Top Stories New Orleans

Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

• The LA Weekly carries a cover interview with Anne Rice, late of the Garden District and now living in Rancho Mirage, Ca. Nothing really new in this piece, other than the fact Rice seems to have taken the Mission Inn in Riverside, Ca. as her new touchstone, using it in her fiction and signing her latest, Angel Time, there. Here’s the online trailer for the book:




• Grim rumblings from Walter Pierce of The Independent in Lafayette:

A biopic about the life of late New Orleans author John Kennedy Toole, still years away from the screen, is getting a head of steam, according to Maxim Entertainment president Blaine McManus. After two and a half years, an Ignatius Rising script based on the eponymous 2001 biography by René Pol Nevils and Deborah George Hardy (LSU Press) is complete and fundraisers are planned in Lafayette, Baton Rouge and New Orleans (dates undetermined) to raise $50,000 for a packaging/development fund. McManus says the fund is designed to ensure the movie “is fully developed and produced in Louisiana by a Louisiana production team.”

Awful news for anyone who loves A Confederacy of Dunces, or who knows the Toole family, simply because Ignatius Rising is such bad source material. I reviewed it back in 2001:

The dichotomy between Toole’s often raunchy novel and the lace- curtain gentility that his mother sought for herself is central to this story, or should be. One wonders if Mrs. Toole, who describes herself in one letter as “a woman of intelligence, culture, and many gifts,” saw herself lampooned in blowsy Mrs. Reilly, whose fingers were “chafed from years of scrubbing her son’s mammoth, yellowed drawers,” hiding empty muscatel bottles in the oven of her roach-infested kitchen. Nevils and [Deborah George Hardy] never even raise the question; indeed, they seem completely uninterested in Toole’s fantastical characters.

Ah, well; they still haven’t figured out a way to film Confederacy — maybe this will fall by the wayside, too. There’s always hope.

• Last but not least: Will Coviello interviews Poppy Z. Brite in this week’s Gambit. We’ll link the story here when it goes online later today. (And here it is.)

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Our man in the Capitol, Jeremy Alford, just passed along this press release from the office of Rep. Charlie Melancon, who is challenging David Vitter in the 2010 Senate elections. Says Alford of the last sentence, “Looks like Charlie Boy just lost the literary vote.”

(Edit: A corrected version of the release has since been issued.)

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Anthony Bourdain, role model for a generation of bad-boy (and wannabe bad-boy) chefs. Garrison Keillor, the rumpled personification of folksy humor. And David Sedaris, one of the funniest people on earth. They’re all coming to the Mahalia Jackson Theater next year as the inaugural wordsmiths of the New Orleans Speaker Series, a new endeavor that’s being “welcomed by” public radio station WWNO-FM.

Individual tickets to the shows will soon be available, but right now the Speaker Series is pitching a subscription model and “limited priority offer for supporters of the Mahalia Jackson Theatre,” with tix to all three shows available for $120-$172.50. The offer’s not on the Web site yet, but you can order tickets now by calling 888-614-2929.

Here’s the schedule (all shows at 7:30 p.m.):

• Thu., Jan. 7, 2010: Anthony Bourdain

• Tue., Feb. 9, 2010: Garrison Keillor

• Thu. Apr. 29, 2010: David Sedaris

The timing is odd — Keillor’s appearance is exactly one week before Fat Tuesday, and Sedaris’s comes during the second weekend of Jazz Fest — but how often do you get to see them? Snap up the tickets before everyone hears about ‘em.

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“Shane (MacGowan) doesn’t do interviews.” So went the response from the Pogues‘ publicist when I requested a chat with the venerable Irish/English band’s famously capricious frontman. Lucky for Gambit’s Voodoo coverage, guitarist Philip Chevron does do interviews, and he does them uncommonly well. Over 40 enlivened minutes, the sharp-witted and equally sharp-tongued Dubliner detailed his 25 years (give or take a few breaks) on tour with the inveterate boozers. What was worse, babysitting the orbital MacGowan or battling advanced throat cancer and chemotherapy? Read on.

