An Interview with Gregoire Chabot (Interview‪)‬

According to Gregoire Chabot, a Franco-American author from Newburyport, Massachusetts, the most important quality in a writer is critical thinking, which is the only guarantee of creativity. Engaged in current social debates, the author has an obligation to help build the future. It is through questioning all values without exception that s/he will succeed in creating something new, something better. Chabot therefore rejects the ideology of survivance, the backward-looking vision that dominated Franco-American literary discourse for more than a century. To want only to conserve, maintain, perpetuate, preserve, is to refuse real life in favor of mere survivorship and to consign oneself, in the end, to oblivion. It is to be content, in the unforgettable phrase of one of Chabot's essays, with the "happiness of dying IN FRENCH!!!" Born in 1944, Gregoire Chabot studied French literature at Colby College, the University of Maine, and the University of Massachusetts. From 1976 to 1980, he worked in the field of bilingual education, then, when government funding ran out, he became a specialist in communications. In 1996 he founded a French-language theater troupe called "Du monde d'a cote" (Folks Next Door). Entirely dedicated to a Franco-American repertory, including the plays of Chabot himself, the troupe has performed in New England, Quebec, Louisiana, and France. Last year Chabot received the literary prize of the organization France-Louisiane-Franco-Americanie for his short story "A perte de vue" (As Far As the Eye Can See).