Christine Campadieu will present her book The Sorcerer and the Firefly, Friday, December 6, at 6 p.m. at the J.-S. Pons media library.
The Wizard and the Firefly on the road and at the table with Jim Harrison, preface by François Busnel, afterword by Jamie Harrison, is published by Nouriturfu. This book has just won the 2024 Livres en Vignes Prize, Clos de Vougeot Prize, and the Literary Harvest Lightning Prize received on October 6 in Rivesaltes.
It is the book of an adventure and a change, for someone who always dreamed of a writing path, but who first became involved with vines and wines, at the Domaine de la Tour Vieille in Collioure. , without ever forgetting its goal.
His meeting with the American writer Jim Harrisson, the author of Autumn legends, Dalva, Wolf.
On the sidelines, The road backwas played on a roll of the dice. With this propensity for Christine Campadieu to go straight ahead, like this Harrisonian heroine in The woman with the fireflies. “Jim saw in me a character, an incarnation of his wife of fireflies, this heroine who, seized by a sudden attack of conscience, can no longer stand the routine of her life and goes straight ahead across the fields” she writes.
This will be the start of around fifteen years of correspondence, around ten years where she will accompany Big Jim in his travels, his dreams and his delusions, taking notes and opening his wide-angle view on this immense writer. “To recount my hours spent with Jim Harrison is to speak of an idiotic bet that would have worked. Probably nothing predestined me to such an encounter, even if my life intentions were parallel to a certain modus vivendi of Jim. Simply , like him I had the passion to see what was there after the bend”.
A man of rituals, Tabasco, good wines, an epicurean, a lover of poetry and crazy enough to follow in the footsteps of Antonio Machado with Christine, the writer is on edge. “He was not the elephant in a china shop, he was the reincarnation of porcelain as an elephant: sometimes a monster, but a monster of poetry of sensitive ramblings and frightened hopes”.
This evening offered by the media library will immerse us in distant America, fishing trips on the Yellowstone River, walks in Arizona, to share the table of this man of the pen with a Rabelaisian profile, unclassifiable.
