and when I started becoming interested in Detroit, I told myself, oh no, you're doing it again, you're choosing a world where your characters are not going to be Francophones and you're going to have this, again, this weird linguistic constraint, and then I thought, well, wait a minute, I could make them French, after all, it could have happened, and then I started digging in the fine point of the history and when things flipped to the other side and became, you know, when the city became American and it seemed to me that it could very well have gone another way and, you know, the whole time I was visiting Windsor and Detroit, I kept hearing the same thing where it's weird because Detroit is actually north of Windsor, so that makes no sense, so it, more and more it felt like, like the natural literary thing to do, you know, so that's how, that's how it happened. And this Detroit that you imagined in this book is a result of some really interesting twists on actual Detroit history. 

You've imagined, as you mentioned, how Detroit would have developed if the French had maintained control of it all along. To reconstruct history in this way, you have to know something about the authentic history you're reimagining. Can you share a little bit about the research that was involved with this project? I read a lot of books for starters, that's how I became acquainted with the history, because I'm not, I'm not from the area, some of my family, my paternal grandparents were from, were Franco-Ontarians, but not from the Essex-Windsor area, they were closer to Ottawa, so I have no family there, so I just started reading everything I could get my hands on, but then I found some historians that were willing to talk to me, and that really was the turning point in my world building process. 

Guillaume Teasdale is an expert in the history of the French communities in this area, and I just, you know, had him on the phone and was like, well, what do you think the city would look like if it had remained Francophone? And he told me, and I wrote frantically, like everything that he was saying, he told me that he felt like it would be a bigger city than Quebec City, for instance, he thought that it would be the second biggest Francophone city on the continent, and so from that, from that assertion, that's how I built Detroit, it was not going to be like, you know, like a back town or anything like that, it was going to be a metropolis, but a French one. I also had the chance to sit down with your very own Irene Moore Davis, who helped me to speculate other aspects of this fictional city, so I'm incredibly grateful for these conversations that I had with historians, because it's one thing to know the history, but it takes a real expert to be able to speculate and sort of like extrapolate and use their imagination and knowledge to help you figure out what this city that you're imagining could look like. The book pays close attention to landscapes, nature, flora, and fauna. 

In the settings you've imagined, downtown Fort Detroit is a place of deserted monuments and empty buildings, whereas most of the action in this novel happens amid a very different scenery. Can you tell us a little bit about the focus on nature in your book, particularly the Riviera Rouge and the landscape that surrounds it? Yeah, writing about nature, writing about urban nature was at the very, is the very essence of this project. That's what I had in mind before I even knew that I wanted to write about Detroit. 

I became really sensitive to the nature in my own urban neighborhood and the grew sort of like willy-nilly if nobody was, you know, paying attention to it. And to me, this was about painting a picture about the resilience of nature and its ability to thrive and survive and reproduce in the most adverse of conditions. I think that's something that is very comforting and maybe we need to think about these comforting elements in this day and age.

And you're right to point out that I sort of left downtown alone because I figured, you know, if we're in a city, my Fort Detroit is in much worse shape than the actual city of Detroit. And if we have people that there's just nowhere to buy food anymore, there's not that many people in the city, there's no public transit, they're just sort of really left to their own device. Would you want to be downtown or would you want to be somewhere where you could have a garden? And the urban farming initiatives that actually exist in Detroit were a huge inspiration. 

I met with some of those people and I wanted that to be central but also not the only thing. So, for me, there's a clear distinction between those gardens and those farms and those people that are creating this, that are cultivating these plants and these things there and also the vegetation and the fauna that just sort of like comes up on its own and takes over. Because there's still a distinction between what is absolutely wild and spontaneous and what is cultivated and domesticated. 

And the Rouge, you asked a question about the Rouge River, I just remembered. I guess because there's a community of children living in a way that's completely independent from the adult world and I wanted to give them a place where they could hide and where they could really be in nature in a way that the neighborhoods and the houses and the smaller parks didn't allow. And that's before I even set foot in Detroit. 

I started researching and I saw that the Rouge Park was there and that it was big and I love rivers, I live by a river. I think they're so meaningful and important in a very practical way because they allow fishing and transportation, but also in a symbolic way. So I immediately knew that I wanted to have their little camp there. 

And then when I finally went to Detroit, my first stop was that park. I went to Rouge Park with Dan Wells, my editor and his wife. And we're just driving around and at some point they said, well, we should stop and walk around. 

