An Interview with Tim Gautreaux: "Cartographer of Louisiana Back Roads"
Margaret D. Bauer, East Carolina University
Abstract:
In this interview with Louisiana native Margaret
D. Bauer, author Tim Gautreaux discusses a quarter century of his fiction
writing. Resisting simplistic labels of "Cajun" and "southern," Gautreaux's
storytelling reveals an intimate understanding of southern Louisiana's
white, working-class people and culture. Often drawn from his own background,
Gautreaux's characters are shaped by a range of experiences, from working
on steamboats and fighting in world wars, to struggling in the 1980s
oil bust.
Essay Sections:
Introduction:
In his 1983 book, The People Called Cajuns, James Dorman observes that Cajuns "rarely speak for themselves" in the various sources that refer to them — historical,
biographical, or literary — but that same year Louisiana's Tim Gautreaux published
his first short story, "A Sacrifice of Doves," in the Kansas Quarterly.1 In the more than quarter-century since, he has published two short story collections and three novels, most recently The Missing (Knopf, 2009). Gautreaux's name reveals his ethnicity, and in his fiction readers find his Cajun perspective. He is a descendent of the French Acadians who settled in south Louisiana after the British drove them out of Novia Scotia in the eighteenth century.
 |
In spite of Gautreaux's importance in adding a seldom-heard voice to literature, he resists such labels as southern or Cajun writer. And certainly his fiction is not limited to the perspective of Acadian descendents — or southerners. The two main characters of his second novel, The Clearing, are from Pennsylvania. While the main characters of his other two novels, The Next Step in the Dance and The Missing, are Acadians, the characters in his short stories are more likely to have working class backgrounds than to be identified as Cajun. His protagonists are predominantly white, blue-collar, south Louisiana men, their ages ranging from the twenty-somethings of his novels to the numerous grandfathers in his stories. It is the Louisiana white working man's story that Gautreaux tells — or rather, the various stories of blue-collar workers, a voice fairly new to southern literature, offered by other writers of Gautreaux's generation (such as Mississippi's Larry
Brown and South Carolina's Dorothy
Allison), countering or deconstructing poor white and "white trash" literary stereotypes. |
Tim
Gautreaux,
2008
Image by Randy Bergeron |
Born in 1947, in Morgan City, Louisiana, Timothy Martin Gautreaux is the son of a tugboat captain and the grandson of a steamboat chief engineer. Other men in his family worked for the railroad and offshore on oil rigs, and many of them enjoyed storytelling.
After attending parochial elementary and secondary schools, Gautreaux went to Nicholls State University in Thibodeaux, Louisiana, graduating in 1969 as an English major. One of his professors entered poems Gautreaux had written in a Southern Literary Festival contest held in Knoxville. Keynote speaker James Dickey read the winning poems, among them Gautreaux's, and invited him into the PhD program at the University of South Carolina. Gautreaux's PhD dissertation was a volume of poetry called "Night-Wide River" (1972).
Gautreaux returned to Louisiana in 1972 to teach at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, east of Baton Rouge and about sixty miles northwest of New Orleans. He brought with him his new wife, Winborne Howell, a North Carolina native he had met in graduate school. Five years after moving back to Louisiana, he applied for a seat in a fiction writing class taught by Walker Percy at Loyola University in New Orleans. Percy selected Gautreaux, along with other writers who would go on to have successful careers, such as future novelist Valerie Martin and future Time magazine managing editor Walter Isaacson. From this experience on, Gautreaux wrote fiction.
Due to the heavy teaching load of a small state institution, along with raising two sons (Robert and Thomas), and maintaining interests beyond academia, it took Gautreaux into his forties to surface on readers' radars. After a couple of early publications in literary magazines, Gautreaux's stories were accepted by such venues as The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and GQ, and selected for the anthologies Best American Short Stories, New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, and The O. Henry Awards' Prize Stories. His stories also attracted the attention of Barry Hannah, who invited Gautreaux to be the 1996 John and Renée Grisham southern writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi, allowing him to finish his first published novel.
