They don't know each other, they're not the same age and they don't live in the same city, yet a common passion brings them together: writing. Or at least, Alix, the novelist. One day while she was dozing in her Parisian apartment, she was awakened by an email from her friend Mo. The journalist suggested that she organize a writing workshop for a week on the island of Groix in the Morbihan. Stupors of the forty-year-old. Who? She? Alix is not a teacher. She wouldn't know how to do it. No, it's not reasonable and she doesn't have time... but Alix hesitates. She looks at where this rock is located in the Atlantic. Doubt again and accept.
A few months pass. Lorraine Fouchet establishes the overview of the six candidates who will have the chance to work with Alix. There is Daniel, the 86-year-old elder, who writes letters to his wife every day; Luchino, the “playboy” with slicked back hair and big wallet; Arzur, the rebellious teenager; Cassandra, the hearing-impaired thirty-something; Léon, the Corsican actor who wants to launch into a one-man show; and Joanna, the English sixty-year-old, inseparable from her mother, Mary. The characters are established, the writing workshop can begin.
Lorraine Fouchet herself led workshops. She knows what the anxiety of the blank page, overwriting, the difficulty of pruning a text are. And that’s what makes reading his novel joyful. In addition to the fact that the author slowly builds his plot, mixes and unravels the destiny of his characters throughout the pages, she distils his writing advice and his vision of literature. The latter, she rightly notes,
“is not the privilege of a few. All the subjects have been covered, all the stories have been written
. If the novel is a palimpsest,
“each voice is unique”
.
Subtle challenge
So, the novelist steps aside to let her budding authors germinate. Subtle challenge as the voices become sometimes serious and sometimes light, but the exercise is successful. Is it because Lorraine Fouchet was an emergency doctor that she so gently dissects the hearts of her characters? We quickly become attached to our life origami. To Daniel in particular, who, we feel, has been dragging monsters and ghosts behind him for more than eighty years.
Words dig, seek emotions, dig through pain, tear off bandages and expose wounds
Lorraine Fouchet
At the beginning, the smiles are there. We are happy, ecstatic to start the adventure. But Alix knows, her exercises will require sweat, and perhaps tears too. If it refutes the idea of therapeutic writing, the fact remains that
“the words dig, seek the emotions, delve into the pain, tear off the bandages and expose the wounds”
. The days pass. The doors open onto the imagination, of course, but also onto the troubled past of the characters.
So what happened to Daniel? And the dark Luchino? Even more, what terrible secret is Arzur hiding? The young man did not come here to write about his life, or rather yes, but to rewrite it... A twist of theater forcibly projects the characters into the real world and into a great melodrama.
“No lock can resist paper and pencil.”
This is a very nice lesson that Lorraine Fouchet shares with us. When is the next workshop?
34th edition of the Montaigu Book Spring
From Friday April 19 to Sunday April 21, the Montaigu Book Spring will offer a weekend of literary meetings and signings with some 200 invited authors. After Étienne de Montety last year, it is Agnès Martin-Lugand who agreed to chair this event where, among others, Lorraine Fouchet
(read above),
Adeline Fleury, Anthony Delon, Catherine will come to discuss and sign their books.
Bardon, Charlie Roquin, Dominique Rocheteau, Douglas Kennedy, Franck Thilliez, François-Guillaume Lorrain, Ian Manook, Jean-Michel Delacomptée, Jean-Noël Liaut, Jérôme Attal, Julia Kerninon, Laura El Makki, Mahir Guven, Mathias Malzieu, Philippe Besson , Philippe Collin, Philippe Torreton, Philippe Le Guillou, Pierre Bordage, Romain Puértolas, Thomas B. Reverdy, Thomas Gunzig...
Rens: springdulivre.terresdemontaigu.fr
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