Conversations with Tim Gautreaux

The Writer Next Door

22 The Writer Next Door Susan Larson/1998 From the Times-Picayune (15 March 1998). © 2011 The Times-Picayune. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. When Hammond writer Tim Gautreaux set out to write a novel following his critically acclaimed, Louisiana-set story collection, Same Place, Same Things, he knew what his subject would be—the oil bust of the ’80s. “It was a tremendously interesting time. So many people had to pull up stakes and move out of Louisiana. So many people suffered and stepped down several levels in their employment and in the amount of money they were making. It was really a time of great trauma for this state and certainly deserved a literary piece to memorialize it.” That newly published novel is The Next Step in the Dance, which chronicles the romance of Colette Jeansomme and Paul Thibodeaux, citizens of Tiger Island, Louisiana. Their marital difficulties spring out of that same period. “A lot of marriages broke up during the oil bust,” Gautreaux said. “It put tremendous stresses on the population of Louisiana. I just felt it had all sorts of things going for it—a sense of culture, a sense of place, and not a place in stasis, but a place in turbulent movement. It’s nice to have reality on your side.” A sense of the reality of Louisiana—the place and its people—is one of the distinguishing characteristics of Gautreaux’s fine fiction. He grew up in Morgan City, the son of a tugboat captain and the grandson of a steamboat engineer. After graduating from Nicholls State University and getting his doctorate from the University of South Carolina, he came home, and he’s been teaching at Southeastern Louisiana University for twenty-six years. So when it comes to Louisiana, he knows whereof he speaks. “Tiger Island is really a composite of three or four little towns—Morgan City (the first name for Morgan City back in the 1840s was Tiger Island), SUSAN LARSON / 1998 23 Donaldsonville, Houma, and Thibodeaux—those are the towns I have some experience with,” he said. “What I like about these places is that everyone knew everyone else, everyone was Catholic, I like the fact that everyone eats the same things. They share a common heritage so they make all sorts of assumptions about each other. “It’s nice to be known, although young people tend not to want that. They want to get away to meet people that they don’t know. But when you get older you see that it’s nice to be known . . . I can remember getting a haircut on Front Street in Morgan City when I was about forty. It was a rundown place and the barber was on his last legs, and as he started cutting my hair, he said, ‘Aren’t you a Gautreaux? I remember when your uncle drowned in the river trying to swim across and everyone was so upset.’ Now this conversation took place maybe around 1985 and my uncle had drowned in the mid-20s and he was talking about it as though it had happened last year.” Gautreaux lives outside Hammond in an Acadian home in the woods. If you’ve read his work, you recognize signs of his passion for machinery—the tractors in the back, the locomotive on the mailbox and the railroad sign on the workshop. His collection of railroad lanterns and steamboat whistles, polished to perfection, adorns the mantel in his living room and the desk and bookshelves in his office, along with his collection of books about antique machinery, ranging from The Locomotive Catechism to The Piston Engine to a hardware catalog from 1918. This is a man who likes to know how things work. “I was born in 1947 and I remember steam locomotives charging through town. Southern Pacific used them up until 1955,” he said. But he doesn’t dream of going away. Gautreaux’s found everything he needs to write about right in his own back yard. “Louisiana’s not going to stop being a good place to write about. It’s going to be hard to exhaust this state because it’s so rich. It comes out of its diversity of cultures and values and all these things are going to be changing.” He laughs. “I saw a sign in a butcher shop the other day for ‘diet hogshead cheese,’ made with turkey instead of pork. So things are constantly changing.” The...