Long before wanting to write books, I wanted to write columns. It first rose in little bubbles of excitement, the keen intuition that I needed to go in this direction. Like Mr. Foglia, I wanted to write about cats and jams but to talk about life, with style, by generating my own subjects, in direct contact with the world or not, depending on the mood of the moment , without trying to please, in this rustle of the pages of the newspaper which turn, blackening the pads of the fingers with ink.
But before I dreamed of being a columnist, I was a peddler and maybe it all starts from there, deep down. Waking up every morning at 5:15 a.m. for quite a bit of my adolescence, two runs of newspapers to be delivered, seven days a week, rain or shine. In winter, it was even longer because of the huge banks of snow which prevented me from zigzagging between addresses, I would come back with snot on my nose, frosty eyelashes… I retired when I had the age of returning home at a time when the newspapers were already piling up in front of my door. Hint: the sky was pink.
Camelot, I sometimes let myself be impressed by a headline on the front page. I remember the headlines announcing the Gulf War — that scared me a lot. This muffled silence of the sleeping suburb while elsewhere, everything was gone. So I turned the pages to see if Pierre Foglia had written — it seems to me that Wednesday was his day. His photo: this awkward, slightly angry look. Like certain radio hosts, he had forged this close bond with us – with me, his young reader. Each sentence slipped into the next and blended into it. Mr. Foglia taught me the art of being brief with panache, and the importance of having a voice, a tone.
I had other teachers who unknowingly showed me the art of chronicling. Impossible to miss Josée Blanchette, who these days is celebrating 40 years of chronicles at Duty. On the cover of Singular pleasures, published towards the end of the 1990s, we see a drawing of her writing in blue and white striped pajamas — I read little passages of it every time I went to read. When I think of Joblo and his Zeitgeist, the word “freedom” comes to mind. This woman is sovereign in writing. Free to say, relate and think. Josée Blanchette taught me, with this mischievous smile and a drop of mischief, what is intoxicating about this independence, but also the weight of responsibility that accompanies it: the heads and tails of the chronicle.
Times have changed, but at one time, I loved reading Richard Martineau in the See aboard the 96 which took me back to my suburbs. From his contact, I learned to choose my angles. As long as they are very pointed, even sharp, not obtuse. The chronicle implies a point of view, a certain look – frontal, oblique, it depends on the chronicler – from which the entire story arises. About Martineau, I always have the impression that one day he will come out of nowhere to tell us “What! ? This whole time you thought I was serious? » and that he will once again become the agile columnist that we loved reading in the late See. Precise your angles, aim for the target, know how to bite but choose when, that’s what I remember from this encounter.
Style, this somewhat indefinable matter that we have or not, I started to worry about it while reading Foglia, but also a lot while losing myself in the pages of the Inrockuptibles, those devoted to music in particular, era JD Beauvallet, Pierre Siankowski, Nelly Kaprièlian. I particularly liked Siankowski’s touch — who has since become a friend. In one issue, he painted the portrait of a basketball player — I was more or less interested in that, to be honest. But the text was deployed with such ease, such dazzling earthiness that we couldn’t help but savor it until the end. Sianko, I tell myself that even his grocery list must be good. This is what I remember from Inrocks.
From the student newspapers where I learned my hand at Duty passing through the See, I approached all the directors and chief editors of all the publications I visited to get a column. I even engaged one — a music columnist — along the way. But I wanted a section and I still didn’t have one.
Until I found myself, a few years ago, in an interview at Duty for a one year replacement. In the small windowless room, with Louise-Maude Rioux Soucy, editorialist and deputy director of information, and Marie-Andrée Chouinard, editor-in-chief, I don’t really remember how, but I managed to make the conversation towards my desire to chronicle. And this call was heard. Before the pandemic, I briefly wrote in the pages of the notebook Read ; for two years in the Freestyle of D Magazine, in shared custody with other feathers that I love and respect.
“You have one in your arm,” Marie-Andrée told me one day. And it turns out I had several, yes. Here it is finally, this sacred space which I wanted to enter and which becomes mine. But why, in the end, this obsessive desire that has never left me, to invest in the genre to the detriment of more classically objective journalism? Perhaps because the column appears at the crossroads of literature and journalism and that suits me? At the exact place where these two axes intersect, there is this precious zone of freedom that has been calling to me for so long and into which I am finally slipping.
Already looking forward to Tuesday in two weeks.