Gautreaux's first book, a collection of twelve stories, was published by St. Martin's Press in 1996, a year before the writer's fiftieth birthday. Same Place, Same Things was blurbed by fellow Louisiana writers James Lee Burke, Robert Olen Butler, Andre Dubus, and Shirley Ann Grau and reviewed by The New York Times. Calling it "[a] terrific debut collection," Kirkus Reviews noted the writer's "sympathetic understanding of working-class sensibilities" and compared Gautreaux to Flannery O'Connor. The Catholic magazine Commonweal praised the collection's stories for providing a "welcome relief from the blandness of McWorld; they bring reassuring evidence of the continuing existence of places away from the big place where, increasingly, we all live." And the reviewer for The North American Review remarked that Gautreaux "knows how to get out of a story's way and just let the characters do what they need to do. . . . These characters move through the world compelled by important motive. The characterizations are swift and precise, rooted in gesture, speech and action."2
Gautreaux's second book, the novel The Next Step in the Dance (Picador, 1998), was also reviewed in the Times, with the reviewer, Andy Solomon, remarking upon the author's "poetic mix of colorful detail and rapid-paced suspense," as well as "his keen ear for Cajun dialect." The Missouri Review also admired Gautreaux's "unmatched ear for the speech of rural Louisiana," as well as the writer's talent for writing about machines: "Here is a writer who can make the refitting of an engine as compelling as another author's love or death scene." This reviewer, however, found that the novel "suffers from a lack of urgency and momentum" and "overstays its welcome." By contrast, the New Orleans Times-Picayune argued for the importance of The Next Step in the Dance: that the 1980s, "a time of great trauma for this state[,] . . . certainly deserved a literary piece to memorialize it."3
In 1999, St. Martin's published a second volume of Gautreaux's stories, Welding with Children, which the Times again selected for a lengthy and positive review, praising the author for his "cartograph[y in] mapping with affectionate but unflinching accuracy both the back roads of Louisiana . . . and the distance between parents and children." Reviewing this collection for the Hudson Review, Susan Balée called Gautreaux "[t]he master of the Cajun short story," as well as one of the three "best short story writers in America today" — praise that would please a writer who resists regional labels. Reviewer Alan Heathcock lauded Gautreaux's "invention of clever, out of the ordinary conflicts" and "his ability to render true the voice of his Louisiana working-class characters." Heathcock sums up the collection: "The stories are all about people who want to be good, who want to help others and end up helping themselves in the process. They are about redemption, with a tender sense of humor, as seen through the kind eyes of their author."4
Next, Gautreaux tackled an historical novel set in the 1920s, dealing with a World War I veteran suffering Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, perhaps prompting USA Today's comparison of The Clearing (Knopf, 2003) to Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain. The New Yorker responded to The Clearing by calling Gautreaux a "Bayou Conrad," and several reviewers began to compare (and contrast) the author to Cormac McCarthy. Publishers Weekly suggested that The Clearing confirms the opinion that "Gautreaux is perhaps the most talented writer to come out of the South in recent years."5 His growing reputation is reflected in the larger number of reviews of this novel in a broader spectrum of venues, from local papers to the Christian Science Monitor and the UK's Guardian. This happened as well for The Missing, another post World War I novel, promptly reviewed in The New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post, as well as by several UK publications. For both historical novels, the author did his homework — researching details that would allow him to realistically depict life in the 1920s in a Louisiana lumber mill town in The Clearing and on a Mississippi River entertainment steamboat in The Missing.
After drafting a volume on Tim Gautreaux for the "Understanding Contemporary American Writers" series published by the University of South Carolina Press,6 I drove to the author's new home in western North Carolina to fill in some biographical blanks and test some theories about his work. Having read every interview I could find, my own interview did not cover the usual ground.7 It was the first interview I'd conducted — though as a journal editor, I've certainly read and helped shape my share of interviews.
Gautreaux is very easy to talk to, a natural raconteur (which will surprise no one who has read his fiction), but some of my questions, while not receiving blank stares, were not responded to with the assurance that I was on track with my readings. Rather, Gautreaux occasionally seemed surprised — an interested, intrigued surprise, but still surprise — by my interpretations. And suddenly, in the middle of it all, I understood that of course he would be. If he had intentionally set out to accomplish what I was asking him about, his work would not be as good as it is. Rather, he is just telling his stories, crafting his stories, polishing his stories. I'm the literary critic who then analyzes what he's done within those stories — while he goes on to the next one.
