A Seedling of Inspiration: How Louise Penny, unknowingly, helped my dreams come true

Have you ever picked up a novel and couldn’t put it down? You would spend hours reading it, enveloped in the characters and the setting; as if you were right there with them until you finally flipped to the last page. That was me with Louise Penny’s Gamache Series… except it wasn’t the first book I couldn’t put down, it was the first three.

Why did I become so invested in a book series… a series where I don’t exactly fit the audience it was intended for? The initial answer is simple. The town that Penny describes in her books, where she based a lot of her setting, was the town I went to school in and spent most of my childhood. I was lucky enough to meet Penny before I even knew who she was. I knew her as a kind woman, a woman who appreciated and respected everyone around her; I got to know her separate from her books. Then her first book landed on my lap when I was in college. What college student reads for pleasure on top of reading for assignments? Me. I was that college student.

Here was a woman who had the purest soul, at least from my perspective and now, here were these amazing books. A New York Times best selling author who lived in the very town that helped me become the person I am today.

Did that mean it was possible for me to become an author? At the time, at 18 years old, I brushed off the idea immediately, I had put that behind me now.

You see. When I was in grade school I only dreamed of becoming an author. There was no other career choice, that is what I wanted to be. At the age of twelve, while all the other twelve-year-old children were using MSN Messenger, learning how webcams worked and opening up their Hotmail accounts for the first time; I was using the internet to look up what unsolicited and solicited meant. I was learning how to write a cover letter and format a manuscript in Microsoft Word. I was sending my children’s stories to publishers around Canada, crossing my tiny fingers that I would be one of the youngest published authors. I wasn’t. I would get letters back, with words of encouragement to continue pursuing my writing, and get back to them when I was older. I didn’t let the rejection ruin my dreams, I just kept trying. I wanted to hold my book, a book I had written and published in my hands.

That dream stayed with me for a while, but started to disappear as secondary school began to get more serious. In Quebec, when you reach the age of fifteen, you have to make choices for your future, courses that will help you pursue the career you want. It is a lot of pressure on a fifteen year old. I started to think that writing was an unrealistic goal to pursue, that I had to go towards a career that was practical and reliable.

Then, a few years later Still Life landed on my college student lap. Written by a woman who I had met, who I knew, who lived in the small town that I grew up in. It planted the seed, but the seed didn’t grow for almost a decade; nevertheless, it was still there… waiting.

I graduated from University and started the realistic, practical and reliable job that everyone told me I was born to do and something was off, something wasn’t right. That was when a year of anguish brushed through my life. Illness, health scares, and a close family member taking his own life. I felt broken. I felt like there were pieces of me everywhere, trying to make everyone feel better, but forgetting about myself. So… I started therapy, and it was at that moment that my pieces started to come back together. I wasn’t happy, but I recognized it, and I made the choice to make myself happy again. I became a refurbished version of myself, ABIGAIL 2.0. That is when the seed, from the first Louise Penny book, began to sprout.

By January 2020, I independently published my own book. I was making my dreams happen because, in my mind, there was no other way. When the first copy of the book… my book, came in the mail, I held onto tightly. That twelve-year-old girl was beaming, her dream was coming true, she was holding onto her own work, a book that she had written.

That sprout slowly turned into an Odoratus, a sweet pea flower that bloomed, a blissful departure from the life it once lived, where lessons were learned and progress was made. Growing into a new life, with new lessons, full of excitement and authenticity.

At the time I didn’t realize what that Louise Penny seed was for. I didn’t even know that it had been planted, but almost a decade later it changed my life. It inspired me to become the person I always wanted to be, to make my own dreams come true. To be happy.