Conversations with Tim Gautreaux

An Interview with Tim Gautreaux

110 An Interview with Tim Gautreaux Maria Hebert-Leiter/2004 From the Carolina Quarterly 57.2 (Summer 2005), 66-74. © 2005 the Carolina Quarterly. Used with permission of the Carolina Quarterly. Tim Gautreaux is the author of the short story collections Same Place, Same Things (1996) and Welding with Children (1999), and of the novels The Next Step in the Dance (1998) and The Clearing (2003). Born and raised in Morgan City, Louisiana, he grew up among blue-collar Cajuns. From this past experience, Gautreaux creates a fictional world that relates the everyday lives and cultural ways of south Louisiana Cajuns. In 1972, he received his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina, Columbia, where he wrote his creative dissertation under the direction of James Dickey. He taught at Southeastern Louisiana University for thirty years before retiring in 2002. On October 15, 2004, I interviewed Tim Gautreaux by phone. We discussed his literary influences, his Cajun identity, and his motivation for writing. MHL: Like Faulkner and Gaines, you write about your postage stamp of land, which you call Tiger Island and which Louisianans recognize as Morgan City. How much have these two authors influenced your work? TG: Ernest Gaines, of course, is a great influence particularly in the way he treats language. Gaines has an excellent ear, and when I was attending a conference one time, Gaines gave a reading. It was the first time I had heard him. It was many years ago. And in his reading I could hear that he was working with the cadences and the grammar of individual speakers in such a way as to really give a vivid and accurate representation of their language. Now you don’t pick that up exactly or as much when you’re at home reading his books, something like A Gathering of Old Men or A Lesson Before Dying. But what that reading did for me is make me go back and read all of Gaines again and to see what he was doing with dialogue. And how important that MARIA HEBERT-LEITER / 2004 111 was to a feeling of authenticity for the readers. And so when I began to work on my own dialogue, I always kept what Gaines was doing in the back of my mind. A sense of place was always very important to me. Gaines created his entire fictional universe out of a single gravel lane in Point Coupée Parish, but a place he moved away from when he was about sixteen. He lived a very long time in other places and would try to create a fiction out of these non-Louisiana locales, but it just didn’t work very well for him. However, whenever he set something in Louisiana in an imaginary landscape that was similar to where he grew up, well, he was very successful. And that of course told me something that is pretty obvious from the beginning of any writer’s career—that is that a writer . . . owns a certain literary territory. It’s the place of his birth, where he grew up, the language that he listened to, the values that were implied, and the everyday commerce of his life. And this is something that the writer has to remember and pay attention to. Even though Gaines’s origins are very humble and he grew up with what you might consider unimportant people, he made great literature out of it. And that was kind of an archetype for me. You can say what Gaines does forms a pattern that I noted when I started to write fiction. MHL: Interesting because I did hear Gaines read A Lesson Before Dying twice, and it is a very different feel when he reads it to you than when you read it in your head. There is very much an oral quality in his writing that I do think you are picking up on in your own. And that these Cajuns are talking in your fiction. TG: You have to pay attention while reading Gaines . . . the one thing I learned from Gaines and other sources, too, [is] how important it was to listen to the people around you and to remember as accurately as you can how people spoke when you were younger. MHL: So Gaines obviously has had a strong influence on your work. I think that any Louisiana writer today couldn’t ignore him. Who else has most in- fluenced your work? TG...