With this realization occurring as I sat on his living room couch, I wondered why I was wasting the man's time with an interview — why we ever ask writers these questions about their work, questions that suggest that the writer sets out with some agenda besides telling the story, when it is probably the case that the writer with a predetermined agenda is usually not the writer we bother interviewing.
Since he knows I am working on a book about his writing, at least I could reassure him during the interview that I appreciate his writing and know it very well — better, perhaps, than he does, he later admitted. And so we continued to talk, not just about his own work but about literature in general and about our common home, south Louisiana, for the rest of the evening, long into the night, and the next day — though after the "formal" ninety minutes of "interviewing," we stopped recording and just talked. Gautreaux's wife, Winborne, another lover of literature, joining us as we shared our favorite novels and writers and figured out who we know in common, having grown up in small towns just about twenty miles apart. After a stimulating visit, I traveled back home to eastern North Carolina with most of the answers I had been looking for and much more, including a bittersweet homesickness for the music of the voices, the celebration of fine food, and the family and friends I've left behind in Louisiana.
After attending parochial elementary and secondary schools, Gautreaux went to Nicholls State University in Thibodeaux, Louisiana, graduating in 1969 as an English major. One of his professors entered poems Gautreaux had written in a Southern Literary Festival contest held in Knoxville. Keynote speaker James Dickey read the winning poems, among them Gautreaux's, and invited him into the PhD program at the University of South Carolina. Gautreaux's PhD dissertation was a volume of poetry called "Night-Wide River" (1972).
Gautreaux returned to Louisiana in 1972 to teach at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, east of Baton Rouge and about sixty miles northwest of New Orleans. He brought with him his new wife, Winborne Howell, a North Carolina native he had met in graduate school. Five years after moving back to Louisiana, he applied for a seat in a fiction writing class taught by Walker Percy at Loyola University in New Orleans. Percy selected Gautreaux, along with other writers who would go on to have successful careers, such as future novelist Valerie Martin and future Time magazine managing editor Walter Isaacson. From this experience on, Gautreaux wrote fiction.
Due to the heavy teaching load of a small state institution, along with raising two sons (Robert and Thomas), and maintaining interests beyond academia, it took Gautreaux into his forties to surface on readers' radars. After a couple of early publications in literary magazines, Gautreaux's stories were accepted by such venues as The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and GQ, and selected for the anthologies Best American Short Stories, New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, and The O. Henry Awards' Prize Stories. His stories also attracted the attention of Barry Hannah, who invited Gautreaux to be the 1996 John and Renée Grisham southern writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi, allowing him to finish his first published novel.
Gautreaux's first book, a collection of twelve stories, was published by St. Martin's Press in 1996, a year before the writer's fiftieth birthday. Same Place, Same Things was blurbed by fellow Louisiana writers James Lee Burke, Robert Olen Butler, Andre Dubus, and Shirley Ann Grau and reviewed by The New York Times. Calling it "[a] terrific debut collection," Kirkus Reviews noted the writer's "sympathetic understanding of working-class sensibilities" and compared Gautreaux to Flannery O'Connor. The Catholic magazine Commonweal praised the collection's stories for providing a "welcome relief from the blandness of McWorld; they bring reassuring evidence of the continuing existence of places away from the big place where, increasingly, we all live." And the reviewer for The North American Review remarked that Gautreaux "knows how to get out of a story's way and just let the characters do what they need to do. . . . These characters move through the world compelled by important motive. The characterizations are swift and precise, rooted in gesture, speech and action."2
Gautreaux's second book, the novel The Next Step in the Dance (Picador, 1998), was also reviewed in the Times, with the reviewer, Andy Solomon, remarking upon the author's "poetic mix of colorful detail and rapid-paced suspense," as well as "his keen ear for Cajun dialect." The Missouri Review also admired Gautreaux's "unmatched ear for the speech of rural Louisiana," as well as the writer's talent for writing about machines: "Here is a writer who can make the refitting of an engine as compelling as another author's love or death scene." This reviewer, however, found that the novel "suffers from a lack of urgency and momentum" and "overstays its welcome." By contrast, the New Orleans Times-Picayune argued for the importance of The Next Step in the Dance: that the 1980s, "a time of great trauma for this state[,] . . . certainly deserved a literary piece to memorialize it."3