And we started walking on a path and I decided to leave the path to see what the actual sort of like woods were like and could there be children there? Could there be a tent? And I walked for maybe one minute just in the woods and I ended up in a spot that was exactly identical to what I had imagined. And I had started writing about actually the ravine where the children live in the book. So that was kind of a magical moment. 

And I like, I took a piece of bark and I still have it. I felt like it was lucky. Amazing. 

The dialogue in this book is very interesting. You have developed a special patois for the imagined residents of Fort Detroit. And then, of course, those unique language patterns have been translated into the English. 

Why was it important to you that the characters in and around Fort Detroit should have their own dialect? Initially, in the first drafts, the dialogue was very similar to the way I speak French and French is spoken around me here in Montreal and in Quebec. And after this first draft, I started looking at the dialogue and thinking, well, that doesn't make sense because people in Saint-Boniface don't speak the same French than I speak here. And people in the Maritimes speak a completely different kind of French. 

And it felt not only wrong, but also sort of disrespectful. So I decided to change it. And I partly used my imagination or what I know about the way English and French sort of like merge together in particularly bilingual areas of the country.

And then I started also doing research because there's this wonderful ethnologist called Marcel Beneteau who wrote extensively about the kind of French that's spoken in southern Ontario and that was spoken in Michigan back in the day. And he actually has like little dictionaries that he wrote with special expressions and words, vocabulary that I hadn't heard anywhere before. So I started drawing from that as well. 

It was important. I'm really interested in language and especially in dialect and the way French or English or any languages sort of varies from, you know, if you're in the mountains, if you're by the ocean, if you're in this city, if you're on the other side of the country. And I'm very sensitive to that and I find it beautiful and fascinating. 

So it became essential to me to sort of do justice to that. It really is unique to this area. Yeah. 

And also unique is the character Gloria. She's very memorable. Is there something about her that sticks long after the novel ends, isn't there? How does this character come to you and what phase in the process of your imagining this story did Gloria emerge as the central character? She was going to be the center all along. 

Gloria is one of the aspects of the book that required the less work because the first thing I knew about the actual story once I had figured out the setting was that it was going to be Gloria's quest looking for her granddaughters. That's the thread that holds a whole novel together. And Gloria sort of, I don't know how that happens. 

Sometimes you really have to work at a character. They feel one-dimensional. You have to add things. 

You have to think about them. You have to find their voice. Gloria came fully formed. 

I knew exactly what she looked like. I knew how she spoke. I knew what her personality was like, what her vibe was, what her pace was. 

So I just had to write it down as if it was as if she was a real person that I was describing. And I got really, really lucky in that way because that just makes everything so easy and everything that this particular character touches becomes alive because she's alive. So I knew that she was going to be obviously heartbroken, but deal with her heartbreak in a way that's very soft. 

She has a hard time accessing her anger. And she's quite passive. And I think she's made passive by what she's going through.

She lost a child, but she's also just a passive person to start with. And the interesting thing, and then the thing that was a little hard about her actually, was setting her in motion. And that's why her neighbors become so important because especially her immediate neighbor, Eunice, is the opposite. 

She's a force of nature. She's just like an engine. And so she's the engine that pushes Gloria into action. 

But then once Gloria is in motion, then she can help Eunice in a different way. So between these two women, there's a back and forth that started existing. And that was really wonderful to write about.

You also tackle urban decay, poverty, violence, crime, and struggle. They are all present in this novel, yet there's still tremendous hope, optimism, and beauty. How important was it to you to ensure that some hopefulness and some light remained at the heart of this story? I always want to quote this line by Albert Camus, and I never do it justice. 

I should just find the actual line and learn it properly. But it's something about how seeing things in just black or white is always wrong. So it's wrong to be overly optimistic and say, everything's going to be fine. 

Everything is wonderful all the time. We all get along. That's terrible. 

That's not right. But it's also wrong to say that things are just dark and awful and that nothing's ever going to get better. That's also a mistake, a factual mistake. 

That's not how the world is. And I think I've been saying this a lot as I'm touring this book. I think the stories we tell matter because they become like self-fulfilling prophecies. 

So I think if we look at the issues that our world is facing and that our communities are facing, and we say, well, we're done. Nothing's ever going to get better. Then it's not. 

And if we look at the possibilities for hope, which are real, they're not fictional. There are things to hope for. There are acts of incredible kindness and generosity happening every day. 

If we look at those and magnify them a little bit, then we start believing that and we start acting according to that story. The book is dedicated to my children. I didn't make it a secret that it was born out of my concern for the people that I put in this world. 

