Between Books / Entre deux livres : The Writer's Time / Le temps de l'A©crivain

In the fourth annual Antonine Maillet-Northrop Frye Lecture, Monique LaRue offers a rare glimpse of one writer''s experience of "between time" — how fiction writers spend their time between books. It is in this critical period that she works with, generates, abandons, and embraces ideas for new books. Literary creation is an act driven by inspiration, or, as LaRue explains it, by the moment of kairos, when the form of the work in progress reveals itself in an instant, intuitively. To get there, LaRue navigates social time in the immediacy of the present and in the distance of the past, both experienced and chronicled. Both perspectives help her build towards a new nexus of creative output. Her account of finding where her voice will take her next is simultaneously intellectual and personal as she traces her debt to her experience as a mother, the oral tradition, her training as a philosopher, and her evolving feminism.

Once a work is completed, when and how do writers and other artists embrace their next creative work? In this fascinating book, Monique LaRue gives a tantalizing glimpse of the contour of time shaped by inspiration rather than the movement of the clock. Moving from the philosophical to the personal, she provides a view of how each of her novels has come into existence -- the personal context in which each came to be and the social context in which each was received.LaRue uses two important words in her approach to this "between-time" of creative possibility. The first, "meander," from the Greek name for Maiandros, has come to signify "wandering at random." Like Northrop Frye, she distinguishes between "Kairos," the mysterious, unpredictable moment when the creative impulse is released, and "chronos," or passing time. This ephemeral moment, as explained by LaRue, is of time but not in it. Given this paradox, it should come as no surprise that LaRue's between-time of writing creatively has no name. Mortality brings time and its passage unceasingly to mind. Yet, the mental action of moving freely through meandering associations during the time between works becomes the criterion for thinking creatively.Une fois une Åuvre achevée, quand et comment écrivains et artistes abordent-ils leur prochaine création? Dans cet ouvrage passionnant, Monique LaRue nous donne un avant-goÃ"t alléchant des contours du temps tracés, dans ce cas, par notre imaginaire et non par les aiguilles de l'horloge. Naviguant entre la philosophie et l'expérience personnelle, elle nous livre un aperçu de la genèse de chacun de ses livres -- tant les circonstances personnelles dans lesquelles chacun a vu le jour que le contexte social qui les a accueillis.Deux mots clés émergent de la démarche de LaRue dans son exploration de cet " entre deux temps " du potentiel créatif. Le premier, " méandre ", provenant du terme grec " Maiandros " qui veut dire " errer au hasard ". à l'instar de Northrop Frye, elle distingue entre " Kairos ", le moment mystérieux et imprévisible où l'élan créateur est libéré, et " Chronos ", le temps qui passe. Pour Larue, ce moment éphémère, surgit du temps sans toutefois en faire partie. De par ce paradoxe, il n'est guère surprenant de constater que l'" entre-temps " de l'écriture créative dont traite LaRue est innommé, Notre mortalité nous renvoie inlassablement au temps. Pourtant, la pensée créative exige une activité mentale qui évolue librement, serpentant, au cours de ce temps entre deux Åuvres, au gré des aléas des associations méandres.