The shape of a cave, this emptiness we seek out like water. The void that
we are. That we wash into as sleep washes over us, and we are blanketed
in darkness. We see nothing. We are in the center of our ignorance.
Nothingness spreads around us. But in this nothing we find what we
did not know existed. With our hands, we begin to trace faint images
etched into the walls. And now, beneath these images we can see the
gleam of older images. And these peel back to reveal the older still. The
past, the dead, once breathing, the forgotten, the secret, the buried, the
once blood and bone, the vanished, shimmering now like an answer
from these walls, bright and red. Drawn by the one who came before.
And before her. And before. Back to the beginning. To the one who
first swam from the mouth of this cave. And now we know all she knew,
see the newness of her vision. What we did not know existed but saw as
children, our whole lives drawn here, image over image, past time,
beyond space.

Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her

The flesh is writing and writing is never read: it is always still to be read,
to be studied, to be discovered, to be invented.

Hélène Cixous, "La Venue à l'écriture"

Madeleine Gagnon has been at the forefront of artistic experimen-
tation in Quebec letters since the early 1770s. Spanning nearly two
decades with considerable scope and power, her writings have
helped formulate and have responded to many of the central preoc-
cupations of feminist literary production in Quebec. Because of
the political sophistication and underlying contradictions that have
formed the essential character of her literary project, Gagnon's writ-
ings have reproduced many of the inner struggles of Quebec's

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