An Interview with Tim Gautreaux: "Cartographer of Louisiana Back Roads"

Margaret D. Bauer, East Carolina University

Published: 28 May 2009

Overview:
In this interview with Louisiana native Margaret D. Bauer, author Tim
Gautreaux discusses a quarter century of his fiction writing. Resisting simplistic
labels of "Cajun" and "southern," Gautreaux's storytelling reveals an intimate
understanding of southern Louisiana's white, working-class people and culture.
Often drawn from his own background, Gautreaux's characters are shaped by a
range of experiences, from working on steamboats and fighting in world wars,
to struggling in the 1980s oil bust.

Introduction:
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 Novia 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, p 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 identified 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-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 Thibodeaux, 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 PhD program at the University of South Carolina. Gautreaux's PhD
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, Robert
Olen Butler, Andre Dubus, and Shirley Ann Grau and reviewed by The New York
Times. Calling it "[a] terrific debut collection," Kirkus Reviews noted the writer's
"sympathetic understanding of working-class sensibilities" and compared
Gautreaux to Flannery O'Connor. The Catholic magazine Commonweal praised
the collection's stories for providing a "welcome relief from the blandness of
McWorld; they bring reassuring evidence of the continuing existence of places
away from the big place where, increasingly, we all live." And the reviewer for
The North American Review remarked that Gautreaux "knows how to get out
of a story's way and just let the characters do what they need to do. . . . These
characters move through the world compelled by important motive. The
characterizations are swift and precise, rooted in gesture, speech and action."2
Gautreaux's second book, the novel The Next Step in the Dance (Picador,
1998), was also reviewed in the Times, with the reviewer, Andy Solomon,
remarking upon the author's "poetic mix of colorful detail and rapid-paced
suspense," as well as "his keen ear for Cajun dialect." The Missouri Review also
admired Gautreaux's "unmatched ear for the speech of rural Louisiana," as well
as the writer's talent for writing about machines: "Here is a writer who can
make the refitting of an engine as compelling as another author's love or death
scene." This reviewer, however, found that the novel "suffers from a lack of
urgency and momentum" and "overstays its welcome." By contrast, the New
Orleans Times-Picayune argued for the importance of The Next Step in the
Dance: that the 1980s, "a time of great trauma for this state[,] . . . certainly
deserved a literary piece to memorialize it."3
In 1999, St. Martin's published a second volume of Gautreaux's stories,
Welding with Children, which the Times again selected for a lengthy and
positive review, praising the author for his "cartograph[y in] mapping with
affectionate but unflinching accuracy both the back roads of Louisiana . . . and
the distance between parents and children." Reviewing this collection for the
Hudson Review, Susan Balée called Gautreaux "[t]he master of the Cajun short
story," as well as one of the three "best short story writers in America today" —
praise that would please a writer who resists regional labels. Reviewer Alan
Heathcock lauded Gautreaux's "invention of clever, out of the ordinary
conflicts" and "his ability to render true the voice of his Louisiana working-class
characters." Heathcock sums up the collection: "The stories are all about
people who want to be good, who want to help others and end up helping
themselves in the process. They are about redemption, with a tender sense of
humor, as seen through the kind eyes of their author."4
Next, Gautreaux tackled an historical novel set in the 1920s, dealing with a
World War I veteran suffering Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, perhaps
prompting USA Today's comparison of The Clearing (Knopf, 2003) to Charles
Frazier's Cold Mountain. The New Yorker responded to The Clearing by calling
Gautreaux a "Bayou Conrad," and several reviewers began to compare (and
contrast) the author to Cormac McCarthy. Publishers Weekly suggested that
The Clearing confirms the opinion that "Gautreaux is perhaps the most talented
writer to come out of the South in recent years."5 His growing reputation is
reflected in the larger number of reviews of this novel in a broader spectrum of
venues, from local papers to the Christian Science Monitor and the UK's
Guardian. This happened as well for The Missing, another post World War I
novel, promptly reviewed in The New York Times Book Review and The
Washington Post, as well as by several UK publications. For both historical
novels, the author did his homework — researching details that would allow
him to realistically depict life in the 1920s in a Louisiana lumber mill town in
The Clearing and on a Mississippi River entertainment steamboat in The
Missing.
After drafting a volume on Tim Gautreaux for the "Understanding
Contemporary American Writers" series published by the University of South
Carolina Press,6 I drove to the author's new home in western North Carolina to
fill in some biographical blanks and test some theories about his work. Having
read every interview I could find, my own interview did not cover the usual
ground.7 It was the first interview I'd conducted — though as a journal editor,
I've certainly read and helped shape my share of interviews.
Gautreaux is very easy to talk to, a natural raconteur (which will surprise no
one who has read his fiction), but some of my questions, while not receiving
blank stares, were not responded to with the assurance that I was on track with
my readings. Rather, Gautreaux occasionally seemed surprised — an
interested, intrigued surprise, but still surprise — by my interpretations. And
suddenly, in the middle of it all, I understood that of course he would be. If he
had intentionally set out to accomplish what I was asking him about, his work
would not be as good as it is. Rather, he is just telling his stories, crafting his
stories, polishing his stories. I'm the literary critic who then analyzes what he's
done within those stories — while he goes on to the next one.
With this realization occurring as I sat on his living room couch, I wondered why
I was wasting the man's time with an interview — why we ever ask writers
these questions about their work, questions that suggest that the writer sets
out with some agenda besides telling the story, when it is probably the case
that the writer with a predetermined agenda is usually not the writer we
bother interviewing.
Since he knows I am working on a book about his writing, at least I could
reassure him during the interview that I appreciate his writing and know it very
well — better, perhaps, than he does, he later admitted. And so we continued
to talk, not just about his own work but about literature in general and about
our common home, south Louisiana, for the rest of the evening, long into the
night, and the next day — though after the "formal" ninety minutes of
"interviewing," we stopped recording and just talked. Gautreaux's wife,
Winborne, another lover of literature, joining us as we shared our favorite
novels and writers and figured out who we know in common, having grown up
in small towns just about twenty miles apart. After a stimulating visit, I traveled
back home to eastern North Carolina with most of the answers I had been
looking for and much more, including a bittersweet homesickness for the music
of the voices, the celebration of fine food, and the family and friends I've left
behind in Louisiana.

