Amélie Panneton's new novel explores Acadian roots and the end of the Maple Spring

Amélie Panneton grew up in Campbellton, New Brunswick, in a house backed against forest. She remembers waking at night to mice in the roof—comforting and strange at once. That childhood image lives in her third novel, Chevrotine, where the protagonist Geneviève is haunted by ghosts of baby mice nesting in her sink.

Geneviève has returned to Acadia after the 2012 student strike ended, disillusioned. She works behind the counter of an unpopular convenience store in her hometown, trying to heal wounds left by anger at never really knowing her mother, who died from mental health struggles. The novel explores major Acadian events, including the historic February 1968 strike.

Panneton, 40, now works at Montreal's Office to Combat Homelessness. She spent two years in Russia working as an international delegate and operations manager for the Canadian Red Cross on emergency humanitarian missions—a period that left her fluent in Russian. Writing, she says, is resistance to the pace of those jobs. "What I love about writing is that it's a space that doesn't respond to the same rhythms as all the jobs I've had, where you have to move quickly, be efficient," Panneton said. "Writing is resisting all those logics. It's like taking a leave from ordinary life."

On the question of how to live with pain, Panneton offers this: "I think maybe we have to... tame them," she said, referring to our ghosts. "If ghosts were just bad, it would be easy to get rid of them. That's the difficulty: how to wrap our ghosts in something else that will serve as a lightning rod against what is most painful?"

Chevrotine is the 100th book published by Éditions de Ta Mère.