Happy Ecolint Memories Haunt Alumni Writer Michael Rowe

Canadian novelist Michael Rowe (La Châtaigneraie, 1982) transferred to the French section of La Châtaigneraie from CDL in 1976, for the final year of his father’s four-year diplomatic posting to the U.N. 

Michael remembers the school and his new friends there as warm and welcoming. He reserves his highest praise and affection for his homeroom teacher, Mme. Hélène Forneris. “She was one of the best teachers I ever had,” Michael says. “She was exceptionally kind and patient and left me with a lifelong love of the French language and culture. She helped make me a committed Francophile. I really loved her.” 

Michael left Ecolint in 1977 to attend boarding school in Canada. After graduation, he came “home” to Europe in the autumn of 1981 as a fashion model in Paris. The following year he enrolled at the University of Toronto to study English Literature, with the goal of becoming a writer.

Between 1995 and 2017, Michael published three novels, two essay collections, and a book of interviews. He also edited four literary anthologies and published award-winning journalism in newspapers and magazines in Canada and the United States, becoming a popular political blogger for The Huffington Post. 

In November 2021, Michael wrote the introductory essay to Rolling Stone magazine photojournalist Nate Gowdy’s book INSURRECTION, Gowdy’s photographic account of the January 6, 2021 riots in Washington, D.C. 

Michael has left hints of his years in Switzerland in his books for readers to find. Two of the primary characters in his first novel Enter, Night are named after towns outside Geneva. The haunted house in his second novel, Wild Fell, is partly based on the 150-year-old villa in Céligny, built on the ruins of a Roman tribune’s residence, where he lived with his family during their Geneva years. 

Particularly as a journalist, Michael believes that international school education has been essential to his worldview and would be beneficial to any child lucky enough to experience it.

“When you go to school with children from other countries, especially in a foreign language, you learn very quickly that you are only one small member of a family of nations,” Michael says. “The world will always look a bit different to you than it will to others. It will look more familiar, less threatening. Nationalism will never make sense and populism will seem stupid. Mark Twain wrote that travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness. The same is true of international education.” 

On a more personal note, Ecolint itself is never far from Michael’s heart and his memories.

“When Wild Fell was published in French translation in 2016, it was one of the proudest moments of my life,” Michael says. “Reading my own novel in French was magical. My only regret and it’s a profound one, is that I was never able to share it with Mme. Forneris. I think she would have been proud.”