Interview with Tim Gautreaux:

This interview took place July 9, 2008. It has been edited for clarity by Tim
Gautreaux and me, and to avoid the distraction of brackets and ellipses, such
minor changes are not noted in the text below. I thank Tim and Winborne
Gautreaux for their hospitality during my visit to their western North Carolina
home. Thanks as well to an East Carolina University Faculty Senate
Research/Creative Activity Grant funded by the University's Division of
Research and Graduate Studies, which provided a summer stipend to complete
a draft of my Gautreaux book, travel money to interview the author, and a
graduate student stipend to transcribe the interview — for which I also thank
Elizabeth Howland for her quick and accurate transcription.
Biography:
BAUER: Let's start with some biographical information. I've found the basics in
interviews and the DLB article on you, but I noticed the date 1969 for your
Nicholls degree and then 1972 for your PhD. So is the 1969 date a bachelor's
degree? And you went straight from that to a PhD? No master's degree?
GAUTREAUX: That was because the University of South Carolina offered an
accelerated program for the PhD where you bypassed the master's. It was
ultimately an academic mistake for an institution to do that because the
program wound up generating so many PhDs that it contributed to the PhD glut
of three or four years after that. So you don't find many colleges — or any
colleges — offering that type of program anymore.
BAUER: I've read the story of James Dickey discovering your poetry and inviting
you into the South Carolina graduate program, but would you talk about your
decision to go to college, coming from a family of blue-collar, working men?
And what was their reaction to your going to college? How did you end up
going to college?
GAUTREAUX: Well, no one really said much about it. I did well in high school,
and that summer after high school graduation it occurred to me that I had to
do something. So, a friend of mine was going to college and he said, 'Why don't
you go to college with me?' and I said, 'okay.' College was so incredibly cheap in
Louisiana in those days. A summer's semester tuition was twenty-five dollars,
and I had received a little scholarship as a senior in high school. I think it was a
reduction of fifteen dollars off of that twenty-five dollars, so basically my first
semester in college cost ten dollars tuition. So it really wasn't any giant
financial decision. I went down the road thirty miles to Nicholls State University
and began studying English there.
BAUER: Do you have any brothers or sisters?
GAUTREAUX: I have one sister. She's about fifteen or sixteen years older than I
am, and she's a housewife. And then I have a brother who's eleven years older
than I am, and he's in the oil business.
BAUER: So you're the first in your family to go to college?
GAUTREAUX: Of the immediate family, yes.
BAUER: And you say your sons both went to college?
GAUTREAUX: Yes. One's an electrical engineer and one's a lawyer.
BAUER: I'm also wondering about the focus of your PhD program on Romantic
literature. Why did you choose that period in particular?
GAUTREAUX: Well it's hard to say. I think that the answer would be in
undergraduate school I had a really good professor who taught English
Romantics. The English Romantics are very accessible. It was a time in literary
history that I found more interesting than eighteenth century, more interesting
than Victorian.
BAUER: And you were focused on poetry at the time?
GAUTREAUX: At the time, right. I found, in particular, Byron's long narratives to
be interesting. They were witty, they were gossipy, and I probably liked them
for the same reasons that people who read them in the early nineteenth
century liked them.
BAUER: I've noted that several of the stories in your first collection had been
published in pretty major venues and selected for the various "Best Stories"
anthologies. Prior to that, did you publish in the usual literary magazines before
breaking into the big time? You published early on in the Atlantic Monthly, GQ,
and Harper's. Are there some other stories, in other words, that I might not
have read yet? I did find two stories that are not in the first collection, one
called "A Sacrifice of Doves," that appeared in Kansas Quarterly and another
story, "Just Turn Like a Gear," in Massachusetts Review. Any others?
GAUTREAUX: No, I never wrote many stories. Every story that I wrote got
published. I just write them with the idea that I'm putting them together in the
best way that I can. I guess I'm kind of a perfectionist when it comes to short
fiction, and also I didn't really see the point of writing dozens of stories for very
small venues that really wouldn't do much either for my career or for my
finances. So I always aimed high.
BAUER: You didn't start publishing until you were in your forties — do you think
this accounts for the absence of the typical autobiographical first novel among
your books — or is there such a novel in your attic?
GAUTREAUX: I really don't have much of an interesting life to write a biography
about. I got out of undergraduate school very young. I had a PhD by the time I
was twenty-three or twenty-four, and then I got married and started teaching
full-time at Southeastern Louisiana University. I was teaching writing, and I
figured that if I was going to teach it, I should have some credibility. And that's
one reason — or maybe the main reason — I always tried to become a good
writer and to get published in major venues. After I began publishing I could
mention this in class and students' ears would perk up and they would say, 'Oh,
well, he's got some success himself.' Because there are a lot creative writing
teachers who really don't have any publishing record, and it's kind of rough
sledding for them in class because the student always has in the back of his
mind, 'Okay, you're teaching me how to write artistically; you're teaching me to
write, presumably, a publishable type of literature. What have you done?' So
that's one reason why I tried so hard, I guess. But then, I've always liked to
write. In other interviews it's come out that as a child I had pen pals all over the
place and would write voluminously to these people every week.
BAUER: You have mentioned in other interviews too that there are a couple of
novels that you wrote and didn't get published. One you said you drew on for
the scene in the boiler in The Next Step in the Dance. Is one of them the
autobiographical novel that the beginning writer often writes?
GAUTREAUX: No, no interest whatsoever in ever doing anything
autobiographical. There are more interesting stories to tell.
The last book I got as an academic — the last free book that a publisher sent
me — was an anthology of American short fiction. It was a huge book, and
there was a section in the back of the index called "Most Recent American
Writers" or "Young American Writers," something like that. And the youngest
writer in that group — and there were twenty of them maybe — was born in
1949. So when you mentioned that I only started publishing in major venues in
my forties, well, most people do that. It takes twenty years for you to develop
the language skills, the intellectual filters in your brain that tell you what to put
on the page and what to leave off the page. It takes an incredibly long time to
develop these skills.
BAUER: Yea, but a lot of people in the meantime, send out to small magazines,
and with the self-publishing, a lot of people don't wait. They just want to get it
published.
GAUTREAUX: But where are these twenty-year-olds being published? Unless
you're a truly rare talent, generally you're not going to sell a book to a decent
house or in a major publication until you're along the line a ways.
Cajun Identity:
BAUER: I found the Marcia Gaudet essay on the depiction of Cajuns in literature
that is alluded to in one of your interviews.8 At the time she published that in
1989, she was able to point out that there were no Cajuns written by Cajuns.
She talks about Longfellow's Cajuns in Evangeline, noting that Longfellow had
never been to Louisiana, then traces other depictions through Ernest Gaines's
fiction. Certainly Gaines has firsthand knowledge of Cajuns, but still is not Cajun
himself, and the role of Cajuns in his fiction is pretty negative. Now I know that
you're "writing what you know" and not consciously answering some call for a
previously absent voice, but would you talk about your contribution of this
missing voice in light of more stereotypical depictions of Cajuns that preceded
in fiction and film?
GAUTREAUX: I don't really think about it. I know that's probably not what you
want to hear. I don't think of myself as any particular type of writer. I am what I
am. I was born in a certain area of the country, and the people around me
happen to speak a certain way and have a certain set of values, and pursue a
certain type of lifestyle, and that's all I know. That's where I draw my
characters; that's where I draw my dialogue, my sense of timing, my values. If I
were raised in some other area, naturally, I would be drawing on some other
set of characters and culture. So I don't think that I have to ennoble or expose a
particular type of culture. I don't feel a particular duty to region. I just weave
