Our next project (currently untitled) interweaves the stories of two writers—a young girl and a middle-aged man, both from Brittany—who lived a century apart.

Jean-Marie Déguignet (1834-1905) escaped the grinding poverty of his Breton peasanthood to explore the world as a soldier-for-hire. Along the way, he compulsively wrote down his life story—a copious, irate, and sharply funny chronicle that is a rare example of a memoir by someone outside the privileged classes. Actually, he wrote it twice: Déguignet believed that his publisher had suppressed the original manuscript at the behest of the Catholic church. So he wrote it over again.

Minou Drouet (1947 - ) became an international sensation when, at the age of eight, her precocious poetry was circulated in the French literary community. Critics were hotly divided: could a child really write the material attributed to Drouet? Or was her adoptive mother, Claude, really responsible? Even when Drouet wrote poems before witnesses, doubts lingered and intimations of fraud have, to this day, remained.

For us, Déguignet and Drouet raise a series of questions about artistic creation that we’re interested in exploring, including: where is genius supposed to reside? What role does doubt (and its cousin, paranoia) play in creativity? Whose story gets told? Why?