In August of 2024, I had the unexpected privilege of spending a month away from my home in the UK, visiting Quebec City for a writing residency at the Maison de la littérature.

I’d visited the region years before and spent a few days in Quebec City itself, and while I couldn’t remember any details, I did remember that it was beautiful. But even knowing this, its beauty still surprised me when I arrived. There was so much to explore, so many streets and buildings and landscapes to discover, that it seemed almost criminal to be spending hours on end staring at a Word document on my laptop.

But writing – specifically, writing my second novel – was what I was there to do. I had never had so much time in which to do it, and it seemed equally criminal not to use that time wisely. So I tried my best to strike a balance between making progress with my novel and being fully present with my surroundings.

I spent much of my residency rotating between favourite writing spots, whether indoors (the Maison de la littérature itself, the Bibliothèque Claire Martin, the Bibliothèque Gabrielle Roy, a very particular armchair in Second Cup at Place d’Youville, in the corner by the window) or outdoors (the Passage Olympia, a picnic bench on the Plaines d’Abraham, the courtyard of the Musée des Beaux-Arts, the park by the ferry terminal in Lévis). Some days I just put my laptop in my bag and set off with no particular destination in mind, stopping to write wherever it seemed I could sit for a while undisturbed.

Writing is one of my favourite ways to spend a day, but my other favourite is walking. And so, when I wasn’t doing one, I was doing the other. Despite not having a drivers’ licence, I managed to walk in some magnificent landscapes outside the city – mostly thanks to the author Jean Désy, a friend of the Maison de la littérature who took me out to the mountains on a hike. We passed through lush green forest and up a rocky path beside a waterfall, eventually breaking through some undergrowth onto the narrow beach of a mountain lake. The lake was surrounded by trees, its surface gently rippled by the breeze. We took Jean’s canoe out for a paddle and did not see another human soul.

When my partner Roberto visited for the last week of my residency, Jean took us on a tour of the Ile d’Orléans, showing us its wild and beautiful northernmost tip: thick forest giving way to a wide rocky beach that looked out across the Saint Lawrence River and towards the forested hills of the Cap Tourmente. Later that week, Roberto and I took the shuttle bus to the Parc Nationale de la Jacques-Cartier. We hiked among unfamiliar trees; gradually relinquished our European nervousness of encountering a bear; picnicked overlooking a wooded valley; cooled our feet post-hike in the wide, shallow river.

Walks of this kind need no explanation. Their value is obvious. But when in unfamiliar city I also find myself embarking on less explicable adventures, irrationally long and inefficient urban hikes that deliberately eschew buses and cycle hire schemes even though – or rather because – they would get me to my destination in less than half the time. It’s fairly predictable: at some point I will choose a place I wish to see, and then decide to walk there, no matter how far away it is. Exploring the in-between space that separates it from me; learning in detail how its position over there relates to mine, over here; finding out what the streets on a map look like from a ground’s-eye-view – once the idea is in my head, these things seem suddenly urgent and necessary. And so off I go, on a mission to stitch together the city in my mind, to understand it as a continuum rather than a collection of singular locations isolated from each other like islands. It makes perfect sense to me, spending hours wandering unremarkable streets in service to this project of internal map-making, but more often than not I don’t share my plans to do so because I suspect people will look at me, confused, and say: ‘Why?’

On one such trip, I walked from my apartment in Old Quebec to the Montmorency Falls, via the Domaine des Maizerets and then along the TransCanada Trail. The idea of joining a path that traversed the whole of Canada from one side to the other was irresistible to me, even though I could see from the map that this particular section of it bordered a highway for miles. It wasn’t the most charming thing in Quebec City, to be sure, and as I walked I could vividly imagine the bemused – perhaps pained – looks I’d receive from locals if they found out that this was how I was choosing to spend my time in their otherwise uniquely beautiful city: traipsing miles along a bike lane in the glaring sun, cars rushing by a few metres away.

And yet there is value, I think, in imprinting something on your memory in this way. You remember places you’ve walked in because you remember how walking there made you feel. Hot, in this case; on guard against sunburn and dehydration; amused by, yet committed to, my own mild lunacy. When I got to the Falls I realised I’d visited them before, on my previous trip to Quebec. But the memory was hazy, and over the years it had detached itself from its geographical location, so that the waterfall might have been anywhere. I don’t remember anything else of that day – the bus ride to get there, where I went afterwards, what I was doing beforehand. But this time, I inscribed the route there and back into my muscles. I have a feeling I won’t forget the Falls so easily again.

My walk back took me through suburbia. Although I was happy to have seen the Falls, which cannot fail to inspire awe, I was happier, in some ways, to see the suburbs. Sometimes, when visiting an unfamiliar place, the pockets of humdrum ordinariness make a bigger impression than the greatest hits. Quiet residential neighbourhoods may seem utterly unextraordinary to the people who live in them, but to an outsider they are full of intrigue. To my European eye, the suburbs I passed through were quintessentially North American: detached houses, a car in every driveway, spacious lawns, no sidewalks. It’s an aesthetic at once familiar to me, because I see it all the time in films, and unfamiliar, because it isn’t at all like the residential neighbourhoods in the UK. To be immersed, in three dimensions, in surroundings I am used to seeing in two, has its own, slightly uncanny pleasure. But I am also conditioned to expect the English language in such places, spoken with an accent unlike my own. Hearing and seeing French instead – a language I associate so inextricably with mainland Europe – turned my expectations on their head. It was strange and defamiliarizing in the best way.

When I arrived home after a thirty-kilometre round trip, I peeled off my hiking socks and discovered they’d given me a novel injury: friction sores, which I inspected with pride. That evening I basked in the weariness that descends after a day spent putting one foot in front of the other. It is, Frédéric Gros writes in A Philosophy of Walking, ‘a radiant weariness’. It brings with it the deep satisfaction of having allowed your body the time and space to do nothing but the things it was built for, the things it evolved to do.

And the next day, once again, I wrote.

Walking and writing have long been activities that go hand in hand. Think of Virginia Woolf stepping out in London like Mrs Dalloway, Baudelaire flaneur-ing around Paris, Rimbaud wandering across France. As Robert Macfarlane observes in The Old Ways, ‘the compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature – a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.’

In some ways the two seem like opposites, one physical and mobile, the other mental and sedentary. But both are journeys, explorations, unfolding in time, wending their way towards an end point without ever truly being completed. ‘As the pen rises from the page between words,’ Macfarlane writes, ‘so the walker’s feet rise and fall between paces … Writing and wayfaring are continuous activities, a running stitch, a persistence of the same seam or stream.’

In Quebec City, I wrote one story and walked many others. And these stories mingle and interweave in my mind and my heart and my body, in more ways than I know how to articulate.

Kate Brook

Kate Brook is an author based in London. Her first novel, Not Exactly What I Had in Mind, was published in 2022 by Corvus (UK) and Dutton (US), with German and Spanish translations forthcoming. Her short-form writing has been published in LitHub, The Fiction Pool and The Real Story. I have a PhD in French Literature and Visual Art from King’s College London, and have worked as a bookseller and in publishing.