SOURCE: "Rereading Jacques Ferron," in The Antigonish Review, No. 61, Spring, 1985, pp. 43-9.

In the following essay, Bednarski comments on the relationship between life and literature in Ferron's works.

When Jacques Ferron died this spring, I began immediately rereading books of his, some of which had remained unopened on my shelf for several years. It must be a natural reaction to seek to re-establish contact in this way and to re-affirm a bond with a writer who has died. Especially if we have known and loved the man. For me Jacques Ferron the writer had always been inseparable from the man. And I no doubt brought to this most recent reading the particular intensity of my loss and, in spite of long held critical convictions and academic habits of mind, the desire, unconscious, perhaps, but no less intense, to rediscover in the texts a life which was no more...