That today we want to take it away from us by force, our House of Writers, is heartbreaking and an aberration. Did we receive this gift of unionization on the condition of denying ourselves? Writers have a certain attitude towards existence, but are we so different from other citizens? Why wouldn’t we have the right to our home?
It is true that we find it difficult to decide: why go there rather than elsewhere, to the left rather than to the right, to live or not to live, to be or not to be, but we succeeded, in 1992, in having our home, an anchor, despite our tendency to leave all paths open and to favor none. Our home has become part of our essence, our soul, our creative spirit. Why kick us out now?
When we founded the Union of Quebec Writers on March 21, 1977, at the spring equinox as a symbol of hope, we wanted to maintain a positive vision of our future and take up the challenge of our presence as scouts, seers and poets, as fighters for writing in Quebec. Louis Gauthier, Michel Beaulieu, Gérard Bessette were present in the room. That evening, we all signed, at Maison Ludger-Duvernay, rue Sherbrooke, the attendance book of Wilfrid Lemoine to elect with emotion Nicole Brossard, André Major, Pierre Morency and Marcel Godin around our president, Jacques Godbout. The Writers’ Union was born as a promise for our future, with the idea of being socially relevant, of having a storefront and of actually existing as a visible reality. From the outset, we had hesitated between the name “Union of Writers” or “House of Writers”, which clearly shows the importance we attach to the idea of a house, of being rooted in the real, of an implantation in the decor, so to speak.
But who would have foreseen that the legal reinforcement of our unionization would one day risk making us lose our home, disposing of our physical and symbolic place of life, exile us from the place of our meetings and our necessary complicities, dispossessing us of the ineffable place of our artistic solidarities? Having a home as an anchor is all the more essential for us writers, as we all have bohemian souls and wandering hearts, and we don’t want to be punished for our wanderings and creative wanderings. The House of Writers has come to strengthen our cohesion and calm our misanthropy, soften our isolation. This meant that we could finally belong to the rest of the world, it anchored us in Quebec society.
We no longer want to live like the uprooted. Long live the House of Writers!