Talking Location With …. Laurie Petrou – ONTARIO

18th June 2022

TalkingLocationWith ... Laurie Petrou, author of Stargazer – ONTARIO

I knew from the moment I conceived of Stargazer that I wanted it to take place at a remote university in Ontario’s cottage country. I was inspired by The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Virgin Suicides, and The Secret History – all books that made place a sly and unavoidable side character. Home, and then, tantalizingly, Away. I wanted to draw out the lazy summer days in a wealthy suburb of Toronto, and also to deeply explore a campus built into the forest. There is something so beautiful and creepy about disappearing to the woods, something about summer camp that engenders friendships that become intimately close very quickly, and are heartbreaking to leave behind. I knew the setting almost as quickly as I saw Diana and Aurelle, the main characters, in my imagination.

I went to summer camp in Huntsville as a child, and have spent a lot of time at cottages in the Haliburton, Gravenhurst, and Muskoka areas. My family spends a week every summer near Haliburton, on Koshlong Lake, at YMCA Wanakita Family Camp. It is my favourite family event of the year. There are a number of small details in the book that I borrowed from Wanakita – the polar dip with the large gong bell at the old dining hall, the waterfront, the enormous evergreen trees, the wood-burnt lettering on the signs. These things are typical of most camp settings, and have been living in my mind, as they say, rent free for years. The Haliburton area boasts beautiful sunsets with pine tree silhouettes straight from a Tom Thompson painting.

The lake features largely in Stargazer, as it is positioned between the campus and the Martin cottage, where the girls have taken up residence. Diana’s memories of the lake and its powerful potential are never far from her thoughts as they ‘commute’ back and forth by canoe. There are many lakes in cottage country, most with a similar visage of cottages all around the edges, their docks stretching into the water, their lights and the sounds, in the evening quiet, stretching almost too easily across the lake, betraying the activities of the residents. I was curious about how the residents of the Rocky Barrens cottages and homes would get along, or not, with the students of RBU, and while there is not a lot in the book about this relationship, I chuckled to myself imagining a backlog of noise complaints about the students. In my mind, I see Koshlong Lake, where it is easy to hear and see across the water, and where there are small ‘islands’ of trees dotted within the lake, providing visual interest and opportunity for exploring by water.

In doing research into where I wanted the book to take place, I stumbled upon the Torrance Barrens, which greatly inspired the invention of Rocky Barrens. The Torrance Barrens is a conservation area west of Gravenhurst, and became the first designated Dark Sky Reserve in 1999, and local activists fought to enact bylaws protecting the spot from light pollution. There is a website run by ‘The Guardians of the Dark Sky and Barrens’, which I love, as they sound like passionate warriors of the stars. https://www.torrancebarrens.com/  I love the notion of a rocky, barren landscape where people return to watch the stars, and while at one point I used Torrance Barrens itself, I decided I had more opportunities to stretch the truth if Rocky Barrens was merely inspired by the place.

Winter in many parts of Canada can be cruel and punishing, although frankly, the rest of the country finds any complaining on Ontario’s part laughable. But the truth remains that the season is long ‘up north’, and when the snow is deep and the water frozen, there is a ‘if you can’t beat it, join it’ approach to winter in a place where summer and fall are so beloved for their seasonal beauty and activities. I wanted these girls, who hail from a bougie area of Toronto where the snow is regularly cleared for them, to cope with the day to day realities of winter in Muskoka: the clothing, the smells, the challenges of getting from A to B. I wanted to see how weather, in its cold, short days and darkness, played with their moods and actions. I also wanted to introduce winter sport into the narrative, and so Diana competing in the winter Triathlon at RBU gave me an opportunity to put a character whose body is so strong and sure into skates and snowshoes, put her on the lake and racing through the trees.

I love campus novels, and I love camp. What better, I thought, than to combine these two things, and create a campus in the woods? At Family camp, there are many sites for campfires within clusters of cabins throughout the sprawling woods of the property. There is a nighttime tradition, where those gathered around one campfire will shout, in unison, at the top of their lungs, ‘We are campfire Number One, Number One, Number One. Where is Number Two?’ The sound echoes through the woods, ripples across the water, and just when you think no one has heard you, the call comes back: it is campfire Number Two, asking for Number Three. And so we reach out to one another through the trees, as the calls move through the darkness.

Buy Now

LAURIE PETROU

Catch Laurie on Twitter and Insta

Join Team TripFiction on Social Media:

Twitter (@TripFiction), Facebook (@TripFiction.Literarywanderlust), YouTube (TripFiction #Literarywanderlust), Instagram (@TripFiction) and Pinterest (@TripFiction)

Subscribe to future blog posts