Between Books/ Entre Deux Livres

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 persepectives 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.