 |
 |
In 1999, St. Martin's published a second volume of Gautreaux's stories, Welding with Children, which the Times again selected for a lengthy and positive review, praising the author for his "cartograph[y in] mapping with affectionate but unflinching accuracy both the back roads of Louisiana . . . and the distance between parents and children." Reviewing this collection for the Hudson Review, Susan Balée called Gautreaux "[t]he master of the Cajun short story," as well as one of the three "best short story writers in America today" — praise that would please a writer who resists regional labels. Reviewer Alan Heathcock lauded Gautreaux's "invention of clever, out of the ordinary conflicts" and "his ability to render true the voice of his Louisiana working-class characters." Heathcock sums up the collection: "The stories are all about people who want to be good, who want to help others and end up helping themselves in the process. They are about redemption, with a tender sense of humor, as seen through the kind eyes of their author."4
Next, Gautreaux tackled an historical novel set in the 1920s, dealing with a World War I veteran suffering Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, perhaps prompting USA Today's comparison of The Clearing (Knopf, 2003) to Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain. The New Yorker responded to The Clearing by calling Gautreaux a "Bayou Conrad," and several reviewers began to compare (and contrast) the author to Cormac McCarthy. Publishers Weekly suggested that The Clearing confirms the opinion that "Gautreaux is perhaps the most talented writer to come out of the South in recent years."5 His growing reputation is reflected in the larger number of reviews of this novel in a broader spectrum of venues, from local papers to the Christian Science Monitor and the UK's Guardian. This happened as well for The Missing, another post World War I novel, promptly reviewed in The New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post, as well as by several UK publications. For both historical novels, the author did his homework — researching details that would allow him to realistically depict life in the 1920s in a Louisiana lumber mill town in The Clearing and on a Mississippi River entertainment steamboat in The Missing.
After drafting a volume on Tim Gautreaux for the "Understanding Contemporary American Writers" series published by the University of South Carolina Press,6 I drove to the author's new home in western North Carolina to fill in some biographical blanks and test some theories about his work. Having read every interview I could find, my own interview did not cover the usual ground.7 It was the first interview I'd conducted — though as a journal editor, I've certainly read and helped shape my share of interviews.
Gautreaux is very easy to talk to, a natural raconteur (which will surprise no one who has read his fiction), but some of my questions, while not receiving blank stares, were not responded to with the assurance that I was on track with my readings. Rather, Gautreaux occasionally seemed surprised — an interested, intrigued surprise, but still surprise — by my interpretations. And suddenly, in the middle of it all, I understood that of course he would be. If he had intentionally set out to accomplish what I was asking him about, his work would not be as good as it is. Rather, he is just telling his stories, crafting his stories, polishing his stories. I'm the literary critic who then analyzes what he's done within those stories — while he goes on to the next one.
With this realization occurring as I sat on his living room couch, I wondered why I was wasting the man's time with an interview — why we ever ask writers these questions about their work, questions that suggest that the writer sets out with some agenda besides telling the story, when it is probably the case that the writer with a predetermined agenda is usually not the writer we bother interviewing.
Since he knows I am working on a book about his writing, at least I could reassure him during the interview that I appreciate his writing and know it very well — better, perhaps, than he does, he later admitted. And so we continued to talk, not just about his own work but about literature in general and about our common home, south Louisiana, for the rest of the evening, long into the night, and the next day — though after the "formal" ninety minutes of "interviewing," we stopped recording and just talked. Gautreaux's wife, Winborne, another lover of literature, joining us as we shared our favorite novels and writers and figured out who we know in common, having grown up in small towns just about twenty miles apart. After a stimulating visit, I traveled back home to eastern North Carolina with most of the answers I had been looking for and much more, including a bittersweet homesickness for the music of the voices, the celebration of fine food, and the family and friends I've left behind in Louisiana.
Essay Sections:
