Authors line the Véloroute des Draveurs for a free lakeside literary ride

Tashi Farmilo

The Authors' Cycle Route, a free outdoor event that turns a ride along Blue Sea Lake into a moving literary reading, will unfold September 19 from 1 to 4 pm on the Véloroute des Draveurs between Blue Sea and Messines, as the Salon du livre de l'Outaouais and the Réseau BIBLIO de l'Outaouais invite Vallée-de-la-Gatineau cyclists to pedal the trail and pause at rest areas where four regional authors read work drawn from nature. If heavy rain sets in, the event moves to the following day.

The four writers reading that afternoon are all rooted in the region and its publishing scene. Julie-Anne Codaire, of Cantley, is an author and communications consultant who published a 2022 collection of testimonials from parents raising children who are different, then a 2023 children's book about her autistic son. Jean-Luc Lacroix, a Grand-Remous native who calls himself a "shipwrecked poet," released the collection L'envolagilité with Maniwaki's La Note verte in 2020 and appears in a collective poetry volume due this fall. Myriam Legault-Beauregard, a translator, student and slam poet, saw her first collection, Comme un myosotis, published by La Note verte in 2023. Kathia Trottier writes children's literature, including the Spikou and Princess Magalie series and the eco-educational title The Allies of the Earth, and works as a library technician and coordinator of the JR L'Heureux library in Maniwaki. Their books can be borrowed and bought through the network's participating libraries, which reach across the valley in Aumond, Blue Sea, Bois-Franc, Bouchette, Gracefield, Grand-Remous, Kazabazua, Lac-Sainte-Marie, Low, Maniwaki with Déléage and Egan-Sud, Messines, Montcerf-Lytton and Sainte-Thérèse-de-la-Gatineau.

There is no set course to follow. The readings run continuously at four literary stops, so riders choose where to begin, how fast to go and which halts to linger at, all of them clustered along the trail's northern stretch near the lake: the Village halt, the Grant Lake halt, the Blue Sea Lake halt and the Messines municipal park. From there the route opens onto a trail that winds through marshes, lakes, rivers and forests over 72 kilometres and forms one of Quebec's early sections of the Trans Canada Trail. It is laid over an old railway bed that helped open the Gatineau Valley to settlement, the same corridor that once carried timber and newcomers now carrying cyclists and verse, the log drivers who lent the route its name traded for authors reading at the water's edge.

The Salon du livre de l'Outaouais, founded in 1979 and drawing roughly 40,000 visitors a year to Gatineau, is the partner driving the day. This ride is the summer, open-air counterpart to that fair, funded by the Quebec government and the MRC de La Vallée-de-la-Gatineau under the region's Cultural Development Agreement.