Enjoying the sweet breeze nature’s offering her, Yolande confides: “Writing is my way of both emptying my head and expressing emotions that are normally difficult for me to express.”
The bond between Yolande and writing begins at an early age. Like most people, she showed some interest in poetry in high school. As for her first texts, they were for her family and friends. However, it’s only in 2020, during lockdown, that she really focused on it, partly thanks to a call for texts about forest. After an ecology master’s degree in Paris punctuate by COVID, Yolande took a gap year to travel through France, alternating her time doing some wwoofings* and spending the rest with her friends. Having more freedom than previous years, she devoted herself to her writing.
Going back to college afterward, she realized what she did did not fit with her anymore.
“I spent four months in a clinic for my anorexia. Ill for years, my studies made my situation worse. I couldn’t keep going like that, so I decided to stop everything.”
Yolande explains she took every poem and text she wrote these past years in order to divide them in different thematic so she could make collections and then self-publish. She loves to put on paper what she’s observing, feeling, or simply covering topics on which she’s sometimes feeling out of step with others.
“At the beginning, I told myself I would try making my writing projects a reality for a few months, and then search for a civic service in science mediation. I eventually gave myself one entire year.”
But self-publishing* is not an easy task. Great communication around her works and the page layout is just up to her, and the printing costs are dependent on her. To cover them, she set up an online pool for her collection’s presale. Proud of her accomplishment, she announces her sales were over 200, when she only hoped for 100.
Nevertheless, Yolande’s creativity doesn't stop here. She’s currently forming herself as a self-taught woman, and preparing herself to lead her first writing class. She’s launching at the same time a notebook’s collection interspersed by poems, with an illustrated cover. She has some other ideas like creating postcards or bookmarks where she would combine poems and texts, or projects around poetry with different audiences.
Her aim : make all of these projects a professional activity at least partial, but above all, she wants to reintroduce poetry in people's lives and change their point of view on this misunderstood art.
“People frequently have a reductive and frozen idea on poetry. I’d like to break this negative image given by school. If I had to define it, I would say that I write a poetry of observation, a poetry of feeling and everyday life.”
For Yolande, whether it’s in a poetry form or not, writing is more than putting letters side by side.
“What I love about writing is this relationship of trust I have with myself,” she confides.” I’ve written hundreds of pages to try to understand what was happening at the beginning of my illness. I was writing things I didn’t understand or simply to give things a perspective, and I have still kept doing it. Writing is kind of therapeutic for me.”
She explains she’s in “passion” mode, and adds, chuckling :
“I think that, sometimes, we have to go ahead without thinking too much while remaining lucid.”
What’s certain is that our dear words' instrumentalist will continue to write, and without doubting the passion she puts in her verses that will surely find their way into her readers’ heart.
1* The wwoofing consists in working a few hours of daily work in an organic farm or smallholding hosts in return for providing food and accommodation.
2* Self-publishing is when authors publish their work by themselves without the intermediary of a book publisher.
Interview of Yolande Belleau, 24 years old
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