Conversations with Tim Gautreaux

An Interview with Tim Gautreaux

25 An Interview with Tim Gautreaux Christopher Joyal/1998 From New Delta Review 16.1 (1998), 87-97. © New Delta Review. Reprinted courtesy of New Delta Review. Tim Gautreaux was born and raised in Morgan City, Louisiana, a blue-collar , Gulf Coast city tied to Acadian culture. He lives in Hammond, Louisiana , with his wife, Winborne, where he is Writer in Residence at Southeastern Louisiana University. Gautreaux stories have appeared in Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, GQ, and Story, winning a National Magazine Award for fiction and an NEA Creative Fellowship. He also has had stories appear in New Stories from the South and Best American Short Stories. Gautreaux’s first book, a collection of stories titled Same Place, Same Things, chronicles the lives of blue collar workers placed in sometimes extraordinary and often humorous situations. Once put to the test, his characters frequently display a basic humanity and decency sometimes derided in more cosmopolitan fiction. Gautreaux’s new novel, The Next Step in the Dance, published in 1998, is about a machinist named Paul, who wants nothing more than a pleasant and comfortable life in Louisiana. His wife, Colette, however, leaves him and travels to California, hoping to find a life and a lover with more ambition. With a rare combination of mechanical precision and a sympathetic understanding of south Louisiana people and culture, Gautreaux explores the difficulties of marriage and true commitment, the conflict between big city ideals and small town morals, and the difference between men and women in an almost mythological setting—a land of snakes, alligators, epic bar room brawls, and rifle contests—the setting Tim Gautreaux calls home. CJ: The female protagonist in your novel, The Next Step in the Dance, Colette , says that she wants to leave Louisiana because it’s a foreign country. 26 CONVERSATIONS WITH TIM GAUTREAUX Another character in a story from Same Place, Same Things has a mother who leaves for a similar reason. Do you think of south Louisiana as a foreign country relative to the rest of the United States? TG: People realize that this place is kind of different. Not too many states allow drive-thru daiquiri windows or sell hard liquor at filling stations. CJ: Your books show a fascination with machines. The main character in your novel, Paul, for example, repairs old machinery. TG: I come from a blue-collar family, and everybody was always talking about machines when I was a kid because my family was made up of tugboat captains, oil rig workers, and railroad workers. They’d talk about their trades. CJ: We often talk about how television and movies homogenize culture, but in literature departments there is a large interest in literature specifically about ethnicity and gender. Do you think that regional writers represent a reaction against homogeneity? TG: I try not to think about that too much. I just accept what I write as an unavoidable part of who I am. I write about Acadian culture or blue-collar families here in the South because it’s where I’m from. It’s just a fact that I was raised in a rough oil-patch town on the gulf, Morgan City. We had thirty-two bars and eighteen churches. That’s my territory as a writer. CJ: I wanted to ask you about religion in your work. TG: Religion was also very much a part of my culture. I went to Catholic school, and I’m still Catholic. I was educated by Marianite nuns in the 1950s. Religion was part of the fabric of small Louisiana towns. We did things in terms of the liturgical calendar sometimes. Even government events would be scheduled that way. When I was at college, at Nicholls State, in those days they would cancel class on holy days of obligation so the Catholic students wouldn’t miss mass. And if you went into a restaurant in Morgan City in the 1950s and ordered a meat dish on Fridays, the waitress would ask if you knew it was Friday. In those days, you didn’t eat meat on Friday. CJ: Coming from a blue-collar family, what did your folks think about you becoming a writer? TG: They were very supportive. Of course I never told anybody I was going to be a writer, because I didn’t know that. I was just a student or an English major. I was going to teach somewhere. [3.141.2.96...