It was a pleasant surprise to see your name added to the Voodoo lineup.
It’s been a long time since we played in New Orleans, so we’re very much looking forward to it. We played in Tipitina’s a couple times, must have been 1988, ’89. We made two or three visits to New Orleans, the Grace of God tour or just after. I love New Orleans. I was there earlier this year as a private citizen, as it were. I was actually checking out the Treme district, because a friend of ours, David Simon, was making his new HBO thing down there. We know him and George Pelecanos. They used “Body of an American” and a few other things in The Wire. One thing led to another, and we kind of hooked up and discovered we were mutual fans. Myself and Spider in particular were early adopters of The Wire.

I just wrote a story about the filming of the pilot. The team of writers he assembled is incredible: Pelecanos, Tom Piazza, Lolis Eric Elie.
I bought Faubourg Treme to have a look at it. And I was fascinated! That tells the story we really don’t know, that New Orleans existed almost as a parallel entity, really, even during the Jim Crow days. It’s a really good film, that. The way they got those narratives from people, and stuck with the same people throughout, was really brilliant. My response when I saw it was absolutely the same as David: I’ve got to find out more about this. This is too good a story not to know.

We’re so used to being portrayed in caricature. Simon’s approach should be quite a change.
I’m fascinated by the city, always have been. I’m fascinated by how it kind of exists likely at an angle from America. Of course the whole business of Katrina revealed so much of what mainstream America, Main Street America, felt about New Orleans. It really did have a quite extraordinary effect outside of America, because it was a bit like looking at pictures of Calcutta. It was hard to believe that there was a Third World country within the United States. I’m very much aware that the political ramifications and fallout of Katrina are still not sorted, and nowhere near resolved. I think that’s a huge shame. But it’s the same old story. The vultures will descend and try to turn New Orleans into a theme park version of itself, if they can. People have continued to fight it. But if anyone can fight it, New Orleans can fight it, because it’s had such an independent history in the past. I’ve always been fascinated by the mixture of elements, in a way. It was in part a great Irish immigrant city and port, and had its own part to tell in that story. So, a fascinating place. I can’t wait to get back.

How are the tours going?
We probably would do this more often, if only we could pin Shane down to rehearsal. I would consider it a problem if it were something that was solvable. But it’s not. He just lives under his own clock and schedule. He absolutely, 100 percent means to be there at the time that rehearsal is happening. But something happens that delays him. You learn early on when you have someone like Shane in your life that you have to accept that there’s an alternative clock going on there. And that twice a day, if you’re lucky, it will be set at the same time as you are.

I read a humorous piece from Shane’s 2006 Guardian blog, about how he’d been out the entire night before a show, and thank God for the human alarm clocks waking him up 10 minutes before he was supposed to be onstage.
Gosh, I remember that incident as well! The hotel was on red alert because nobody could get into his room. And the hotel security was saying, ‘We can’t interrupt Mr. MacGowan. We must respect his privacy.’ We were saying, ‘Let us in! Give us the f—king pass key! We need to get him out of there!’ ‘I’m sorry sir, we can’t do that. Mr. MacGowan has left strict instructions that he’s not to be disturbed.’ (Laughs) Eventually, God knows how, they did eventually get him out. We got him on the stage only 10 minutes late or something. This doesn’t happen very often. Usually it will occur because something quite innocuous has happened. If he picks up on a new film — he got into Brokeback Mountain in a big way for a while, and he was watching nothing but Brokeback Mountain, incessantly. ‘You’ve got 20 minutes before it’s time to go to the gig, Shane.’ ‘I can’t! I’m still watching the movie.’ ‘You should’ve thought of that and put it on a bit earlier, maybe.’ That’s a logic that never quite works for him. The logic that works for him is, I’ll be there when I finish watching this movie. (Laughs)

You seem to have kept your sense of humor about it after all these years.
The thing about it is, you find ways around all that. It doesn’t come unstuck very often. Of course, I can talk merrily about it because it’s not my problem; it is the problem of tour managers and other people who are paid for it to be their problem. (Good stories from them?) I bet they have. They’re all taping them for their books, I think.

