You're most likely to spot Penelope Fletcher behind the cash register, on the ladder, or running between the three branches of her bookstore, The Red Wheelbarrow, in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, right next to the Jardin du Luxembourg. She grew up on Hornby Island, off the coast of Canada, and moved to Paris in 1990. We spoke with Penelope about her upbringing, moving to Paris, her experience of reopening her bookstore with her friend who had cancer, and the community she has curated through selling books.
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on her morning routine
I come from a small community and I think I still behave as if I lived in a small community. I wake up early and look forward to my time — I can write in my journal, drink coffee, finish reading a book, sit in the window and watch the chestnut trees undulating. I love the early mornings in Paris, when I go to throw out the boxes, and can talk to other people opening their cafés, the people sweeping the streets. It’s a whole sort of world. Paris is being set up.
There’s a kind of optimism in the morning. I wish I were reading and writing. But lately, I'm often really late for work. I have insomnia, and I get caught up doing work at home. So I try to hire people who can be at the bookstore before I arrive. Sometimes, I have a shower and I spend too long in it — or I do laundry and the time goes by too quickly. I always intend to write . . . maybe I will from now on.
on growing up off the coast of canada
I lived on a beautiful farm by the sea on Hornby Island, and I had a love/hate relationship with it. It was a beautiful island and it also had its Wuthering Heights—like stormy side. It was a bit of a dystopian utopia. There weren’t boundaries between people. I grew up in a very dramatic place. It felt like the center of the world. It was very artistic. I definitely got the sense that you could do anything. We went to high school on Vancouver Island, so we took two ferries and three buses to get to school. It took two hours. I spent a lot of my childhood looking for wood to make rafts and build forts, walking in the forests, looking at mushrooms and trees, getting lost and a little bit frightened.
Seventy-five percent of the population of the island were American draft dodgers, so I grew up with a fear of what was going to happen in the world — which is happening at high speed right now. I never imagined we would make it to 2025.
Then, I went to University in Vancouver when I was 18, fresh out of high school. I had never been to a big campus university before. I had never eaten cafeteria food, I had always eaten salad out of the garden, real food, and all the food tasted like soap to me. I had never been in an elevator by myself. After a week, I went home and attended college there for my first year of university and began collecting second hand books. I opened a secondhand bookstore there when I was 19. My father turned a chicken coop into a bookshop caravan, and it remained open for three long summer periods each year and then it was sold and remained in existence for another thirty years under different names. At first, people said I couldn't open a bookshop and then they saw the collection of books grow larger. I was buying books at garage sales and library sales for 10 cents. When we opened in May 1982, I sold the books for a dollar a piece and we sold all of the books in the shop. It was the first bookshop I opened and it was fun, but I didn't mean it as a career choice. I wanted to be a university professor or a writer.
on her childhood reading habits
Independent bookstores started up in North America in the 1970s, so there were places for people to go. I grew up in a very rural area, so of course there weren't bookshops, but I grew up in a household full of books. We ordered books from England and I belonged to the Puffin Club when I was a kid. Books were special things. I wanted to be a writer and I envied the life of people who grew up in places where they could be going to bookstores and meeting authors.
When I went to school, everybody else was learning to read, but I already knew how to read. The teachers didn’t know what to do with me, so they put me to one side and I sort of got off track. It made me feel like an outsider, starting as a small child. I still feel like that. But I think being an outsider is probably part of the human condition.
on her mother’s adventurous spirit
When she was in her eighties, I asked my mom what her favorite part of her life was, thinking she would say that it was when we were little. But she said her sixties, because she wrote a book and got it published. Her book is called Hammerstone, and it is a history of Hornby Island from the beginnings of prehistory up until the arrival of the Europeans. That’s where I come from, the most beautiful island in the Salish Sea.
My mother was a decoder during World War II. She wasn’t allowed to talk about what she did, and she was only between the ages of 16 and 20 during the war. She was quite secretive about her past. After the war, she worked for the Allied Circle, and so she met lots of people. She knew T.S. Eliot. Then she lived in Somalia for a while.
So, I had a mother who’d had lots and lots of adventures, and she was a fabulous storyteller. It’s funny — she was a bit secretive and couldn’t talk about some things, but then she also told amazing stories. But haven’t you noticed that about people who are writers?
on moving to paris with no money
I moved from Montréal to Paris in January of 1990. In November of 1989, there was a mass shooting in Montréal, and I wanted to move away. I had an English passport because my father was born in England, so it was easy to move. I bought a one-way ticket and moved with 200 Canadian dollars, which was probably about 100 euros at the time. I was hoping to get a job at a bookstore. My father asked me, “Why do you always have to live on the edge?” I think about this. A lot.
