Erin Moure's Current Reading Includes Louky Bersianik's 1980 Maternative, Bertrand Laverdure in Translation, More

Erin Moure gives us a glimpse of her summer reading over at Tarpaulin Sky. Primarily, her focus is on Readopolis, Quebec writer Bertrand Laverdure’s 2007 novel Lectodome, translated into English by Oana Avasilichioaei (BookThug, 2017). The book is "at times a panorama of Montreal literary culture, at times a condemnation of the precarity and banality of cultural economies, at times a rich homage to friends and to hope, as well as to the wonders of the act of reading itself. Avasilichioaei captures the mad hilarities of Laverdure’s style perfectly," writes Moure.

Moure is also casting back, thankfully, having spotted Louky Bersianik’s Maternative (1980) on her bookshelf.

Bersianik, a feminist Quebec writer of a foundational generation of Quebec feminists who altered our relationship to the word and its possibilities, dreamed large in her works. In an era of North American writing, the 70s and 80s, when the thinking of women writers was still derided by male critics as small, she reclaimed a big experimental and avant-garde space for motherhood and thinking in this book, which employs theatre, poetry, prose fiction, journals, to create a world of touch and proximity that includes pregnancy, motherhood, craziness — and also is collaborative: it includes acid-etchings by artist Jean Letarte. Oh, and it’s in French! 

There's much more to be read about Moure's reading here. Further Bersianik-work can be discovered by checking out Theory, A Sunday (maybe you already know).