Speaking of, I’m curious to hear your thoughts on Shane’s book (2001’s A Drink With Shane MacGowan).
I kind of skimmed through it. I enjoyed the bits that I caught in it, but I can’t say I read it cover to cover. I also felt a little irked by the editorialization that was going on with Victoria. There’s a sort of secondary narrative going on about her. Which, while she’s a delightful woman and perfectly charming, I wasn’t very interested in reading that book. So there was some curd of doubt about whether this was Shane’s book or her book. And the book slightly got lost in the crack between those two points of view, I think. I never felt inclined to read it all the way through. The bits that caught me eye and looked like they might be an entertaining, 10-minute read, I read and enjoyed. And of course, it being Shane, a great deal of it is 3 o’clock in the morning, excessive nonsense, that is his own false recollection of what actually went on. Because he’s one of those people that when he actually decides that something happened a certain way, that is the way it will have happened forever more. There is no such thing as contradictory evidence; contradictory evidence is just simply flawed. So there is that element where, if you were to take a book like that seriously, it might hurt you or offend you.

Shane, bless him, when he heard it was coming out quite soon — I think it was our former manager who had taken legal advice on it, and was threatening to put some sort of legal injunction on the thing (he was well history at that point). I think Shane used the book to settle a few old scores. Something about the consequences of that never quite registered with him, and it suddenly dawned on him: ‘Oh, shit. This might actually upset some people.’ At which point he said, ‘It can’t come out!’ And Victoria said, ‘But darling, it’s on the bookshelves already. It’s in the shops. You can’t stop it coming out — it’s out!’ I think there must have been, at some point in the proceedings, a comparable incident where he kind of got cold feet, because he did add that final page to it where he basically says, ‘Nothing personal, f—k you all if you take it personally anyway. You should know me better than that by now.’ Which indeed is true. We do. None of that shit ever hung over our getting back together again, because it’s all just f—king showbiz with Shane, you know? He’s like some old vaudevillian who knows how best to present himself.

You two met in a London record shop, is that right?
We both worked in kind of parallel sister record shops. Mine was Rock On; his was Rocks Off. They were both in London, and they were both run by Irish people. My history, such as it is with Shane, goes back even before the record shops. He was one of the first people who came to see my previous band, the Radiators. We came to London. And he was in the Nipple Erectors, or the Nips as they became. We had shared history, shared contacts. The same sort of shared contacts that ran record shops also ran Chiswick Records, which was home to both the Radiators and the Nips at various points. So we had a shared sort of hinterland of Irish people in London. We knew each other quite well from that sort of tangential part of the London punk scene in 1977 and so on.

I was more inclined to see Shane in pubs over the years than in record shops. He would come up to Candontown where I worked and we’d go and have a few pints. In fact, one of our drinking sessions there was when the song “Boys From the County Hell” was born. Because Shane had a habit of borrowing money off people by saying, ‘Do you want a drink?’ You’d say yeah. ‘Got any money then?’ That’s how the whole, ‘Lend me 10 pounds and I’ll buy you a drink’ thing came about. Because Shane actually said it to me once. And I thought it was so funny, that immediately he stored it away for future use. That’s the Shane we know and love: generous to a fault. I’ll buy you a drink with my last pound. The only thing is, you need to give me that last pound first. (Laughs) Which I always thought characterized so much about who Shane MacGowan is, because he literally would give you his last pound. But he’d have to first find out how to get it. Again, that’s the strange, convoluted logic that works for him. And once you get used to it, works for you as well.

How do you compare the Shane that had to be ousted from the band (in 1991) to the guy you welcomed back (in 2001)? How did you go about making amends?
What we did was remove the things that made it so unbearable the first time, which is essentially that we were just overworking. We were working for agents and managers rather than for ourselves. We found ourselves on these endless roller coasters of tours, and there never seemed to be any way of getting off. Every time we tried to call a halt, there would be just one more tour we had to do because we were contracted to do it. Then there would be something else at the end of that tour. We have to go out and do this tour, because we lost money on the last one, and we have to make up losses on this next one. It was a constant battle between common sense and common decency, with the reality we actually faced, which was we were on this constant treadmill — and in the middle find time to write songs and make an album while all that was going on. Very often the tours weren’t particularly expertly routed, either. At the level we were working at, with the sort of pressure we were under to deliver commercially all the time as well, it was really unhealthy for all of us.

