Conversations with Tim Gautreaux

Interview with Tim Gautreaux

35 Interview with Tim Gautreaux Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais/1998 From the Mississippi Review 27.3 (1999), 19-40. © Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais. Reprinted courtesy of Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais. Tim Gautreaux, author of a collection of stories, Same Place, Same Things, and a novel, The Next Step in the Dance, was born in Morgan City, Louisiana . He studied English at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana , and received his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina, where he studied under George Garrett and James Dickey. Gautreaux is writerin -residence at Southeastern Louisiana University. His short stories have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Harper’s, Story, The Best American Short Stories 1997 and 1998, and New Stories from the South. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais met with Tim Gautreaux in his home in Hammond , Louisiana, on March 20, 1998. Interviewer: You have said you think every writer is limited to where he is from. How does this apply to your own work? Tim Gautreaux: I think everybody owns the territory he was born into. That’s what can be used best, the richest ore that can be mined. That sounds like a theory, and there are exceptions to anything anybody comes up with in the way of a theory. But that is what I teach. Get in touch with where you’re from, your aunts, your uncles. I teach creative writing students that no matter where they are from, even if it’s a subdivision in Kenner, Louisiana, that that is their literary heritage. That’s their culture. If they look at it closely enough, they will see that it is as exotic and unique as some Central or South American cultures in the mountains. It is what they are given to work with. I really can’t understand these people who say that they can write about anything and any time if they do enough research, because when they say that, 36 CONVERSATIONS WITH TIM GAUTREAUX they cut themselves off from the speech of those they grew up with. Speech and dialogue and cadence and dialect are very important to me. Sometimes I try to set a story in another region of the country, and it’s harder for me to write those stories. Such a tale might work, but there will be a richness of language, a whole dimension, that is left out. Interviewer: In your novel, The Next Step in the Dance, you take two of your characters from Louisiana to Los Angeles. TG: But they carry their idiom with them. If I were just writing about two Los Angeles people in Los Angeles, I would have been helpless, and there would have been a whole dimension missing from their language. Interviewer: Do you see yourself eventually departing from a Southern setting and researching other regions and setting stories elsewhere? TG: The projects I have planned now are all Louisiana projects. I think a writer forms most of his opinions and absorbs most of his nuances in the first fifteen years of his life. Somebody with creative sensibility is someone who was born with a lot of antennae. A teacher can tell you that children are much more receptive up to seventh grade than they are after. The little seven-, eight-, and nine-year-olds’—information is just pouring into them because they are wide open to all sorts of things. I think that’s why when they grow up to be writers, their youth is what they mine. Interviewer: There are many writers today who try to achieve a Southern dialect, yet they often end up writing in clichés. With your writing, the dialect is genuine, but you obviously do not speak that way. From where did this foundation come? TG: I did speak that way up until the time I became educated. One thing you’ve got to understand—I mean, you’ve opened up a really complicated answer here—is that uneducated people have a much richer language than educated people, and it is because they are forced to improvise. After you go through four years of college, you have standard, formal English you are supposed to speak. And those people who are raised with parents and in a neighborhood where everyone speaks standard, formal English really don’t understand the richness of nonstandard speech. One thing about growing up in Louisiana (where pretty...