narrative out of where I'm from. I think it's bad for a writer to think that way —
that 'okay, I'm Polish, I have to do this tribute to my area of Chicago' or
wherever my little group is — because that's what forces a writer into using
clichés. He figures, ' well, okay, I'm going to write a Polish story, so I've got to
have some cabbage rolls in it or some kielbasa or something like that.' While
that's part of the fabric of that particular culture — just as étouffée or boiled
crawfish is part of the fabric of Louisiana — you don't consciously sprinkle
details like that throughout your writing like salt and pepper. If they happen,
they happen, but you don't consciously plant them with the idea of "amazing"
readers who are not of your culture.
BAUER: Now, I know you resist the label "southern writer," and I agree with all
the reasons that you give in the various interviews I've read — especially the
fact that everyone is a regional writer, but also the danger then of being self-
consciously southern à la Rebecca Wells. That said, your identity as a Cajun
writer is so important, since you're filling in a previously unheard voice. How do
you feel about this label?
GAUTREAUX: I'm not interested in labels; I'm interested in storytelling. And
nobody even knows what a Cajun is. I put a redneck character in one of my
stories in Welding with Children, and a lot of people have called him a Cajun,
and he's from Alexandria, which is the most un-Cajun place on the face of the
earth. And he's not Catholic, and he doesn't have an Acadian surname.
Anybody from the region understands who that fellow is, but people out of the
region will read other things into it. I just can't worry about that.
BAUER: What about when you see Cajuns in film? I hear a voice that is more
authentic coming out of your fiction than in the film The Big Easy.
GAUTREAUX: The Big Easy was a very popular movie. It painted New Orleans as
being a Cajun town, which is absurd. It didn't worry me at all because a long
time ago I understood that Hollywood never gets anything right as far as
culture is concerned. Not for one nanosecond, anywhere, in any way, shape, or
form, will Hollywood get it right. And the only thing Hollywood is concerned
about is bucks. They're not interested in culture.
BAUER: I notice that you do not resist the label of Catholic writer. You're more
inclined to talk about that in various interviews, your Catholicism and how it
influences your writing. Why is that label less problematic for you?
GAUTREAUX: Cajuns are in Louisiana; Catholics are all over the planet. None of
us knew we were Cajuns until all the hoopla in the mid-1970s when a sort of
Cajun Renaissance started and brought out of the closet, as it was, Cajun music
and food. I really don't consider myself some kind of dyed-in-the-wool
southern cultural phenom.
In south-central Louisiana, I never really ran across many people that
considered themselves southerners in the sense that Georgians or
Mississippians consider themselves southerners. And I don't consider myself to
be any kind of alligator-eating Cajun type. As I said, that's kind of superficial.
But I've always been a Roman Catholic, since baptism, since birth.
BAUER: In one interview you talk about the inspiration for The Next Step in the
Dance — wanting to capture the oil bust of 1980s Louisiana. First, I want to ask
you why that period in particular was so attractive to you.
GAUTREAUX: It's something I lived through. I was born and raised in Morgan
City, Louisiana, which is an oilfield town. And the entire oil industry in Louisiana
crashed and burned during the eighties. I saw the effects firsthand: the out-
migration of white-collar people and skilled workers, the idle boats and oil rigs,
and so many people out of jobs, houses that were worth two hundred
thousand dollars going down to ninety thousand dollars in value overnight, just
about. I could see it happening around me, and nobody else was writing stories
about the oil bust. I'm sure people who experienced the Dust Bowl in the
thirties had the same feeling: is anyone going to write about this? I felt that if I
didn't produce literature out of this, maybe nobody else would. There are lots
of events in American history that are ignored and unknown because nobody
wrote anything about them. And I had the feeling that this was going to
happen. People talk about the oil bust as an economic phenomenon, but The
Next Step in the Dance shows it as something that affects people in a very
painful and personal way. It's one thing to say that twenty thousand jobs were
lost; it's another thing to put a reader inside the house of one of those people
who lost his job.
Influence of War:
BAUER: Now, would you talk about the inspiration for each of the other two
novels? What has drawn you twice now to the period just after World War I?
To the lumber mill in The Clearing, the excursion steamboat in The Missing?
GAUTREAUX: Many of the uncles in my family were in World War I, and they all
came back with their stories, and I heard a lot of them. The Clearing, of course,
is about this damaged veteran who returns shell-shocked. I had an uncle that
was in all eight major American engagements and endured some horrible
things. And I knew what it was that he endured through family stories and
through talking with him because he lived to be quite old. I knew him many,
many years. Of course he was very unlike the character in The Clearing, but
nevertheless I could draw on the psychological damage that I witnessed in him
to develop the Byron character in that novel.
BAUER: Is it significant that you've been writing post-war novels during the two
Gulf wars? Do you feel like you're inspired by what's going on now?
GAUTREAUX: No, I don't think about the present conflicts much. It just happens
that everybody that gets involved in the business of shooting people with rifles
winds up damaged and changed. When someone writes a novel thirty or forty
years from now, there's going to be a war going on somewhere and the same
question is going to be asked: 'Are you thinking about this present war?'
There's always a present war, it seems. The fact that it's going on while I'm
writing a novel about psychologically damaged warriors, that's just the way it
happens. In a way, all wars are the same war. The other novel, The Missing —
really, the novels can be analyzed side by side because in one, we have a
protagonist severely damaged by his experiences in World War I, and in the
second we have a protagonist who arrives in France on the day the armistice is
signed and doesn't get to shoot anybody at all. Even though he is briefly
involved in the aftermath, the cleanup of the battlefield, he's not affected by
the carnage, and really, even while he's over there, he understands this. Then
we follow him through the rest of his experiences in The Missing, and we see
that he behaves differently from Byron in The Clearing, has a different life, a
different outlook. The novel is negative definition: Sam, the main character in
The Missing, is defined by what he does not do. If I had had him show up two
months earlier on that troop ship, while the killing was still going on, it would
have been a different novel. I think the whole narration is propelled by the fact
that he did not have to shoot anybody in France, that he showed up by an
incredible stroke of luck on the day the armistice was signed.
BAUER: And I did read that you have another uncle that that happened to?9
GAUTREAUX: Nobody knew anything about battlefield disposal. There were so
many millions of tons of unexploded ordinance left all over Europe buried in
the mud that farmers are still plowing it up to this day. One uncle was sent out
right after he got there; it was just like in the novel. They gave him a bunch of
clips of ammunition and a rifle and said, 'Go here, and shoot at this ordinance;
we've got to get rid of it somehow.' He went out for a day or two, but it didn't
work; it was an absolute screw-up. Most of that in the novel is imagined, of
course, but I could sort of put two and two together from what he'd told me.
His squad didn't do that more than a couple days. The officers immediately
realized that it wasn't working, that it was dangerous, that it was going to hurt
more people than it was going to help.
BAUER: Were you in Vietnam?
GAUTREAUX: I was going to join the Air Force, but they had that draft lottery,
and I drew number 361. Number one went, and the further away you were
from number one the less likely you were to go. When I drew the number, I
had already taken my physical and everything; I was headed to boot camp, but
I hadn't signed the enlistment papers yet. So I guess I was lucky.
BAUER: Going back to The Clearing, why did you choose to leave Randolph and
Lillian childless at the end? Byron and his wife are expecting a baby, and they
have Walter by then. The nice clean, bows-all-tied ending would have been to
give Randolph and Lillian a child, too, but I am curious if it was a conscious
choice not to do so, if there was something in that?
GAUTREAUX: It was a conscious choice: to show how much Randolph loves his
brother. It was a big sacrifice to give up that child. I think the fact that they
remain childless through the end of the novel is to demonstrate how big a
sacrifice giving up Walter really was.