My first impression of Paris was so cliché. I walked around like everyone says, feeling like I was on a movie set. I would love to get that feeling again. I felt complete freedom, even though I could only afford a crêpe or a sandwich a day. I don’t think I ate in a café for the whole first year I lived here because I didn’t have any money.
I got a job babysitting and by the end of the year I got a job at a big, bustling bookstore. It was still pre-Amazon days, so they were very successful and I was thrilled to work there. I learned how to be professional. I also worked with artists and I got into all the trouble that you get into in your 20s in Paris.
on almost getting kidnapped after moving to Paris
When I first moved here, I lived in a chambre de bonne — basically a very small apartment on the top floor — in the Seventh and I had to move out. I went to look for an apartment on the notice board of a church nearby. I was a little bit out of it. I had been to the discotheque the night before, so I’d gone to bed late and gotten up early.
While I was at the church, a woman came up to me. She told me that she was going to put up an ad for a chambre de bonne in exchange for translation work, and said that she could show me the apartment. I stupidly said yes. When we walked out, we were joined by a guy with dark glasses on. As we were walking, the woman heard that I’m Canadian and started talking about the Quebecois in a very derogatory way, and I thought to myself, these people are weird.
We got to the building, which was between the Eiffel Tower and the church. We stepped into a little elevator and went up to the apartment. Nobody lived up there. There was a stripped-down bed, a counter, a blue bottle of something, a desk. I immediately thought to myself that it was a trap. The woman said she was going to get something to drink, but she never came back.
I decided to pretend that I couldn’t do the translation work, thank you very much, and said that I was leaving. There was an overwhelming smell of chemicals, so I didn’t know if I was going to get chloroformed or something like that. I didn’t know how to get out, or if the woman was on the other side of the door, or if it was all in my head. At my age now, I know it was not all in my head. But at the time, I was young, and I wasn’t sure.
I started thinking, I have to use fairytale logic. How did Hansel and Gretel get out? I didn’t want the guy to know that I had caught on. I kept asking him questions, for example, about the company the translation work would be for, but he couldn’t answer any of them. I told him I had friends I needed to join, and was thinking that if he made one false move, I was going to reach for the bottle and whack him on the back of the neck and then smash open the window and crawl out onto the ledge. But the whole time, I was saying, “thank you so much for your generous offer.”
Eventually, we stood up slowly, he opened the door, and we went back to the small elevator. He started telling me that I would end up being a housemaid. He obviously had a spiel. When we got to the bottom, I said, “oh, I think I can see my friends at the end of the street.” And I walked away.
My dad told me not to go to the police because I didn’t speak the language well enough. But I should have gone to the police.
on opening her bookshop
The bookstore is called The Red Wheelbarrow after the William Carlos Williams poem, and I owned a green wheelbarrow as a child. The shop in the Marais initially opened on September 1, 2001. I ended up losing the first bookstore completely. I went through a very difficult divorce. I went to Canada from 2012 to 2014 and I returned to Paris because of family reasons.
We reopened in 2018. I had a friend who had terminal cancer, and she told me she wanted me to reopen the shop, so I did. She was my inspiration. There were a few moments along the way when I said, “I don't think we can do this.” And she said, “Of course we can.” It reopened in September 2018. She passed away around the time Notre Dame burned down — so, around April 2019. Up until around February 2019, I thought she was going to live, even though she had told me in 2016 that she was in stage four. I still have her voice with me. I don't think I would have opened the bookstore knowing that I was going to end up on my own again. In a way, she was super clever to encourage me to do that. I miss her. But in some ways, people sort of live on, giving you instructions.
It's kind of amazing to me, listening to myself tell the story, because it seems like each time I needed a little push, something happened in support. I would say hope springs eternal in the bookseller's heart. Booksellers are very optimistic people.
on bookshops as community centers
Some people came into the bookshop from Hornby Island yesterday and said to me, “You abandoned Hornby.” I said, “No, I’m in exile.” But I think maybe the bookstore really was me trying to find Hornby again — or something of equal value.
A bookshop is a community. People say to me, “Oh, you're The Red Wheelbarrow.” No, I’m the person who opened it and runs it. But you can't run it by yourself. Everyone who works there brings something different to it. I realized opening bookstores is a kind of addiction. It's very expensive — —you use up money you don’t have, you put your personal life in danger for this addiction.
“People go to bookstores as they go to synagogues, churches, and community halls.”
on lasting impressions
I had another friend, Renee Levine, who’s so close to my heart. She died in 2020. When she first came into the bookstore, she was a little bit scary. She was asking if we had this book or that book. And the second or third time she came in, she brought other friends with her. And slowly, she came to approve of the bookstore. Then one day, she offered to work as a volunteer. She turned into one of the most important people in my entire life.
