Steve Gagnon has an uncommon conviction, a commitment that he does not hesitate to channel into his roles as an actor, but which is just as perceptible in his abundant writing, a poetic prose that is both carried away and controlled, feverish and sovereign. We meet the author who has just returned from Les Jardins de Métis. “I was there with Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette,” he explains. “We were participating in a literary hike organized by the Carrefour de la littérature, des arts et de la culture. Anaïs and I read excerpts from a book we are currently working on, a correspondence about the quest for joy.”
Over the past fifteen years, Steve Gagnon has offered several gems to Quebec dramaturgy. The Red (Blood) Mountain has Anna, these trains that are rushing towards mepassing by Splitting the lakes And Underground Summershis award-winning theatre is as coherent as it is visceral, as poetic as it is committed, as timeless as it is contemporary. After allowing himself a foray into the essay (I will be a proud territory and you will put down your furnitureWorkshop 10), then the children’s album (22 marshmallows around the worldillustrated by Magda Wilk, La Bagnole), the author is publishing a first story this fall at L’instant même: Genesis of a revolution without death or sacrificea relatively short text, both tender and brutal, a true awakening of the senses where botany undeniably rhymes with eroticism.
Gagnon acknowledges that there is something theatrical in his story: “I actually started writing it for Marion Lambert, a French actress, but little by little I changed direction.” It should be noted that the author is fond of detours, and even considers them “necessary”: “The quickest path is rarely the most moving,” he writes in his foreword. Thus, after discovering a passion for bryophytes, commonly called mosses, plants without roots or vessels, he wanted to integrate them into his text, as a counterpoint “to the ambient brutality, malevolence, radicalization and polarization.”
“I felt the need to counter all these attacks with a kind of walk in the forest,” explains the author, “a gentle narrative experience that I quickly imagined somewhere other than the theatre, simply between a book and the person who immerses themselves in it. I won’t hide from you that I hope to reach a wider readership than the often very modest one of the theatre.” However, this did not prevent Gagnon from directing a public reading of her story. After being presented at the Festival du Jamais lu last May, the reading, which brought together actresses Véronique Côté and Marie-Thérèse Fortin, will be offered again at the Outremont theatre for the International Literature Festival on September 26. In the meantime, France Culture will produce, on the occasion of the 2024 Summer Mousson, in Pont-à-Mousson, in northeastern France, a broadcast of Genesis of a revolution without death or sacrifice signed Laurence Courtois. “It’s a reading with music and sound effects,” says the author. “It will be recorded on August 25 in front of spectators equipped with headphones. I can’t wait to see what it will be like.”
A significant meeting
Steve Gagnon explains that he grew up in a violent environment that made him develop “an unhealthy hypervigilance”: “I had the impression for a long time that everything could explode anywhere, at any time.” Since he met the author of Forest womanlast summer, an encounter that he does not hesitate to describe as significant from a personal as well as professional point of view, the 38-year-old man, now the father of two young children, has a completely new relationship with happiness. “While I am more spontaneously in nostalgia, in torment, even in anger, which can be a driving force, as we know, but which wears you down a lot, Anaïs is in joy, she nourishes it, she attracts it, she calls it, she even chooses it. Thanks to her, I am more attentive to the many small sources of wonder that surround us.”
While quoting Power of gentleness by Anne Dufourmantelle and The power of joy by Frédéric Lenoir, the author recognizes that Xavière, the heroine of Genesis of a revolution without death or sacrificethis woman who flees the city to recharge her batteries with her mother, in the family home in the heart of the forest, was inspired by Barbeau-Lavalette, herself rarely happier than when she is with her family in her old house in the Estrie countryside. “Anaïs naturally embodied the character that I was trying to define at that time,” explains Gagnon. “That’s why I dedicated the book to her. But I couldn’t help but breathe some of my revolt into the character.” We thus observe the courageous Xavière, who lives in an environment that is both wild and nourishing with her mother, her son and her lover, unlearning the language of anger to assimilate that of joy.
Before leaving Steve Gagnon, we cannot help but ask him about the reasons that prompted him to publish a new edition of I will be a proud territory and you will put down your furniturethe essay he wrote on masculinity almost ten years ago: “I received a lot of comments after the book came out. I quickly became aware of the clumsiness, lack of courage or imprecision I had shown in certain places. When it came to reprinting, I decided to remove chapter 7 and replace it with a new text that names the real problem: patriarchy, which only benefits men, but harms everyone.”
In this brand new chapter, the author uses inspiring words that could quite easily be applied to his entire approach: “We must educate men. […] We must speak to them of gentleness, of tenderness. Endlessly. Strive to point out to them the thousands of little paths that lead to joy, even tiny or unclear. We must distance ourselves from anger as well as from apathy. We must distance ourselves from fear. It is often out of fear that we act violently.