Conversations with Tim Gautreaux

An Interview with Tim Gautreaux: “Cartographer of Louisiana Back Roads”

128 An Interview with Tim Gautreaux: “Cartographer of Louisiana Back Roads” Margaret D. Bauer/2008 From Southern Spaces (May 2009) http://www.southernspaces.org/2009/interview-timgautreaux -cartographer-louisiana-back-roads. © Margaret D. Bauer. Used with permission. In his 1983 book, The People Called Cajuns, James Dorman observes that Cajuns “rarely speak for themselves” in the various sources that refer to them—historical, biographical, or literary—but that same year Louisiana’s Tim Gautreaux published his first short story, “A Sacrifice of Doves,” in the Kansas Quarterly.1 In the more than quarter-century since, he has published two short story collections and three novels, most recently The Missing (Knopf, 2009). Gautreaux’s name reveals his ethnicity, and in his fiction readers find his Cajun perspective. He is a descendent of the French Acadians who settled in south Louisiana after the British drove them out of Nova Scotia in the eighteenth century. In spite of Gautreaux’s importance in adding a seldom-heard voice to literature , he resists such labels as southern or Cajun writer. And certainly his fiction is not limited to the perspective of Acadian descendents—or southerners . The two main characters of his second novel, The Clearing, are from Pennsylvania. While the main characters of his other two novels, The Next Step in the Dance and The Missing, are Acadians, the characters in his short stories are more likely to have working class backgrounds than to be identi- fied as Cajun. His protagonists are predominantly white, blue-collar, south Louisiana men, their ages ranging from the twenty-somethings of his novels to the numerous grandfathers in his stories. It is the Louisiana white working man’s story that Gautreaux tells—or rather, the various stories of blue- MARGARET D. BAUER / 2008 129 collar workers, a voice fairly new to southern literature, offered by other writers of Gautreaux’s generation (such as Mississippi’s Larry Brown and South Carolina’s Dorothy Allison), countering or deconstructing poor white and “white trash” literary stereotypes. Born in 1947, in Morgan City, Louisiana, Timothy Martin Gautreaux is the son of a tugboat captain and the grandson of a steamboat chief engineer. Other men in his family worked for the railroad and offshore on oil rigs, and many of them enjoyed storytelling. After attending parochial elementary and secondary schools, Gautreaux went to Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana, graduating in 1969 as an English major. One of his professors entered poems Gautreaux had written in a Southern Literary Festival contest held in Knoxville. Keynote speaker James Dickey read the winning poems, among them Gautreaux ’s, and invited him into the Ph.D. program at the University of South Carolina. Gautreaux’s Ph.D. dissertation was a volume of poetry called Night-Wide River (1972). Gautreaux returned to Louisiana in 1972 to teach at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, east of Baton Rouge and about sixty miles northwest of New Orleans. He brought with him his new wife, Winborne Howell, a North Carolina native he had met in graduate school. Five years after moving back to Louisiana, he applied for a seat in a fiction writing class taught by Walker Percy at Loyola University in New Orleans. Percy selected Gautreaux, along with other writers who would go on to have successful careers, such as future novelist Valerie Martin and future Time magazine managing editor Walter Isaacson. From this experience on, Gautreaux wrote fiction. Due to the heavy teaching load of a small state institution, along with raising two sons (Robert and Thomas), and maintaining interests beyond academia, it took Gautreaux into his forties to surface on readers’ radars. After a couple of early publications in literary magazines, Gautreaux’s stories were accepted by such venues as the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and GQ, and selected for the anthologies Best American Short Stories, New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, and The O. Henry Awards’ Prize Stories. His stories also attracted the attention of Barry Hannah, who invited Gautreaux to be the 1996 John and Renée Grisham Southern Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, allowing him to finish his first published novel. Gautreaux’s first book, a collection of twelve stories, was published by St. Martin’s Press in 1996, a year before the writer’s fiftieth birthday. Same Place, Same Things was blurbed by fellow Louisiana writers James Lee Burke, 130 CONVERSATIONS WITH TIM...