Marseillaise by birth, growing up in Montreal, an Explorer at heart and based today between Paris and Eastern France, French author Anne Calife takes her readers on a journey of perception and strong emotions through sensory writing. After her studies in medicine, she started to write her first book, Meurs la faim (“Dying of Hunger”), in 1997 when she was pregnant.
In 2003, she wrote a text after traveling to Palestine: “Next to a huge cone of grey sand is what I want to touch, see and understand: the WALL…I approach it very slowly, as one would approach an enemy who is stronger. If I could crawl, I would have done it; if I could have insulted it, I would have done it, too. Because the wall could not care less, with its head in the sky and the clouds stretching slowly above.”
In 2007, she published her fifth book, Conte d’asphalte (« Street Tale »). She presents a view of the life of homeless people that was inspired by true stories and perceived through the eye of the main character named Pierrette, who finds herself living on the streets one day. Anne says about this book on her website: “In order to write, I need imbalance and to put myself in danger. Perhaps that is why I need to put myself in dangerous situations, on the edge of the cliff. Thus I lived almost one year with homeless people, sharing the hardships of their everyday life and swinging between friendship and insults.”
Her new book Tant mieux si je tombe (So Much the Better if I Fall), published in 2012, tells the story of a young woman named Lucille who finds herself in a spiral of psychological imbalance, suffering in silence and connecting with sculpture to find a way to express herself.
Art & Inspiration: What inspired you to write When You’re Falling, Dive?
Mark Matousek: On this journey of life, I have observed that there are people who are able to face adversity while others seem to fall apart and find no meaning in their challenges. I had met so many amazing survivors and I had also lived through the story myself and read so much about survival that I wanted to compile a book that would be a kind of touchstone for people who were going through some kind of serious challenge – whether it was illness, a divorce, losing your job, whatever it is that sort of cracks open your story – and not knowing how to move forward. I wanted this to be a book for people who could find some inspiration from those who had been through worse things than they and come through it with some kind of spiritual awakening and a sense of courage and possibility. I consider this to be a book of service to others.
A&I: And you share so many inspiring stories. How does being in a crisis actually help people to transform their lives?
MM: What a crisis does is that it puts you up against the wall where you have to tell the truth. The luxury of lying and evasion are taken away from you. And so a crisis offers an opportunity to see yourself, your story and your life differently and to reinvent yourself, to re-imagine yourself in the future. My motto is that when you tell the truth, your story changes. And when your story changes, your life is transformed. Not everyone uses it that way though. Some people get so paralyzed by fear or the unwillingness to change that they miss the opportunity and are often defeated by what has happened to them. One of the things that John Dugdale, the amazing photographer who went blind, said to me in the book was, “If you can’t imagine yourself differently, you’re not going to make it.“ It’s all about being able to have an image of yourself that’s different from how you’ve been. Because if you’re holding on to the past and if you’re expecting things to go back to the way they were before, forget about it – you’re lost.
A&I: In your book, you also write that John Dugdale said that his physical and spiritual survival depended on his ability to make art. How do you think he was able to find that hope or that continuous motivation after losing his eyesight?
MM: For an artist like John, his creative impulse is so intimately tied in with his life force and his will to live. For someone like him, if he can’t create, he doesn’t really want to be here. So he needed to figure out how to do it so that it would give him the will to live and the strength to survive. Creativity doesn’t have to be artistic though. It’s about creatively thinking about your life and not feeling like because something has been taken away from you -that you think you can’t live without - that your life stops. Creativity, imagination, survival and the will to live are very intimately tied into each other.
Art & Inspiration : Comment vous est venue l’idée d’écrire When You’re Falling, Dive (Lorsque vous tombez, vous plongez)?
Mark Matousek: Toute ma vie, j’ai constaté qu’il y avait des personnes capables de faire face à l’adversité là où d’autres semblaient s’effondrer, incapables de trouver un sens aux défis qu’elles rencontraient. J’ai croisé tellement de survivants épatants, j’ai vécu tellement de choses au travers de leur histoire et j’ai tellement lu à propos de la survie que j’ai eu envie de compiler tout cela dans un livre. Un livre qui servirait plus ou moins de référence pour tous ceux qui sont confrontés à d’importants défis (maladie, divorce, perte d’emploi… n’importe quoi qui vienne fissurer votre histoire) et ne savent pas comment avancer. Je voulais que le témoignage de ceux qui ont surmonté le pire, grâce à un éveil spirituel, un sens du courage et des possibles, puisse servir d’inspiration à d’autres. Pour moi, ce livre est un manuel à la disposition de tous.
A&I : Et il y a tant d’histoires inspirantes que vous partagez. Concrètement, en quoi une situation de crise peut aider les gens à redéfinir leur vie ?
MM : Ce que fait une crise, c’est vous mettre au pied du mur, là où vous devez dire la vérité. Vous ne pouvez plus vous payer le luxe de mentir ou de fuir. Elle vous offre un regard neuf sur vous-même, votre histoire, et votre vie, mais elle vous propose aussi de vous réinventer, d’imaginer pour à l’avenir un nouveau vous-même. Ma devise c’est que quand vous dites la vérité, votre histoire change. Et quand votre histoire change, votre vie en est transformée. Tout le monde cependant ne l’interprète pas de cette façon. Certains sont tellement paralysés par la peur ou le refus de changer, qu’ils passent à côté d’opportunités et se laissent abattre par ce qui leur est arrivé. Une des choses que John Dugdale, cet incroyable photographe devenu aveugle, m’a dit c’est que « si tu es incapable de te représenter différemment, tu ne t’en sortiras pas. » Tout tourne autour de la capacité à avoir une image différente de ce que l’on a été. Parce que si on s’accroche trop au passé et qu’on s’attend à ce que les choses redeviennent comme avant, ce n’est plus la peine de continuer, on a d’ores et déjà perdu.
A&I : Dans votre livre, vous avez également écrit que John Dugdale affirme devoir sa survie physique et spirituelle à sa capacité à faire de l’art. Comment pensez-vous qu’il a été capable de trouver cet espoir, ou éternelle motivation, après avoir perdu la vue ?
MM : Pour un artiste comme John, l’impulsion créative est intimement liée à sa force vitale et à sa volonté de vivre : s’il ne peut pas créer, il n’a pas de raison d’être ici. Il a donc fallu qu’il trouve comment garder sa volonté de vivre et la force de survivre. Mais la créativité, ce n’est pas forcément quelque chose d’artistique. C’est plus réfléchir à sa vie de manière créative et ne pas avoir le sentiment que parce quelque chose vous a été pris (quelque chose que vous pensez indispensable) votre vie s’arrête. La créativité, l’imagination, la survie et la volonté de vivre sont toutes étroitement liées entre elles.
" What a crisis does is that it puts you up against the wall where you have to tell the truth. The luxury of lying and evasion are taken away from you. "
"Ce que fait une crise, c’est vous mettre au pied du mur, là où vous devez dire la vérité. Vous ne pouvez plus vous payer le luxe de mentir ou de fuir. "
- Mark Matousek
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