After the very successful snowshoe harean animal fable combining transhumanism and magical realism, Mireille Gagné this time slips into the skin (or rather under the bark) of a tree with iron wood. The story of a transformation that invites us to rethink our relationship to nature and to take care of the living.
Posted at 12:00 p.m.
Active for more than a decade in the literary world, Mireille Gagné has published collections of poetry, short stories, then a first novel, snowshoe hare, in 2020, which has had a certain success, both with the public and the literary world. “There are books like that that start running on their own,” she points out. I am very happy with the fate of this book. »
She proposes this new book, a “strange insect” difficult to define, touching at the same time on poetry, the collection of short stories and the short story, presenting rather strong family ties with her first novel. “It’s his sequel in a way, even if I went in another form”, remarks the author.
Suite also because she found herself in a bit the same situation as her character Diane, suffering from work addiction and performance anxiety: on sick leave, tired, in a horizontal position most of the time. ” the Hare carried a message that I may not have understood myself,” she mused aloud.
During this moment of forced rest, she observed nature a lot, in particular a huge lime tree which dominates her land and which led her to question her relationship with the felt and the living.
“I don’t know if it’s the two years of the pandemic, but I felt a profound lack of communication, there was something stuck in me. I observed nature a lot, and I wondered how to take care of it,” she says.
The trees have understood something of the slowness that we have not understood.
Mireille Gagne
This lime tree called him, then. She started researching trees, and what she discovered fascinated her: “Trees communicate with each other, some can emit signals, send toxins to drive away harmful insects. They would therefore be able to help each other, to anticipate their external environment, something that I felt I had lost. »
PHOTO YAN DOUBLET, THE SUN
Mireille Gagné slips “into the bark” of a tree in iron wood.
become a tree
“If one day you had told me that I would turn into a tree, I would have started more exhaustive research on the different species and their characteristics in order to know which one has the hardest heart. »
This is how it begins iron wood. Over the course of very short numbered chapters, where more technical segments are sometimes inserted on the trees, the narrator describes the sensations, worries, anxieties, reflections of a tree badly in its bark, breaking with its environment, attacked by visible and invisible evils.
Psychologist, yoga teacher, doctor, chiropractor, acupuncturist, the specialists invited to his foot can do nothing about it: “Despite all the efforts invested in letting go, I always spot a surface, your eye, a puddle, a memory, a window, where my image is reflected unfinished. »
Mireille Gagné spent months writing this book, then sent the manuscript to La Peuplade, her publisher. Two days later, the City of Quebec, where she lives, did a “major” pruning of her lime tree, leaving it disfigured. “I was left amazed by that. I had been projecting myself into this tree for months, I had become this lime tree, analyzing the behavior of the trees in relation to our behavior. It really saw me in two! »
An annoying event that added a more assertive environmentalist layer to his book. “Our suburban or city nature, I often have the impression that it is on little Lego plates with trees that we uproot, remove and replant. But nature is so much larger and more complex than that. Taking care of them, taking care of us… It reinforced the idea of the discussion I wanted to open. »
Discussion that also addresses the issue of mental health, human fatigue to evolve in this world he has built, and how to rebuild after being broken. The image of ironwood, the ironwood, a tree whose wood is so hard that it is difficult to split with an axe, greatly inspired her. “I am a lime tree and I would so much like to be an ironwood, not to split! But if you break down, you have to learn to become stronger… Doing this inner quest, writing this book, it really did me good. »
iron wood
Mireille Gagne
The People
212 pages