Conversations with Tim Gautreaux

A Postmodern Southern Moralist and Storyteller: Tim Gautreaux

53 A Postmodern Southern Moralist and Storyteller: Tim Gautreaux Julie Kane/2001 From Voces de América/American Voices (Aduana Vieja, 2004), 123–45. © 2004. Used with permission of Laura Alonso Gallo and Julie Kane. This interview was conducted on 15 January 2001 in Hammond, Louisiana. Timothy Martin Gautreaux, who publishes as “Tim Gautreaux,” was born on 19 October 1947 in Morgan City, Louisiana. His fictional portrayals of working class characters from southern Louisiana—particularly those of the distinctive “Cajun” ethnic community, descendants of Acadian French settlers who were expelled from British Nova Scotia in the eighteenth century —have earned him acclaim as one of the best contemporary American fiction writers. After graduating from Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana, Gautreaux went on to study for a Ph.D. in Romantic Literature from the University of South Carolina, where he took poetry writing courses from James Dickey. Following his graduation from USC in 1972, Gautreaux began teaching at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana—a position that he would maintain until his retirement in 2002. In his fifth year of teaching, Gautreaux took a novel-writing course from Walker Percy at Loyola University in New Orleans, which inspired him to give up poetry in favor of fiction. His early stories were published in “little magazines” such as Kansas Quarterly and the Massachusetts Review, but in the decade of the 1990s he broke through to national literary recognition. In 1992, 1997, 1998, 1999, and 2000, Gautreaux had short stories selected for inclusion in the prestigious annual volume Best American Short Stories —a feat unmatched by any other writer. During the same time period, his stories also appeared in four volumes of New Stories from the South: 54 CONVERSATIONS WITH TIM GAUTREAUX The Year’s Best. The story “Waiting for the Evening News” won the 1995 National Magazine Award for fiction, and another story appeared in Prize Stories 2000: The O. Henry Awards. Gautreaux’s stories were collected in Same Place, Same Things (1996) and Welding with Children (1999), both from Picador/St. Martin’s. Kirkus Reviews called the first book “A terrific debut collection from a Louisiana writer whose stylish, sympathetic understanding of working-class sensibilities and Cajun culture gives his work a flavor and universality unique among contemporary writers.” The second collection was named a New York Times Notable Book of 1999. Gautreaux’s first novel, The Next Step in the Dance, came out in 1998 and told the story of a young Cajun French couple from a small “oilpatch” town in Louisiana, struggling to survive during the oil industry recession years of the 1980s. It won the Southeastern Booksellers Association Novel of the Year Award. Gautreaux’s second novel, The Clearing, about a shellshocked World War I veteran adrift in a cypress logging “company town” in rural Louisiana in the early twentieth century, was published in 2003 to superlative reviews. Publishers Weekly, for example, stated in its review that Gautreaux was “perhaps the most talented writer to emerge from the South in recent years.” At a time when many contemporary writers have abandoned conventional narrative in favor of postmodern, experimental fiction, Gautreaux continues to entice readers and critics with his storytelling gifts and his memorably drawn characters. Despite his Ph.D. in literature, Gautreaux is the son and grandson of steamboat, railroad, and oil industry workers, and his characters most often make a living with their hands in the Cajun communities of small-town Louisiana. Gautreaux’s fiction often depicts characters faced with difficult moral choices—another unusual quality amidst the contemporary American atmosphere of “moral relativism” that is reflected in so much literature. Because of his concern with moral issues, his regionalism , and his Roman Catholicism, Gautreaux is often compared to the late Southern writer Flannery O’Connor. Like O’Connor, as well, Gautreaux writes with a vein of ironic humor, even when his subject matter is violence. Gautreaux is “rapidly becoming a major American writer,” Kirkus Reviews asserted in 1998, and the critical reception for The Clearing should cement Gautreaux’s position in that elite group together with such fellow Southerners as O’Connor, Twain, and Faulkner. On a drizzly January day in Hammond, Louisiana, I pull up to the handsome , brick, Acadian-style home of fiction writer Tim Gautreaux. The JULIE KANE / 2001 55 house is surrounded by a cat’s-cradle of slender pines. Behind it is a weathered wooden...