Yannick Marcoux very early on wanted to build his life around literature. But for a long time he did not know at all how to achieve his ends. He gave up his master’s degree at the age of 26, in order to work full time on a novel project and was already projecting himself as an award-winning writer, without suspecting the years of wandering that await him. “Before that, I lined up to be a CEGEP teacher, like all my friends,” he recalls, summing up the professional fate of so many graduates in letters.
“What happened to me at that time was the test of reality. I thought to myself, “I’m going to try to make a living from my pen, prove to myself that I am capable.” But I was taken by the fear of heights. It was not at all scary to think about the future as long as I imagined myself a teacher, then suddenly, it is as if the freedom, which I nevertheless claimed, worried me. “He adds, in a deliberately euphemistic phrase, as if to keep this old anxiety at bay:” It has been a bit difficult years. “
It’s his a little – a lot – difficult years of which The lighthouse horizon, the first book of the one who is today a literary critic in To have to, traces the versified story. “I yelled / heckled / I believed in it / at the surge of my voice,” he writes, filled with disillusionment at having seen his anger collide with the wall of apathy.
Yannick Marcoux was editor-in-chief of a tennis magazine (!) When the 2012 student strike began, which quickly turned into a fervent social movement. “I worked in an office with gray dividers, neon lights, no window, tse, the cliché,” says the author. A situation that does not already correspond exactly to his youthful ideals. Then comes this historic mobilization. “And I was surrounded by people who defended the decisions of the Liberals! It was screwing me up. My colleagues were humanists, but they were blinded by the media coverage of the events. I was trying to fix the bridge that was breaking quietly between us. Dinner time always turned into a debate. “
Present every evening during demonstrations in the city center, Yannick Marcoux at the same time resumes writing, which he had abandoned. He also tastes a romantic relationship whose drunkenness, in The lighthouse horizon, merges with that which gives him then this feeling of not being alone to believe in another world. “Sometimes, we think that we are not much to carry very simple ideas like love for our neighbor. Then you go out into the street and you realize that we are a gang estie! And that feels so good! Demonstrating is a vibrant, but ephemeral, reminder that we are a group of gangs not to be satisfied, and it is easy to forget it, so much the voices we hear in general, the voices of power. , of the system, they are not those. “
As with so many poets before him, Gaston Miron being undoubtedly the most famous here, the amorous quest and that of another society are therefore intertwined in the same burst of euphoria: “finally you get up / you are a sky in full force / and you invite me in your orbit ”.
“There is something similar in love affair with getting involved in a popular movement, because they both make us want to offer the best version of ourselves,” observes Yannick Marcoux. But there are also parallels to be drawn between the slap of the heartache and the slap in 2012. I don’t know if we have recovered from that injury. “
Never stop being thirsty
Dedicated to those who were there “on the other end of the line”, when it mattered most, The lighthouse horizon celebrates the bulwark of friendship against the call of the abyss, not to say against the desire for death, faced with its desperate narrator, worn out by too much love and so many disenchantments, as well as by this spring whose buds will quickly have closed in on themselves. “The help they gave me was so great that I wanted to say thank you,” says Yannick Marcoux.
“I forbade myself / your stubborn festive hearts / your open arms against time / your screams in the brush / and your laughs // our laughs,” he wrote. “There were miseries like moons / and how many sunrises / but today / I took my place / in this living cloud / this clan which sings louder than the birds // it was enough to cross the intangible customs / to accept the outstretched hand / and to embrace / this inextinguishable thirst ”.
“If I speak of inextinguishable thirst,” he explains, “it is because there are many of these friends who are inspiring precisely because they are never sustained. They’re still chasing after their next sip of life. “
Yannick Marcoux, 38, is today the happy father (although a little sleepy) of two boys, he continues to serve beers at the Dieu du Ciel brewery, his home port where he has worked for more than fifteen years, and he tries to arrange for writing as much space as possible. He will publish his first novel, The island without a bridge, at XYZ, next March.
“Dawn without doubt”, such is the title of the last part of The lighthouse horizon, headlights whose beams seem to have triumphed for good over the darkness. And if Yannick Marcoux knows too well that literature will not change the world on its own, he refuses to stop believing that it can do great things, and that this polarized Quebec of which the Maple Spring was perhaps the act founder must be pacified. “Literature has worked a lot of miracles and will not stop doing it. If there’s one thing writing can do, it’s create those moments of meeting. I write in the hope of reconciliation. “