How can we arouse spectators’ curiosity for new literary voices, and for authors who have not yet reached their full influence, who are not popular figures? This is one of the questions that Isabelle Forest, outgoing artistic director of Quebec in all letters, will leave behind her at the end of the 14e edition of this literary festival. A change of guard which inevitably leads to an assessment. Discussion.
“I keep repeating it, I’m a little tiring with it, but what I wanted to do when I arrived in Quebec in full [en 2016, et à la programmation à partir de 2018]it is to provoke situations which make people bury themselves in literature”, summarizes in Duty Isabelle Forest during a telephone interview, the day before the opening of the festival.
“That’s still what I’m trying to do. My wish is to be able to make them encounter in their daily lives a poetic or literary word that would make sense to them, that would stop them for a moment as they go to the grocery store or pick up the children at home. nursery. »
This is the legacy that Isabelle Forest leaves at the festival, while the one who is also a poet – “we tend to forget it now, but I write, too…” – intends to return to her personal projects, “which have been really reduced in recent years. »
This year, the Quebec festival-goer in full will be able to once again witness this “widest possible deployment of the literary presence in the city and in everyday life”, which is done through installations, exhibitions, audio proposals, maps postal items slipped into home mailboxes, public readings.
There will also be meetings with authors, of course, as well as shows mixing different performing arts. Without forgetting the round tables and the pure study day to think about the different ways that the literary arts have to invest space, co-organized by René Audet and Corentin Lahouste.
Audiences of all genres (literary)
Do literary festivals in Quebec all have to work on this big gap between popular spectacle and more niche offerings? Isabelle Forest responds in a roundabout way: “I have never been able to answer the question “Who is the Quebec public in full?” I know we have different audiences. »
“And that probably makes sense,” continues the poet director. “Literature itself is so vast, it carries so many themes, genres, approaches, diverse and different voices. Even the literary arts are difficult to define, as they are so manifold in their forms. »
What currently works best at the festival, according to Mme Forest, these are the authors who have a great popular influence, like Caroline Dawson. Reading spectators remain curious about the ways of writing of their favorite writers, the links between their works, but also their way of fitting into the socio-political landscape.
Conversely, “curiosity for new voices, like Jonathan Roy, who is very well known in New Brunswick, but less here, or for the Frenchman François-Henri Désérable, who plays to full houses in France, is yet to be developed here. »
The fun and more spectacular offerings also attract a large audience, like the Cabarets, or the Poetry Nights, or like the Mixed Literary Arts Championshipwhere in a ring, the artists disguise themselves to fight a fight of spoken wordto music, more performative.
Another example ? Mme Forest names Biological letters, forbidden loves, the evening of reading the letters exchanged between Brother Marie-Victorin and his colleague Marcelle Gauvreau, read by Marika Lhoumeau and Yanick Villedieu. The evening has been sold out for quite a while.
What are Isabelle Forest’s wishes for the rest of the festival? May the team remain. “They are passionate, beautiful mad people who work for pleasure, and who believed in all my crazy projects. »
She also hopes that the festival finds a way to renew itself. “I am very proud to have taken over public space, and to have made room for the next generation. And there are shutters that have been installed, which have become recurring, public spaces to which we have become accustomed…. Maybe we should shake [encore] some aspects. »
“But if I take the time to think, what I am most happy with, in fact, is having contributed to ensuring that Quebec in all letters finds itself on the map major literary festivals. »
Quebec in all letters is held from October 12 to 22, in various locations in Quebec.