Louise Penny Transported Me Home When I Needed it Most

I’m a proud Townshipper. Penny knows what makes the region special

Sep 28, 2022

Some housekeeping: our three winners from last week’s drawing are Kate from DC, Tasha from CA, and Nancy from MN. If you can email your info to: notesfromthreepines@substack.com we’ll see about getting you your pencils!

We’re so excited to kick off Notes From Three Pines with this essay from novelist — and Eastern Townshipper — Amy Tector. You can purchase her novel The Foulest Things, out this week (!), here. — Aya and Elizabeth

My first month in Brussels, it rained constantly and the winter sun set by 4 PM. We’d moved to Belgium for my husband’s job two weeks after our wedding, which meant I was a newlywed in a dark and strange country where I knew no one. I was homesick and unnerved as I tried to navigate a new city, untangle the Flemish language, and figure out how to grocery shop without angering old Belgian ladies (there are a lot of unspoken rules in a Belgian grocery store — many related to cheese).

That’s when my mother’s care package arrived. In addition to the usual candy and printed photographs (2006 was the olden days!), she sent along a book by a local author, Louise Penny, who was making a bit of a splash.

I loved Still Life for all the usual reasons: Warmly drawn characters, delicious descriptions of food, just enough literary allusions to make me feel smart and a clever plot that kept me guessing. However, what eased the lonely, disorienting ache I felt as I started my new life was the setting, the village of Three Pines.

Still Life: Penny, Louise: 9780312541538: Amazon.com: Books

Penny infuses her fictionalized (and — despite the death count — romanticized) Townships’ hamlet with the history, geography, economy and character of the real region, the one I call home.

Penny’s evocation of dirt roads leading to dairy farms, quaint, flower-filled villages, rolling hills, carpets of forests and the vibrant mix of French and English cultures was deeply familiar and deeply comforting. At a time when I was half a world away, her words brought me home. She captured the pride I feel in being a Townshipper.

Three Pines is a fictional spot and Penny makes that clear by sprinkling a little magic over its setting. You can’t pin down its location on any map, and the village is only found by those who are meant to stumble across it. This fuzziness can’t conceal the fact that Three Pines is based on a real place: Quebec’s Eastern Townships. Now it’s true, “The Eastern Townships”’ as an official designation no longer exists. The provincial government scrapped it as an administrative name in 1987, undoubtedly due to the sometimes prickly linguistic division between French and English that enlivens most aspects of Quebec society.

Picture shows a country road with the sun shining through the trees and a blue sky — Stagecoach Road, South Bolton (Courtesy of Amy Tector)

Still, the idea of the Eastern Townships remains important amongst the community. There’s even an annual “Townshippers’ Day” when, in non-Covid times, community members come together to feast on the region’s agricultural bounty, catch up with neighbors and argue about politics. Townshippers are connected through family, friendship, schools, hospitals, weather, geography, history and livelihood. It is this sense of familiarity, comfort and neighborliness that makes Three Pines, and Penny’s books, so appealing.

The Eastern Townships are the home of the Abenaki First Nation and were subsequently settled by Americans headed north to escape the Revolutionary War (In Canada, these settlers are known as Loyalists for their fealty to the British crown). The eponymous three pines of the novels served as a marker to tell Loyalists they were now safe.

British and French farmers soon followed, all looking for good land. Historically the area’s main industries were dairy farming and logging. Nowadays, the dairy farms still thrive, but vineyards and tourism play an important role. You are as likely to see a group of tightly packed cyclists on a country road as a farmer driving his herd to a new pasture.

The region’s natural beauty and proximity to Montreal have meant that it was always a refuge for wealthy city-dwellers looking to escape the hustle and bustle for clear lakes, great ski hills and a lot of peace and quiet. The pandemic has only increased this trend and the area is changing once again. What all this means is that the region is a mixture of French and English, rural simplicity and urban cosmopolitanism, sleepy farming communities and expanding housing developments. The novels take us to each of these locales and bring to life this ongoing change.

Penny roots her story in this region, making Three Pines itself, with its village green and sense of an active (if murderous) community a vital main character. I can attest that the Eastern Townships does indeed boast thriving bookstores, lively theatrical productions, stunning art installations, quirky antiques, gorgeous gardens, delicious restaurants and some kooky characters. It also has worries about over-development, anxieties about water table levels, angst over the opioid crisis and struggles with reconciling its colonial past with Indigenous reality.

Picture shows a country church and a blue sky with a pond in the foreground and thick grass covering thee ground — United Church at the Mill Pond in Knowlton, Quebec (Courtesy of Amy Tector)

These more prosaic concerns don’t grab center stage in Penny’s writing. Instead, she takes the best of those elements and weaves a new place. She celebrates what’s wonderful about the region: the stunning landscape of hills, lakes and forests; the thrill of the French/English cultural mix; the humor and hardiness of the people who live there, the abundance of the locally grown food and the skill of those who cook it.

Some might argue that Penny paints a rose-colored view of this real place, but I think it’s a question of focus. As I learned in Belgium during that rainy, disorienting first year, an author’s ability to summon a place — to conjure the sights, smells, tastes and, yes, “vibe” of a specific location — is incredibly powerful. Penny evokes the Townships, but creates something entirely new. In bringing Three Pines to life she has heightened its reality.

If you’ve fallen in love with the Townships thanks to Three Pines, allow me to offer some further reading suggestions:

Solomon Gursky Was Here by Mordecai Richler. Richler is one of the giants of Canadian literature and was the Eastern Townships most famous author until, ahem, Louise Penny. This sweeping novel makes a few pit stops in the Townships along with London, the Arctic, the prairies and Montreal.

The Granby Liar by Maurice Crossfield. This is an excellent mystery set in a grittier 1980s Eastern Townships. If you want your Townships a little darker, check out this first book in what Crossfield calls his “Townships Noir” series. I hear a sequel is coming!

Linebound by Peter Turner. Linebound is a tender and funny story of a man dealing with loss and life in a joyful and elegiac ode to the Townships.

It Was Only a Movie by John Lebaron This volume includes vignettes about growing up in the Eastern Townships amongst other things. It’s filled with funny, touching and thoughtful takes on life, politics and hockey. (Full disclosure: I wrote the foreword).

Have you been to the Eastern Townships? Do you want to visit?

Louise Penny Transported Me Home When I Needed it Most

I’m a proud Townshipper. Penny knows what makes the region special

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