Outlander Perspectives:
BAUER: In various interviews, you have talked about the value of capturing the
voices of home, and you have been praised by interviewers and reviewers for
the authenticity of your dialogue. So it must have felt like a risk to choose for
the central perspective of The Clearing two Yankees. Would you talk about that
choice in light of what you have said about writing about Louisiana?
GAUTREAUX: The point of view characters are the two outlanders from
Pennsylvania. That was done to open up the novel to all readers so that we
wouldn't have so much a hermetically sealed, southern novel with southerners
looking at southerners. We have a novel in which these northerners are looking
at the culture and the people down here, and the readers in Minnesota or
Oregon or Canada look at things through the main characters' eyes. The non-
southern point of view makes The Clearing less of a southern novel, and I think
improves it, broadens it.
BAUER: Well actually, if you think about the nineteenth-century southern
literary tradition of bringing the northerner in to see that the South is not so
bad, it actually is an old tradition of an outsider looking in. What Byron and
Randolph see is completely out of their experience. Randolph doesn't know
what to do with it. Byron says, rather, 'This is what I've seen of the world; this
place is no different.'
GAUTREAUX: They come down, and the stereotypical notion is that they're
going to condescend or hate the place. But they don't. The anonymity and
isolation are what Byron wants. Randolph finds himself empowered by coming
south. He's really, for the first time, in charge of things. When he goes back to
civilization he finds it to be inconsequential. Swamp life is a tough existence,
but then again it's an intense one. It's one that he grows used to.

BAUER: You have also mentioned that you ended up cutting the California
section of Next Step in the Dance down significantly in order to bring your
characters back to more familiar territory.
GAUTREAUX: For two reasons: one, because I don't know California culture
that well; two, readers seem not to be interested in that. They don't want to
read about California.
BAUER: The best scene in California is when Paul eats in the Cajun
restaurant.10 I have always connected Cajun tourism to the oil bust — 'we
have to make some money, and we're not going to make it in oil now; let's
build a Cajun village tourist site' — but you were saying before that it was
earlier, in the 1970s.
GAUTREAUX: I think the people associated with USL (now UL) got the public in
touch with Cajun culture, and then Vermilionville and Cajun Village and the
promotion of Cajun culture and all that stuff came out of that earlier
"renaissance." 11 The oil bust didn't do anything except make everybody poor.
BAUER: What I was thinking was that they started hyping up tourism to try to
replace the oil business, but maybe that was just New Orleans.
GAUTREAUX: The hyping of tourism is in western and south-central Louisiana,
too, but I don't think it was because people were looking for stuff to do. Really,
there was an out-migration of a quarter-million skilled workers in the eighties;
geologists, the best welders and machinists, they just left the state. They didn't
start up some Cajun enterprise.

Voice, Violence and Steamboats:

BAUER: Do you have something in mind for what's next after The Missing?
GAUTREAUX: I'm starting to think about it, but I don't have anything sketched
out yet. I don't know what the next one will be. I've got this old cranky guy in
my imagination, and I might give him a book. I've never written a book in first
person and it might be time to try that. I had good luck with "Welding with
Children"; the voice in that story was really good. It's easier to write in first
person than third person. It doesn't take the same discipline. So I might start
playing around with that.
BAUER: Although in The Missing, right when we are getting worried about the
little girl, Lily, you have a chapter in which we find out that the scoundrels who
kidnapped her are not abusing her. So third person allows this information,
which is kind of a relief to the reader, who can go on with Sam's adventures,
knowing that Lily is at least physically okay, especially when we learn about the
boy who was adopted and then sexually abused — which brings me to the
violence in the new novel. But first, backing up a bit, throughout the novel, Sam
keeps meeting himself — in the German girl, in Lily and August — until he
finally meets the Cloats and deals with his past. Now there's a scene! Leading
up to Sam's own experience with the Cloats we hear Constable Soner's story
about them — he alludes to a dog involved but doesn't ever get specific — just
says that whatever his wife witnessed, she couldn't get over. Again, then, the
violence occurs offstage.
GAUTREAUX: It was hard to rein that one in. You have to know when to stop
because you can ruin things for the reader. You can give him a piece of graphic
violence that will just overpower the rest of the narrative for him because he
can't think of anything else for the rest of the story except some horrible scene
that you've detailed for him, which you don't need to do anyway because
whatever's in the reader's imagination is worse than anything you could paint
for him. Even in the scarier parts of a Cormac McCarthy novel, I can see his
restraint where he doesn't want to cross that line into ghoulishness. Then I
remember the books that I've read where authors have gone into ghoulishness,
and it's just like a trip down the meat counter at Piggly Wiggly — sensory
overload. A writer just has to know when to hold back.
BAUER: Thinking about taking Sam up and down the Mississippi in The Missing:
it's very Huck Finn; you have this Mark Twainian thing happening. Can you talk
about Mark Twain?
GAUTREAUX: Yes and no. I enjoy Mark Twain. I enjoy Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn immensely, and of course when I was a kid I read Life on the
Mississippi. But where I get my knowledge of the Mississippi River is the fact
that my father was a tugboat captain. He ran up and down the Mississippi
River, and I used to ride with him sometimes. And my grandfather was the chief
engineer on a steamboat. I was born in 1947. I can just barely remember some
of the old steam-powered craft in the New Orleans harbor. When I was a kid
the Jackson Avenue Ferry and the Esplanade Avenue Ferry were reciprocating,
steam, paddle-wheel boats and I used to ride them just to watch the engines
work. I liked to listen to the machinery and the whistles and smell the hot
boilers. There were still a few old sternwheel boats running in those days — the
government inspection steamer, Mississippi, and John Newton, and a couple of
others: in New Orleans we'd see the Delta Queen or the Gordon C. Green. My
father knew the people who worked on these boats, and we'd go through the
engine room and talk to the engineer. And when I was a kid I used to ride on
the old, side-wheeled steamer President down in New Orleans, which was
steam-powered all the way until 1980. And I'd be down in the engine room
listening to how engineers answered the old bell system of communication
rung by the pilot upstairs. I'd go up on the roof and watch the pilot in the
wheelhouse blow the big whistle. So a lot of what is in The Missing is from
firsthand experience, and then of course I've done all my reading, taken
passage on the Delta Queen, ridden the Belle of Louisville, and whenever I'm
around any kind of old, nautical, reciprocating machinery, I make a point to
photograph it, visit it, talk with the docents that take care of it.
BAUER: You talk about the different steamboat whistles in the novel — the
pilot knows who is coming by the different whistles. This has not been captured
in fiction since Mark Twain, and these things are gone. But in your new novel
we get on that steamboat and ride up and down the river during that time.
GAUTREAUX: It's sort of like writing about the oil bust: nobody has really
written any fiction that included the world of excursion boats. From say 1910 to
1940 the excursion boats were a big deal all throughout the South and the
Midwest. These big steamers would run on the Mississippi from New Orleans
all the way up to Minneapolis, on the Ohio all the way up to Pittsburgh. They'd
stop at towns along the route and show up with a great jazz band and huge
dance floor and entertain a community, clean up, and move on to the next one.
There were probably forty or fifty boats that operated in that trade in the
thirty-year period we're talking about.
BAUER: It does also echo Huck Finn — as Huck and Jim go up and down the
river, they meet all these different people. It reminds us that every community
has a different voice. Twain was apparently a linguist who captured all the
different dialects. One of the things I like about your Louisiana stories is that
you recognize that not every Louisianian sounds the same. Different main
characters have different voices. Linguists in Louisiana could probably put them
where they're from, whether it's Morgan City or Lake Charles or Alexandria.

I feel like that's in both novels. In The Clearing, you've given the main point of
view to the outsiders, but all the different voices are still there — the Cajuns
and the Creoles and the African Americans.
GAUTREAUX: It's important for a writer to pay attention to accents and
grammar. If you walk around this area of North Carolina, you'll hear retirees
from Florida who are originally from New Jersey; you'll hear Mexicans. The
priest at the local church is from Vietnam. And then there are mountain people
here that I have trouble understanding sometimes. The locals here are very
friendly and open people — some of them say thar for there — I mean a deep
thar. I might say to someone, 'Well I think I'll go up to West Jefferson,' and he'll
respond, 'I wouldn't go thar this afternoon. Up thar they's a-workin' on the
highway.' Their speech rhythms are also wonderful. One might assume that a
region's accents are homogenous, but that is never true anywhere — especially
in the South.
BAUER: There are a lot of Souths, and speaking of the South, you mention in
one interview that "Deputy Sid's Gift" is the closest you come to dealing with
race, acknowledging the painfulness and thus the difficulty of this topic. That
interview was before The Clearing, because you do deal with race in that novel
with May and Walter, and you also deal with race with the musicians in The
Missing. Would you talk about race and why you don't write about it, even as a
writer of southern literature? Your reviewers don't find the subject missing, by
the way — I've found no one noting the subject as missing in your work. But
you are from Louisiana, as I am, and I know race is still an issue there.
GAUTREAUX: I don't even think about it, not for a nanosecond. I don't write
about race. I write about people. I included black characters in The Missing
because the best musicians on the dance boats were African American. The
new jazz music was money in the bank for a big dance boat. The white bands
couldn't play like that, not at first, so the boats hired the African American,
New Orleans musicians, not because they were black — it wasn't a racial issue
— it was because only they had the sound, the good dance sound, and these
were dance boats. The second decks were three hundred-foot-long, waxed
dance floors, and the boats were after young people generally, who wanted to
hear the latest hot music. The best jazz was African American. To put a white
band on a New Orleans-based boat would not have been realism. Let me tell
you why nothing big in the way of racial stuff happens: always stick to the
narrative. The story of The Missing is driven by Sam's character, and his
character involves him in this rescue search, and that's what the whole novel is
going to be about. The minute a writer says, 'I'm going to write about race'
instead of 'I'm going to write a story about people' he has already failed.

Place, Character and Intervention in Short Stories:

BAUER: Do you think you'll write any North Carolina-set stories, now that
you're living here part-time?
GAUTREAUX: I won't know until I set pen to paper. But I find myself testing the
waters outside of Louisiana. For example the story that I was working on this
morning is set in north Mississippi. I've got a feel for north Mississippi because I
was up at Oxford for a semester as writer-in-residence, and one of my sons
went to Oxford, so we were always up there visiting him. And I have relatives in
Memphis; I've got some kind of a feel for the lay of the land, so we'll see how
that comes out. It's possible that I could write something set in North Carolina.
I'd be among good company.
BAUER: And speaking of North Carolina writers, Jill McCorkle has actually told
me she prefers writing short stories — I was so glad to hear that because after
devouring each of her collections, I've looked forward to the next one. What
about you? Which do you prefer to write, or do you have a preference?
GAUTREAUX: The short story; it's controllable, and it's — how can I put this? —
you can work on a short story sentence by sentence almost the way you work
on a poem. And you can micromanage it. You can go back over it many times
and make everything line up. You can make sure that the logic of the first
sentence ties in with the logic of the very last. You can't do that with novels;
they're just too large. I guess you could if you were a genius or something, but I
don't fall into that category. I think the short story is more of an art form,
really, than the novel. I'm sure a lot of people would disagree with me on that.
The short story is a very important genre. Think of the major American writers
who are known more for their short stories than their novels. That statement
goes back to Hawthorne and Poe and applies to contemporary writers like
Joyce Carol Oates. If Joyce Carol Oates had never written two short stories,
"Where Are you Going, Where Have you Been?" and the other one with the
long funny title, "How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of
Corrections, and Began My Life Over Again," which are anthologized in
everybody's phonebook even, you wonder how many people would know who
Joyce Carol Oates is. But those two stories are in every university anthology
known to man, and so she's taught all over the world and students go on to her
longer works after they read those two, or to her story collections. The college
anthologies are like wonderful advertisements for short story writers. Similarly,
if a twenty-one-year-old college student knows Faulkner, it's probably through
an anthologized short story like "A Rose for Emily," not because he read
Absalom, Absalom!. You can go through indexes of American literature texts
and look at the important stories and see how much they've done for the
reputations of major American fiction writers.
BAUER: Well you mentioned "A Rose for Emily," so I have to ask — in my book
on William Faulkner, I included a chapter on your story "The Piano Tuner" and
"A Rose for Emily." 12 I resisted, while I was writing it, asking you, so now that
it's already done I have to ask, did you by chance have Faulkner’s "A Rose for
Emily" in mind when you were writing "The Piano Tuner"?
GAUTREAUX: I had in mind instead the archetype of the spinster lady left with
the family house, which happens not only in the South but all over the place.
You don't see it so much anymore because families now are composed of two
kids. But say in the 1920s, a man would have a large house, and he would have
six kids, and four of them would get married, one of them would get killed in a
car accident or something, and then it seems like there was always one
daughter that was left over; she never married, and she would wind up living in
the father's house. And the father's house of course had eight bedrooms in it,
and she couldn't afford to heat all of that, so she would close them off one at a
time over the years.
She would take in boarders, and then she got too old to manage boarders.
Then there was this old woman living in one or two rooms of this house built in
1900. Such spinsters were all over the place. I knew several women like this, a
lot of old women, and I even have a couple of them in my family. So that's
where the archetype for that story came from. And that's probably the
archetype that Faulkner drew on to write "A Rose for Emily."
BAUER: Well, the difference is that Emily's dead when the story starts. She's
lived to the old age that you're talking about. The town is mourning her passing
— or at least the story's "We" narrator is. But they wait until she's dead to go
see her. Even when she bought the poison to kill Homer Baron there's the
telling line, "So the next day we all said, 'She will kill herself'; and we said it
would be the best thing."13 But nobody tries to help her. In your story the
piano tuner gets involved. And this is what attracts me to your stories: these
men who say, 'What can I do? I have nothing to do with this, but I could do
something.' Faulkner's prototypical Quentin Compson feels really bad about
the oppression he witnesses but Hamlet-like just worries and doesn't do
anything. You're sending in these guys who are not sons of the aristocracy but
they're doing something about it. I'm curious if this is your reaction to Faulkner
— if you're responding to these sons of the aristocracy. Ernest Gaines has said,
"Faulkner wrote about Dilsey in his kitchen; I wrote about Miss Jane in her
kitchen."14 Are you also responding to Faulkner?
GAUTREAUX: There are several of my stories that you could call intervention
stories, where somebody's in a bad way, and a character takes that step to
help, breaks through the mirror, to go to the other side. There's no story unless
somebody does something like that. You see, if the piano tuner had come out
and tuned her piano and then went home, never went back, and then she died
of old age or something, there wouldn't be much of a story. What propels the
story is his decision to help.
It's like what Rust Hills, the old Esquire editor, used to say: there's fixed action
and moving action. Fixed action is the stuff that you expect to happen and
happens every day — it is kind of a pattern. You go to the mailbox every day to
check your mail; you stick your hand way down in the mailbox, if it's one of
those old post-mounted ones on your porch, and you look for the stuff, and
you pay your bills. This is all fixed action: every day you do the same thing. One
day you go out on the front porch, stick your hand in the mailbox, and feel
something kind of crawling, and you pull it out and it's a big chicken snake, and
you're scared to death, and you holler and you drop it. Then you hear laughter,
and across the street your neighbor is just doubling up because he's put that
big, harmless chicken snake in your mailbox as a trick. Well that's moving action
— that doesn't happen every day. A pattern has been broken, and it's going to
generate other action. The reader already sees what's going to happen: he's
going to play a trick on the guy across the street.
 The same thing when the piano tuner decides to help out the woman by
getting her a job. The pattern of fixed action is broken, and we're now in
moving action: we're in a type of thing where we don't know what's going to
happen; we can't predict what's going to happen; we're in a series of events
now that's new for both characters. That's what interventions do. But all of that
comes from being raised Catholic where we have been taught to help people
who are less fortunate than we are, not just by praying for them but by actually
going out and fixing their busted air conditioners and stuff. And it also comes
from my blue collar raising. My father never made a lot of money and the
people that were his friends never made a lot of money, and when their cars
broke down the one of them that was best at fixing cars would go over there
and fix it, and when my father's air conditioner broke down the guy in the
neighborhood that was best at fixing air conditioners would come over and fix
it and it was sort of a quid pro quo relationship among blue-collar workers that
way and that's true all over. It's another form of this intervention mentality
where you help people for no real reason. Intervention in a purer form occurs
in stories like "The Piano Tuner" and in "Resistance" where the old guy helps
the little girl with her science project. It's kind of a distilled form of altruism,
and there is a point in many of my stories where the character feels put upon
by fate because he says, 'I gotta make this decision: I can turn around and I can
walk away — or I can help.' And when he makes that decision, then the story is
rolling.
BAUER: That's what I like — they make the decision not to turn around and
walk away.
GAUTREAUX: Well, if they walked away there would be no story or there would
be the usual 'life has no meaning' story.
BAUER: Yes. As I tell my students when they complain about reading what they
consider one negative story after another, 'No conflict, no story.'
I do find it interesting that there are so many very specific details that are the
same between your story and Faulkner's — there's so much we read that's out
there, that's in our heads —for example, the fathers in both stories ran all the
suitors away.
GAUTREAUX: That's coincidence —just another part of the archetype; that's
why the old lady wound up by herself. It was common for the father of the
family, the patriarch, to run the suitors away for several reasons: they weren't
good enough, rich enough, but you wonder if he really wanted that daughter to
stay around to take care of him, to take care of his wife. He didn't want her to
get married and move away. He'd lose a nurse.
BAUER: And the mothers often died after having so many children, so he
wanted someone to take care of his house.

