Ten Years of Grand Amour et Couche-Culotte: Les Zurbains

Apr 11

Case Study / Personal Reflection

Opening: The Story That Started Everything

I was younger when I wrote "Grand amour et couche-culotte" for Les Zurbains.

Younger, but not naive. Old enough to know that love is messy and profound and transcendent and limitless and ridiculous all at once. Old enough to understand that the most honest stories are the ones that make you feel simultaneously exposed and liberated.

I didn't know then that this story—published in a theatrical anthology for adolescent voices—would become a touchstone for me. That ten years later, I'd look back at those words and see not just a story, but a declaration of who I was becoming–– as an honour I have had to participate in such an unravelling but in how it has shaped my perception of the world and of what is possible.

Because "Grand amour et couche-culotte" wasn't just about love. It was about daring to tell the truth in your own voice when everyone expects you to sound like someone else.

And as a woman, as an entrepreneur, as someone building B0LD from nothing but conviction and words—that lesson has become everything.

This is what ten years of being a Les Zurbains writer taught me. About voice. About courage. About the long game of building a life that feels like yours.

I. What Les Zurbains Means

The Context That Matters

For those unfamiliar, Les Zurbains is a Quebec theatrical anthology series that gives voice to adolescents and emerging writers. It's published by Dramaturges Éditeurs, produced by Théâtre Le Clou, and it's been running since 1997.

This isn't a vanity press. This isn't "everyone gets published." This is a curated collection of voices that theatre professionals deem worthy of stage and page.

To be published in Les Zurbains as a young writer is to be told: Your voice matters. Your perspective is valid. Your story deserves to be heard.

When "Grand amour et couche-culotte" was accepted, I didn't fully understand what that meant.

I do now.

II. The Story Itself

What I Was Trying to Say

"Grand amour et couche-culotte"—Great Love and Diapers—was my attempt to capture the absurd, tender, terrifying reality of love stripped of romance novel gloss.

Not the Instagram version. Not the fairy tale. Love coexists with mundane logistics and where passion lives alongside embarrassment. Grand declarations happen in unglamorous moments; what is profound and ridiculous are inseparable. I grew up on Alexandre Jardin Fanfan and Le Zèbre, I wanted to live in bold letters and to love even bolder.

The title itself was intentional: juxtaposing "grand amour" (the elevated, the romantic, the aspirational) with "couche-culotte" (diapers—the corporeal, the messy, the real).

That tension, between who we want to be and who we actually are, that's where truth lives.

And at the immature age I was then, I was already obsessed with that tension. Already trying to write my way into understanding it and into allowing the potentiality of Love to transform us into better humans with more faith.

III. What It Taught Me About Voice

Finding Your Actual Voice vs. Your "Should" Voice

When you're young and trying to write, everyone tells you how you should sound academic, accessible, within the lines, but the brilliant team at the company showed me that pushing the boundaries of creativity is the epitome of art, but also of life.

Les Zurbains taught me: Your weird is your wealth.

The editors didn't want me to sound like anyone else. They loved my quirks and my unconventional wits. They wanted me to sound like me.

"Grand amour et couche-culotte" got published not despite its peculiarity, but because of it. This lesson shaped everything I do now.

When I work within B0LD, we don't try to sound or be like other marketing strategists; every strategy coming out of us is an ode to potentiality and pushing what can be done. When we position clients, I don't force them into "industry standard" voices. We help them find their actual voice—the one that makes them sound like no one else.

Your voice is your positioning. If you sound like everyone else, you are everyone else. And in a saturated market, being like everyone else is invisibility.

IV. What It Taught Me About Courage

The Vulnerability Tax

Writing something true costs something. Stripping your heart naked, whether you do it at 17 yo or at 85, wearing your heart on your sleeves requires courage. "Grand amour et couche-culotte" required me to put on paper—and on stage, performed by actors, witnessed by audiences—something deeply personal. Not autobiographical necessarily, but emotionally true. The kind of truth that makes you feel naked even when it's fiction. That's the vulnerability tax: to create something meaningful, you have to risk being seen. As a woman, this tax feels higher: We're told to be accommodating (bold truths aren't accommodating), we're told to be likeable (honesty isn't always likeable), and we're told to protect others' comfort (vulnerability makes people uncomfortable)

Publishing with Les Zurbains at a young age taught me: Pay the tax anyway. Because on the other side of that vulnerability is connection. The people who read "Grand amour et couche-culotte" and felt something—those were my people. The ones who recognised the truth in it, who saw themselves in the absurdity and tenderness.

As an entrepreneur now, this lesson is everything:

When I write about the soil season, about beauty rituals, about the darkness that heals—I'm paying the vulnerability tax. Some people will think it's too personal, too poetic, too much. But the right people, the right people will think: "Finally. Someone who gets it."

V. What It Taught Me About Building

The Long Game of Voice

Here's what I didn't realize ten years ago: Being published in Les Zurbains wasn't the destination. It was the foundation. Now with Le Theatrophone, the play is avaiable to students and teachers across the province.

