Can you really die when your name is Marie-Claire Blais?

Marie-Claire Blais is the first writer who addressed me as a colleague even though I was barely budding in words and texts. She is also the one who started my movement towards the countryside, long before it took place, by recommending that I find a workshop, a workspace “for me” while my office was in the living room. to eat that I then shared with a whole family.

Audree Wilhelmy
Writer

She told me to take care of my writing, not in the sense of choosing my words well, but in the sense of giving them time, taking care of the art and giving creation the central place that it now occupies in my life.

I was all alone on the other side of the world, at the Atlantide Festival, in Nantes, I didn’t know anyone, I didn’t know Marie-Claire either, but we spent an evening talking and I remember the heat words exchanged, and the naturalness of this moment.

I had before me a giantess, the only one I had studied in high school at the same time as Gabrielle Roy and Anne Hébert, and I devoured her luminous presence without believing my luck.

I don’t know if you can really die when your name is Marie-Claire Blais. I have the impression that a piece of her remains immutable and powerful, the indisputable mark of the path she has blazed for all the women who write in Quebec today.