Responsibility and Compassion:

BAUER: Another pattern I've seen in your stories is the grandfathers. I'm
fascinated with my father's enjoyment of his grandchildren. He truly plays with
them when he babysits (or when they Poppysit for him, as he puts it). His
generation of fathers did not participate in childcare the way my generation of
fathers does, and I think they realize now, watching their sons and sons-in-law,
how much they missed. You have several stories with grandfathers stepping in
to take care of their grandchildren — "Welding with Children" and "The
Courtship of Merlin LeBlanc," for example. Would you talk about the men in
these stories? What is your inspiration for this particular focus on grandfathers
becoming involved in raising their grandchildren?
GAUTREAUX: Grandfathers in the stories come from two sources. One, I never
knew either of my grandfathers because they died before I was born. One thing
a fiction writer does is he makes things that he doesn't have, so I make
grandfathers for myself while I write. Another thing is that in teaching survey
courses with thirty-seven students in them, I always had a number of single
mothers who had child care problems. And I always got a lot of excuses, like
'Oh my mother or father couldn't take care of my kids so I couldn't come to
class.' Or, 'My kids are sick and my mother and father can't take care of them
because they're scared they'll catch the flu themselves, so I have to stay home.'
Or they show up with the kids. They bring the kids to lecture, so sometimes I've
had two, three, five kids in this classroom. So that's kind of where this interest
in grandparents comes from —there are a lot of grandparents and great-
grandparents out there taking care of little kids. It's because the girl has gotten
pregnant once or twice, and she has no husband and no job. Sometimes the
student's mother doesn't live close by or she's disappeared or something, or
her mother never had a husband maybe. And so the kids' great-grandma and
grandpa, who are these 1940s relics, who grew up, did right, got married once,
and worked forty years down at the mill and lived the straight life, they're left
to deal with the mess.
BAUER: This is tied into your theme of taking responsibility — like the bug man
who comes in to spray. It's not his responsibility to help the woman; he could
just spray and leave. Or the grandfather —it's not really his responsibility, but it
is his grandchild, and he did raise the mother who had this child out of
wedlock. You see this theme of responsibility again and again in your fiction. Is
this part of the Catholic background, too?
GAUTREAUX: It's not anything I really thought about much; if it's there it's
there. I can honestly say I don't think, 'well let me only write about responsible
people' or anything like that.
BAUER: It's a worldview that is in your fiction —the choice to take
responsibility.
GAUTREAUX: I don't know what to say about that, but let me start talking
about something that maybe I do know something about, and that's the notion
of hopelessness or despair that I see in a lot of contemporary fiction. I seem to
run across two types of stories that worry me. One is the New Yorker type tale
where everything is a joke and the reader can't really take anything, including
death and disease, seriously. The reader feels he's not supposed to have
intense emotions about anything because that's silly and bourgeois. And the
other type of story I run across is a truly dark narrative about vicious people
who don't learn anything from what they do and are not punished in any way
and never get their comeuppance. Sometimes that's realism. And such stories
belong in the canon. But the mistake a writer of those types of stories makes, I
think, is to write all of his stories like that because then, cumulatively, the
author gets away from realism.
Now what do I mean by that? It's unrealistic to ignore compassion and the
ability people have to cope and even triumph over their problems. You can
write a story about how horrible it is to die from a certain type of cancer. That's
realistic. Yet I run across many people who have coped with their cancer and
are in fairly good shape the night they die. I've known people like this. Where is
their literature? I read this student's story about a woman who was molested,
was totally ruined emotionally, and eventually committed suicide. I've known
many male and female students who were sexually abused, and most have
coped in various ways. Some of them even write about it, which is disturbing to
read, but nevertheless — maybe it's therapy — they're able to do it. Somehow
people who suffer in this way or that are able to triumph over what they're
going through. Where are the short stories about the small successes that
people have dealing with their problems? Well, they're not out there because
they're hard as hell to write without making them seem simple-minded or
clichéd or insipid or sentimental. The most frightening thing in the world to an
intelligent writer is sentimentality. He doesn't want a molecule of it in his
fiction. But I think if you read enough and you understand how to blend humor
and irony and the right tone in with the bad stuff, you can write a story that
carries an emotional load yet is not sentimental in the least. If anybody wants
to know how to deal with this type of thing, he can read my stories. I'm not
exactly sure how I do it myself, but it's a conscious mixing of comedy and
tragedy, of irony and straight non-ironic storytelling. A lot of it's like tap
dancing or jitterbugging or singing: either you got it or you ain't.

Notes:

1. James H. Dorman, The People Called Cajuns: An Introduction to an

Ethnohistory (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, 1983), 36.

2. Suzanne Berne, "Swamped," New York Times Book Review (22 Sept. 1996):
16. Kirkus Reviews 11 (Sept. 1996): 991; Rand Richards Cooper, "Local Color,"
Commonweal 8 (November 1996): 25; Perry Glasser, "True Dirt," North
American Review (March.-April 1997): 45.

3. Andy Solomon, "Books in Brief: Fiction," New York Times Book Review (14
June 1998): 21; John Tait, rev. of The Next Step in the Dance by Tim Gautreaux,
Missouri Review 21.2 (1998): 212; Susan Larson, "The Writer Next Door," New
Orleans Times-Picayune (15 Mar. 1998): E1.

4. Liam Callanan, "La. Stories," New York Times Book Review (3 Oct. 1999): 31;
Susan Balée, "Maximalist Fiction," Hudson Review 53.3 (2000): 520, 519,
emphasis added; Alan Heathcock, "Book Reviews," Mid-American Review 20
(2000): 249-50.

5. Bob Minzesheimer, "Clearing Is a Cut Above," USA Today (31 July 2003); "The
Critics: Briefly Noted," New Yorker (30 June 2003): 101; "PW Forecasts:
Fiction," Publishers Weekly (26 May 2003): 49.

6. Portions of my introduction are adapted from Chapter 1 of Understanding

Tim Gautreaux (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, forthcoming).

7. See the Recommended Resources, in which I list all of the interviews with
Gautreaux that I have found.

8. Marcia Gaudet, "The Image of the Cajun in Literature," Journal of Popular

Culture 23.1 (1989): 77-88.

9. See Gautreaux's essay "Left-Handed Love," in A Few Thousand Words about

Love, ed. Mickey Pearlman (New York: St. Martin's, 1998), 139.

