Louise Dupré was born on July 9, 1949, in Sherbrooke, Québec. At the time, Québec was in the grips of “la Grande Noirceur,” or Great Dark- ness, of the rigidly conservative Duplessis era. But Dupré’s more liberal upbringing anticipated the enormous changes that were about to take place in the province. Members of her mother’s …
All around, too many dramas that I had to keep to myself, far, far too much silence. As if, in revealing human misery I’d risk being devoured, ripped wide open in the public square, voracious beasts snuffing through my entrails. And yet, to write begins with the shame of a sordid death, always one’s own, …
And you become the child you never knew how to be, brazen, as the insects keep buzzing in the cavern of your ear. Something of the world is entering into you and you no longer refuse it, the purity of grieving. It bursts in, pushes you out of bed on those darkest nights when you …
Like a lover who sets her fear ablaze until nothing is left but a small pile of embers, I love how leaves and vines grow through the sweetness of tears, in the center of the face, in its astonishment. Light. Serenity, the echo that the voice discovers as it ventures along new paths. Learning to …
How many flowers underneath our Sunday dresses, pinks and crinolines skipping toward the church, while our mothers, squeezed tight in their mother shells, were marching along dreaming of a Christ who would redeem the emptiness of bedrooms. I was a happy little girl with the bright eyes of a believer. For God was a man …
I’m from nowhere when the sky pulls back, from no forest, no city, like a woman sitting in her woman’s littleness seeking her face through a shrouded window. There, in the memory of my death, the exact instant when breathing left me, I rock back and forth soundlessly, surprised to find myself whole again in …