It was impossible for me to write this book without hope. It's important to acknowledge all the awful stuff that's happening. It's real. 

It's true. And it has to be told. But it's also important, I think, to acknowledge and to create a space for hope. 

So when you're not writing, you are a translator and an editor. How involved were you or weren't you in the process of translating Lavenier into the English version of the future? I tried to brace myself. I can be very invasive with translators because my English is OK. 

I'm not perfectly bilingual in the sense that I could never write a book in English or translate a book into English. But I have a lot of opinions, nevertheless. I have tortured my previous translator with my opinions in the past.

That was Laser Letter Handler. He was incredibly generous and gracious about it. So I promised myself that I would hold back a little bit. 

I think all this intrusiveness that I had in the past was maybe also just I wasn't used to this strange experience of seeing your work in another language. And now I'm used to it. So I didn't actually have that much to say about Susan's translation. 

She's also a genius, I think. She did such extraordinary work. I sort of handed the book to her and thought, what is she going to do with this? What is she going to do with the language that I created for the children and for the grownups living in Detroit in French? She was so creative with it. 

I think the dialogue in English is extremely funny and convincing. So I read it all and I gave her a few notes, but I trusted her so much that it wasn't that much. The translation has just been released here, as we mentioned in the introduction. 

Have you received any feedback from actual Detroiters or how has it been received, do you think? I received feedback from someone who grew up in Windsor, but had to go to Detroit pretty much every week for school or something like that. And he's the only person that commented on it. So I'm very curious to know how Detroiters are receiving it, because obviously, I did my homework, I did my research, but I'm not a Detroiter, so I have no idea how it's perceived, really. 

Are you working on anything new now in your fiction writing? Oh, good. Can you tell us a little about it? Yeah, sure. I have a book that's going to come out in French in the spring, in April, it's going to be called Peuple de Verre. 

I don't know how Suzanne, hopefully Suzanne will translate it. I guess roughly it's nation of glass or glass nation or people. See, I'm a bad translator. 

And this time I wrote about community again, but from a very different angle with a very different kind of voice. I wrote it in the first person and my main character is quite, she can be kind of brazen and abrasive a little bit. And this time I wanted to explore the topic of home and homelessness. 

And, you know, I think everyone living in a major city right now is like concerned about the housing crisis. And I am too. So that's sort of what drove me to this subject. 

Okay. Would you like to read a little bit of your work for our listeners? Absolutely. I'm going to read a passage from the children's world.

The only thing to know really is that all the kids in this world have nicknames. They don't have real, real names. And this one, well, this one never comes down on the ground. 

This one lives in trees. Whale watches the scene from on high, the only possible viewpoint. From the ground doesn't work. 

Not with a body that has always been too heavy, too cumbersome for as far back as whale can remember. But all creatures experience grace in their element. And whale has found it in the trees. 

The ground is an unstable place, especially with summer's approach when heat causes the red of the river to rise and the camp turns into a wasp's nest where blows rain down and teeth bite out of the blue. Whale is afraid of fights, of hurting others, afraid of sweating, crying, getting murdered in the spongy earth and seeing folds of flesh invaded by dark humors. So the treetops have become home. 

A hammock, ropes, a platform and pulleys, a spyglass so keeping watch warrants the height, though its lens mostly picks up the parade of caterpillars, the complicated choreography of birds, the smoke from fires that twines around branches. And off in the distance, downstream along the Rouge, other children like them out near Ilgus and beyond, on Rivière des Trois, cargo boats disappearing down the elbows of a river as leaden as dead snake, as deep as the tomb of a cyclops. Below the clamor of battle rises, but amid the cool of the branches and the shimmering of leaves, whale hears nothing. 

The silence of the sapwood like a cloister. Reflecting on war, on peace, on what both threatens and protects, imagining what it would be like to take flight, to be reincarnated, to be free of gender or to harbor a novel organ between one's legs, a fig, a chanterelle, a star. Reflecting on how to make this life last forever, to never have to come down from the trees, how to halt the city's encroachment and pull off the feet of never growing up. 

That is what whale ponders from above. The platform creaks under whale's weight, the bark quiver, quivers. Whale can hear the murmur of its sap. 

It's Simon, the maple, insisting that immortality is not for human, telling of the life eternal shared by trees through their roots. And Simon's words flow into whale's heart, words spoken by trees, both distress and illuminate. Thank you so much for joining us, Catherine LaRue.

Thank you very much for having me. Thank you for your questions. Thanks for joining us. 

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