Sometimes, somebody comes in, and something in their behavior reminds me of Renee, but it’s not her. This is something I’ve noticed: sometimes, people you become very good friends with — you’re a little bit scared of them at first. I have a lot of really good friends who are still alive that I get to see and be around. And the bookstore has been very often the way I know these people.
on finding a way to be political
The bookstore is a portal to different worlds, and there is a political portal. The books we put into the store create a space where people can talk about politics, and people talk all day long about them in the bookshop. What is happening right now is very serious.
People can find books like The Persuaders by Anand Giridharadas and books that are recommended on the Substack that he runs daily, called The Ink. He interviews people that are fighting authoritarianism in the US, such as Rebecca Solnit, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Michael Cohen. This is how we get a lot of ideas.
The shop brings in people of all sorts of backgrounds who come and talk about what’s going on in their countries. Americans on vacation come in, Russian students come in, Ukrainians come in. It’s kind of unique, the bookstore, in that way. Besides political books, it also has novels, it has the classics, and in that way it’s a community hall — it’s also a place where you can go in and choose a book quietly.
“Running a bookstore was not a lifelong dream for me. It’s just a really nice way to earn a living. I think that’s what led me to open a bookshop in the first place — bookshops are portals to other worlds, other centuries, and quite a few different places. ”
on what she’d like to change about herself
I wish that I knew how to think before speaking, acting, and writing — I wish I knew how to have that practice of finding the space between the act and the reaction to the act. I wish I was wiser. I have lost so many friends and important relationships because I have opened my big mouth and said something I later regret and cant fix.
on her advice for those who want to run a bookshop
It takes optimism, courage, experience, money (which is the Achilles’ heel) and friends and family and strangers who believe in the project too. What surprised me at 19 is how much people love and support bookstores. It is such a rewarding way to earn your living. When I opened RWB in Paris in 2001, I was surprised by the community that I found. When I reopened in 2018, it was a bit different. I was surprised by the shift in the bookselling market — people love bookshops more than they did before, but on the other hand, some of the publishing world is less generous and supportive than they were before to a small indie bookshop and you need support on all sides.
The bookshop has to be you really want to do. You need to like books, like reading, enjoy climbing ladders. We are sociologists or pharmacists of books. Perhaps you need to be able to read books and read people and match them. You need to find what works in the community you are opening a bookshop in and be ready to adapt to the changes in the world. It helps if you like people in general — if you are selling new books. If you are selling secondhand books, you can be as grumpy as you like. My advice is to find a beautiful shop and make sure you have enough money to do the project, rather than beginning with not enough. Don’t give up, and be brave. Go to book fairs, and make up cards with the name of your bookshop and go to the Chamber of Commerce and find people who will help you get funding — and most of all find allies in the book world.
on what she’s reading
I'm reading A Movable Feast right now, which is the most sold English-language book in Paris. People would be very, very shocked to know that I have never read it before. But I didn't read it because I had read The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which is by Gertrude Stein, and she didn’t really like Hemingway, so I wasn't really interested in reading him. But recently, the writer Yasmin Zaher, who just moved to Paris, showed me this secret passageway that's in the book, so I decided I would read the book. I also like her book, The Coin.
My favorite book would have to be Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It’s a very beautiful book because one story morphs into another story. Another favorite at the moment is The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters. It’s a story where a four-year-old child disappears — she’s the youngest child of a Mi’kmaq family that lives in Nova Scotia but goes to Maine to pick blueberries every year.
I like The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker. I love Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. I love A.S. Byatt, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Henry James. I love Manju Kapoor — she’s an Indian writer who comes into the bookstore once a year. She wrote A Married Woman. I loved Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence. I love Miriam Toews — she’s a good Canadian writer. I really like the contemporary writer Karl Geary, who wrote Juno Loves Legs. And Janet Skeslien Charles, who wrote The Paris Library, which is a wonderful book. She is a good friend of the bookstore. And I like Ann Patchett. When I was a teenager, I would have said that my favorite book was Persuasion by Jane Austen. It’s hard to choose favorites as a bookseller. I feel like I’m betraying so many people by not mentioning them.
penelope’s favorite spots in paris
In my neighborhood, up in the 19th near the Buttes Chaumont, there is a cafe, Les Buttes Chaumont, that has delicious food. There is a restaurant called The Mistral where you can eat in a tiny courtyard on an alley with grape vines and it feels like being in Athens. Down at metro Belleville, there is the best Chinese restaurant in a pool hall called M8. You can eat in the family restaurant just beside, at tables which you sometimes share with others. The whole family is there and the food is delicious. In the 20th, off rue de Pyrenees and near Menilmontant, you can find tiny winding streets and a Kurdish restaurant about halfway up the hill.
If I came back to Paris after not being here, I would go walking along the river. And then there are all the places where you can go to the roof: the top of the Centre Pompidou, the top of the Institut du Monde Arabe. And I love Montmartre. Anywhere where you have a view.
