A podcast made for Louis

It started with a question a seven-year-old couldn't yet ask. A parent in Montreal wanted their child to know where they came from — not as a list of names and dates, but as a story. Something a child could press play on now, and again at seventeen, and again at forty.

The research went back to 1653, to the St. Lawrence Valley and the people who had lived there since time immemorial — and to the settlers who arrived in that same period, including a sixteen-year-old girl who crossed the Atlantic on a leaking ship. She came to a place that was already ancient, already storied, already home to nations whose knowledge of the land would determine whether the newcomers survived at all. The city that would one day become Montreal was built on that meeting — fraught, violent, and generative all at once.

Where You Come From is an eight-episode podcast series tracing one family line across ten generations, from the St. Lawrence Valley to the mill towns of Massachusetts and back again to Montreal. Each episode is built around a single object: a ship, an axe, a ribbon of farmland, a church bell, a suitcase, a loom. The series doesn't look away from the complexity of that history — the land that was cleared had been tended before; the peace that held was hard-won and impermanent.

The child it was made for is seven years old. One day he'll understand everything it took to get to him — and everything that was already here.