Author Catherine Leroux imagines climbing a tree's branches to write inside its head

Leading up to Canada Reads, CBC Arts is bringing you daily essays about where this year's authors write for our series Where I Write. This edition features The Future author Catherine Leroux.

I have always dreamed of writing in a treehouse. A place to overlook life while surrounded by another sort of life. Isolated because of its height and deeply anchored in a longer, more stable time. Trees, like books, are birthed slowly.

I never did have an office in a tree. I wrote on solid ground. In The Future, I created a character who, like Italo Calvino's baron in the trees, never comes down from the canopy. Then, three years ago, I moved into an apartment on the second floor — the best floor given that it was at tree height. More specifically, it was at the height of the crown, a spot that evokes both royalty and the head. The part of the tree that thinks, dreams. The windows of my new home faced the west's bright light and gave onto a huge centuries-old maple that my eldest baptized Grondin. Its enormous limbs were so near that, as I sat on the balcony, I could convince myself I was writing not beside but within its branches, inside its head.

Last April, a sudden ice storm hit Montreal. In the space of a few hours, tons of ice adhered to fences, sidewalks, power lines, tree bark and new buds. At around 3:30 in the afternoon, I heard a crash so loud I thought the earth had split open. It was Grondin. Like thousands of other trees that day, it toppled under the weight of the ice. Through the night, the silver sheen of silence was punctuated by other explosions. Everywhere, crowns and heads fell.

I have never had a desk. I wrote on the dinner table, on the kitchen counter as the soup simmered, on my youngest's tiny bureau overrun by a collection of rocks that grew by the day, in an old armchair when I was tired. I have written on buses, on trains, on planes, in waiting rooms, cafeterias and parks. I write where I can when the mood takes me. Before becoming a novelist and a mother, I was a bit of a nomad. My work has taken on that trait.

In January, I decided to buy myself a desk for the very first time. I chose a narrow one whose height could be adjusted so I could either sit or stand. One on casters since the key to it all may well be my slight wandering. This morning, I stationed the desk by the window, across from the empty space that still holds the shadow and the spirit of Grondin.

Translated by Susan Ouriou

Read this year's Where I Write essays every day this week on CBC Arts and tune in to Canada Reads March 4th-7th, 2024.