SOURCE: An introduction to Selected Tales of Jacques Ferron, translated by Betty Bednarski, Anansi, 1985, pp. 11-6.

In the following essay, Bednarski remarks on the central place of the tale in Ferron's work.

Jacques Ferron, winner of the Governor-General's Prize for literature, the Prix France-Québec, the Prix Duvernay and the Prix David, has long been recognized as one of Quebec's foremost writers. Novelist, essayist, playwright, polemicist and, above all, master storyteller, he has begun in recent years to achieve the recognition he deserves outside Quebec, in France and in the rest of Canada.

In spite of his literary fame, many people in Quebec still know Ferron only as a doctor. He completed his medical training in 1945 at Laval University and shortly afterwards went to work as a country doctor in a remote fishing village in the Gaspé. Since 1948 he has lived and practised in Longueuil (formerly Ville Jacques-Cartier...