10. In California to try to mend his relationship with his estranged wife,
Louisiana native Paul Thibodeaux orders the only thing he recognizes on the
menu, gumbo, and the waiter brings him "a small cauldron of bitter juice so hot
with Tabasco that after the third spoonful, Paul broke into a sweat." When
asked how it tastes, Paul remarks that was too hot and is told, "It takes time to
develop a true Cajun palate," to which Paul responds, "it sure don’t take much
time to ruin one" (The Next Step in the Dance [New York: Picador, 1998], 81).

11. The University of Southwestern Louisiana (USL) is now the University of

Louisiana at Lafayette. Vermilionville is a "Cajun/Creole heritage and folklife
park [that recreates life in the Acadiana area between 1765 and 1890"
(http://www.vermilionville.org) and Cajun Village is comprised of "[h]istoric
Acadian buildings, restored to house unique specialty shops"
(http://www.thecajunvillage.com).

12. See Chapter 7, "Don't Just Sit There; Do Something: Frustration with
Faulkner from Glasgow to Gautreaux," in William Faulkner's Legacy: "what
shadow, what stain, what mark" (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2005).

13. Collected Stories of William Faulkner (New York: Vintage, 1977), 126.

14. Gaines made this remark when guest-speaking at a class I took at the
University of Southwestern Louisiana (now the University of Louisiana at
Lafayette) in the spring of 1986. Gaines also refers to a similar, if not the same,
episode in an interview with John Lowe: "Someone asked me when I wrote The
Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, was I thinking about Dilsey in Faulkner's
novel The Sound and the Fury. And I said, 'No, I did not have Dilsey in mind.'
And by the way, the difference between Dilsey and Miss Jane Pittman is that
Faulkner gets Dilsey talking her story from his kitchen; the young schoolteacher
in my book gets Miss Jane's story from Miss Jane's kitchen. And it makes a
difference" (John Lowe, "An Interview with Ernest Gaines," Conversations with
Ernest Gaines, ed. Lowe, Literary Conversations Series [Jackson: UP of
Mississippi, 1995], 313).

return to top

Recommended Resources:

Other Interviews with Tim Gautreaux:

Arnold, Elizabeth. "Best Short Stories 1997." All Things Considered (15 Dec.
1997).

Birnbaum, Robert. "Interview: Tim Gautreaux." Identitytheory.com (1 Oct.

2003): http://www.identitytheory.com/interviews/birnbaum127.php.

Bolick, Katie, and David Watta. "A Conversation with Tim Gautreaux." Atlantic
Online (14 Mar. 1997):
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/factfict/gautreau/tgautr.htm.

Fitten, Marc. "A Conversation with Tim Gautreaux." Chattahoochee Review

24.1 (2003): 103-12.

Hebert-Leiter, Maria. "An Interview with Tim Gautreaux." Carolina Quarterly

57.2 (2005): 66-74.

Joyal, Christopher. "An Interview with Tim Gautreaux." New Delta Review 16.1
(1998): 87-97.

Kane, Julie. "A Postmodern Southern Moralist and Storyteller Tim Gautreaux."
Voces de América/American Voices Entrevistas a escritores
americanos/Interviews with American Writers. Ed. Laura P. Alonso Gallo. Cádiz,
Spain Aduana Vieja,( 2004): 123-45.

Kingsbury, Pam. "'Everything Has a Purpose': An Interview with Tim

Gautreaux." Southern Scribe 4.8 (2003):
http://www.southernscribe.com/zine/authors/Gautreaux_Tim.htm.

Langley, Greg. "Gautreaux Doesn't Need a Label Other than 'Writer.'" Baton
Rouge Advocate (10 Oct. 1999): 11-12.
Larson, Susan "Pelican Briefs." New Orleans Times-Picayune (15 Sept.1996): D1.

Levasseur, Jennifer and Kevin Rabalais. Interview. Mississippi Review 27.3

(1999): 19-40.

Masciere, Christina. "Novel Approach: Tim Gautreaux Takes 'The Next Step.'"
New Orleans Magazine (March 1998): 31, 35, 47.

Nisly, L. Lamar. "A Catholic Who Happens to Write: An Interview with Tim
Gautreaux." Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 8.2 (2007): 92-99.

Scanlan, Christopher. "Tim Gautreaux." Creative Loafing (June 2004):

http://tampa.creativeloafing.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A3956.

Work by Gautreaux and Criticism

Gautreaux, Tim. The Clearing: A Novel. (New York: Vintage, 2004).

———. The Missing. (New York: Knopf, 2009).

———. The Next Step in the Dance: A Novel. (New York: Picador USA, 1998).

———. Same Place, Same Things. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996).

———. Welding with Children. (New York: Picador USA, 1999).

Kanes, Julie. "Tim Gautreaux." In Twenty-First Century American Novelists,
edited by Lisa Abney and Suzanne Disheroon-Green, (Detroit: Thomson Gale,
2004), 119-125.

Nisly, L. Lamar. "Presbyterian Pennsylvanians at a Louisiana Sawmill, or Just

How Catholic Is Gautreaux's The Clearing?" U.S. Catholic Historian 23.3
(Summer 2005): 109-19.

———. "A Sacramental Science Project in Tim Gautreaux's 'Resistance.'" Logos:

A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 5.4 (Fall 2002): 135-51.

———."Wingless Chickens or Catholics from the Bayou: Conceptions of

Audience in O'Connor and Gautreau" Christianity and Literature 56.1 (Autumn
2006): 63-85.

Piacentino, Ed. "Second Chances: Patterns of Failure and Redemption in Tim

Gautreaux's Same Place, Same Things" Southern Literary Journal 38.1 (Fall
2005): 115-33.

Links:
Louisiana Authors Index. Louisiana State University.
http://www.lib.lsu.edu/special/la/

Louisiana Center for the Book. State Library of Louisiana.

http://www.state.lib.la.us/la_dyn_templ.cfm?doc_id=113

"Louisiana Novelist Tim Gautreaux Honored with Louisiana Writer Award."

Louisiana Book Festival, (13 February 2009).
http://www.louisianabookfestival.org./LWA_TimGautreaux.html
About the Author:

Margaret D. Bauer, author of The Fiction of Ellen Gilchrist (University Press of

Florida, 1999) and William Faulkner's Legacy: "what shadow, what stain, what
mark" (University Press of Florida, 2005), is the Rives Chair of Southern
Literature, Editor of the North Carolina Literary Review, and Professor of
English at East Carolina University, where she was named one of the ten ECU
Women of Distinction in 2007.
- See more at: http://southernspaces.org/2009/interview-tim-gautreaux-
cartographer-louisiana-back-roads#sthash.pCb7JTGb.dpuf