It was the first brick in a structure I'm still building, a body of work i could be proud of, a labour of love, a reputation for truth, a relationship with my own voice and the firts proof that I could create things that mattered

As a woman building a business, this long-game thinking is radical. Real authority isn't built in quarters. It's built in decades. And today I celebrate with you my first one. Les Zurbains was my first public claim that I was a writer. B0LD is my current claim that I'm a strategist. But they're connected by the same thread: consistent, courageous creation over time.

Ten years from now, what will you be celebrating?

What are you starting today that will compound into authority, credibility, legacy?

For me, it was a story about young love and Cupid's diapers. For you, it might be a first blog post or a first product launch or a first client who took a chance on you or even simply the first moment you chose your voice over what was expected

VI. What It Means As A Woman

The Feminine Voice in a Masculine Medium

Theatre—especially published theatrical work—has historically been male-dominated.

Women's voices, especially young women's voices, were often dismissed as "too emotional" and minimised as "too domestic".

Les Zurbains creating space for young voices, or a distinctly feminine voice exploring love and intimacy and the unglamorous truth of connection like I did—is political. Les Zurbains says these stories matter. These perspectives deserve stages. These truths are worth publishing.

As an entrepreneur, I carry this forward: B0LD exists because I refuse to apologise for bringing feminine intelligence into business strategy. And We refuse to do anything but create more space and ease for women in business as well.

Our positioning is lyrical, not because we are trying to be different, but because that's how we actually think. We want intuition alongside data, we want beauty alongside function, we want cycles alongside linear growth, we want relationship alongside transaction.

This is feminine leadership. This is Love for business.

Les Zurbains taught me young: Your unique voice isn't a liability. It's your advantage.

VII. What It Means As An Entrepreneur

From Writer to Builder

The bridge from "published writer" to "business owner" isn't obvious, and honestly, I can´t wait to publish my next piece, but I also can't deny how business drives me the exact same way writing does, all-encompassing, soul-chattering and wholehearted. For me, they're inseparable, they are the love story between truth, loyalty, work ethic, freedom and impact.

Les Zurbains taught me:

1. You Can Build Platforms From Voice

I didn't have capital. I didn't have connections. I didn't even have a degree. but they saw something in me: the ability to write clearly, to tell truth compellingly, to create things people wanted to read and see, to let people feel.

That's what B0LD is built on. Voice as infrastructure.

2. Your Early Work Compounds

"Grand amour et couche-culotte" is still out there. In digital libraries and collections. Being read by people I'll never meet. Every article I write for B0LD will be out there too. Compounding credibility, building authority, creating connections, I can't predict.

3. Quality Over Quantity (But Quantity Matters Too)

Les Zurbains publishes curated work. Not everything. Not mediocre. The best.

But to get that one piece published, I probably wrote twenty version of it with them that didn't make it. Success requires high volume + high standards. Create prolifically. Let it all flow. Publish selectively. Let the best work represent you.

4. Your Origin Story Is Your Positioning

"I'm a Les Zurbains writer" carries weight in certain circles. It signals: quality, curation, Quebec cultural literacy. It carries weight in my heart. "I've been writing and publishing for over a decade" signals: longevity, commitment, seriousness and heart, a whole lot of heart. Your origin story, where you started, what you built from, is positioning gold.

Mine starts with a story about love and diapers published in a theatrical anthology. Yours starts wherever you choose to claim it.

VIII. The Celebration

What Ten Years Means

When Les Zurbains asks me what this story represents, as a woman, as an entrepreneur, on my journey, the answer is:

It represented the beginning of taking myself and my voice seriously, and to give others, complex feelings and big dreams a voice. Before Les Zurbains, I wrote in notebooks no one would read. I felt like I did not deserve it in all honesty. After Les Zurbains, I wrote for audiences, here on B0LD. For clients. For readers who were looking for exactly what I had to say. The shift from private expression to public voice is what creates careers.

For ten years, I've been building on that foundation:

More stories
More strategies
More courage to say true things
More trust in my voice
More evidence that this works

And I'm not done.

The next ten years will be:

More books
More businesses built
More women positioned as authorities
More proof that feminine, poetic, uncompromising voices can build empires

A Decade Of Gratitude

To Les Zurbains, to Dramaturges Éditeurs, to Théâtre Le Clou, to Les Gros Becs, to everyone who believed a young writer's voice was worth amplifying:

Thank you.

You taught me that voice matters. That Love moves mountains and that everything is possible. You taught me that truth—even messy, uncomfortable, unglamorous truth—deserves stages. You taught me to build the long way, the courageous way, the way that compounds.

Ten years later, I'm still building.

And it all started with a story about great love and diapers.

This article is dedicated to every woman building something from nothing but voice and vision. Your Grand Amour et Couche-Culotte moment is coming. Or maybe it already happened, and you're just starting to realize what it means.

ALEX VAZQUEZ