TMI Student Profile: A Conversation with Charlotte de Neeve
By Dominic Varvaro, May 2024
Featured image: Charlotte de Neeve speaks with the TMI community at Spring Convocation
Savouring her hot chocolate, she displays a youthful bohemian spirit belied only by greying hair. Her soft-spoken responses to my questions in the cavernous market café cause me to lean in close on more than one occasion. Still waters run deep. This is the thought that occurs after my initial meeting with Charlotte de Neeve (pronounced de-NAVE-uh) at a local brûlerie where she’d bicycled – in the rain – to meet.
She is at home in Montreal. “It’s where I’m from,” she asserts, in spite of having lived in British Columbia, Texas, Massachusetts, and Ontario before returning two years ago. She tested Montreal’s CEGEP waters in the 1970s, a time when she was “playing piano for ballet classes and just hanging out.” She still practises the art of “playing music for fun or with friends.”
In 1980, she acquired a registered-nursing qualification from Vanier College and then followed her future husband to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver where she obtained a B.A. in Latin and Medieval Studies. “It was the Latin,” she corrects me when I ask about her reasons for choosing medieval studies. She emphasizes how important the study of language is to her and that Latin was simply something that interested her. “I just wanted to do it,” she reaffirms.
She earned a second undergraduate degree and then a Masters in Nursing from the University of Ottawa and began working as a nurse practitioner in 2013. “You learn a lot about medicine… and about how clinical decisions are made,” she explains of her small-town practice in a rural Cornwall clinic. “I was on my own a lot,” she says of its appeal. Today, she works as a nurse at a Residence privée pour aînés. When I press her on the nature of a vocation that intersects the purview of nurse and doctor, she tells me that she enjoys the interactions and that her practice is a serendipitous opportunity to socialize with the community she serves.
Both her parents were long-time supporters of the Thomas More Institute, so she feels it’s natural that she should return to the liberal arts there, to “stay connected to the world of ideas.” Her first hands-on TMI experience was a Gatineau-based in-person course on the Canadian constitution led by renowned TMI volunteer Pierrot Lambert, “which was fun,” she says. She extols the connections she made with the local community and the open discussions that transpired under Pierrot’s leadership.
Her feelings about Pierrot are reciprocal. “[She] brought to our discussions her intelligence, her wide experience of social issues, and her fine sensitivity,” he writes when I ask about his recollections of their classes together.
She later comments on the collaborative and interactive nature of the TMI method, saying that she “enjoys the discipline and dynamic of the discussion…learning how to listen better and to respond with equanimity, or how to say nothing and wait.”
Charlotte earned a Comprehensive Certificate, celebrated at the May 2024 convocation ceremony at the Institute. The Certificate program—comprising several courses with literature as a central theme – is an advisor-led and tailored program that concludes with a substantial and integrative essay. She tells me that the effort she invested in the essay was “…like scaling a vertical rock wall with my fingertips.”
Her essay escorts the reader through the development of literature from Roman poets to the Romantics. It exposes the power and beauty of the written word by showing how storytelling helps shape the evolution of society. It’s a sentiment that is familiar to essay reader and TMI Chair Carol Fiedler, who contends the essay “…accentuates the interaction between the mythical universe of the imagination and the natural universe of our physical bodies.”
In the essay’s conclusion, Charlotte writes “Our ideas and words define us as human.” She floats an enthralling proposal that “…we should replace our political stances with poetical ones, exchange ideas rather than oppose them, and practice a conversation based on our shared, timeless and contemporary language of myths and stories.”
Toward the end of our interview, I ask about her reasons for returning to Montreal. She explains that she moved back “for six months” to take care of her ailing mother, who was always a source of meaningful conversation. “Not stories so much as ideas about the world,” she answers when I ask about the nature of their conversations, but then she looks away and changes the subject before I can explore further.
Charlotte sees the writings of Renaissance author Giovanni Boccaccio as “…a growing democratization in the business of learning and literature.” It occurs to me that the nature of her essay parallels her life experiences, that the highlights of her journey—the social interactions, the exchange of ideas, the critical perspectives she acquired, and the playing of the piano for her friends—are all a continuation of the democratization of our own stories.
Dominic Varvaro is a writer, photographer, and TMI student. His foodie creations can be found at @thesauceison. You can read more of his writings in Voices: A TMI Writers’ Journal.