With the exception of Shane, we all felt nevertheless we had more in us; we felt, if we can just slow it down a bit, we had more to say as a band. But it was very clear that Shane, who really, unless you’ve been the lead singer, the focal point in a band — and I have been — you can’t fully know how much additional pressure there is there. Everybody wants to know about you. As often as possible, the interview is with you, and the photographs are of you. It becomes intolerable at a certain point. However hard it is to be the guitarist or the drummer or the bass player, unmistakably it’s twice as hard to be the singer and the focal point and the man who writes the best songs. It collapsed him a lot quicker than it collapsed the rest of us, and it was very clear that he wasn’t able to cope with it. But at the same time, he was able to walk away from it. There was an element he felt that if he walked away from it, he would be letting everyone down. We had to take that on board and say, ‘He’s not going to do it. We’re going to tell him he has to do it.’

Tell me about that day.
It was an extremely uncomfortable position to be in, but it had to be done, and I think we were all very glad that it was done. It was in Japan, in a hotel room. And after the meeting, we just all went out and had dinner together, and remained friends. That’s the thing: Although Shane got a lot of valuable mileage out of the whole thing — ‘The f—kers sacked me! Those bastards, they sacked me’ — he got a lot of press and a lot of sympathy. It wasn’t true, and he knew it wasn’t. So there were never any wounds to heal when we got back together. All we did was, we recognized it had been a few years since we’d seen each other, expressed how wonderful it was to see each other again, and got on with the job.

How do you feel about being a spokesman, in effect, for Shane?
You ask Shane a question, he will think deeply about it before he answers it. There isn’t a part of his brain that files away not so much stock answers but a kind of reservoir where the answers come from — which I have and which Spider has, which we can draw on to tell you the truth, but nevertheless with the confidence that comes from knowing that you have the answer in your head. Shane doesn’t work like that. He rather sort of thinks, ‘Why did you ask that question? What sort of person are you to have asked that question? Why could you possibly want to know?’ And then, when all that’s footworked through, ‘What am I going to tell you instead?’ That in itself is exhausting, and I understand perfectly why he doesn’t do it very often.

You come to recognize as well that the best of Shane MacGowan is without a shadow of a doubt the two hours he’s onstage every day that he’s with us. And whatever it takes to get those two hours out of him is worth doing. If that includes him not doing interviews, that’s fine with the rest of us. He understands that equation as well, and subscribes very much to that. Because he knows if he f—ks up in that two hours, there’s not so much hell to pay, but he becomes aware that everyone knows he f—ked up, and it’s an unpleasant position for him to be in. So he does everything in his power to make sure that he’s at his optimum for the two hours that he’s onstage. Most of the time that works out pretty well. There are occasional mishaps, but not very often. Maybe three or four in the last six or seven years. Which is pretty good, considering the amount of touring we still do. Though it’s nothing like in the old days, we still do a pretty fair amount.

Is there a part of you that wishes you could still play Irish pubs?
Well, we never really played pubs in Ireland. It was London Irish pubs, because that’s where all the sort of immigrant Paddys ended up. There’s a culture in London Irish pubs that isn’t in Irish pubs. Different attitude, different atmosphere, different preoccupations, a different sort of melancholy. But also, the pubs we played in were specifically music pubs. They weren’t just London Irish pubs, although there were a few that were. We progressed very slowly from pubs to small concert halls and clubs. At the same time, we were moving outwards: We were playing in Germany, in Norway, playing in places that didn’t necessarily have Irish bars. They did later, but they were prepackaged, sort of Irish bar in a box affairs that people bought and set up like franchises in every town in Germany and Norway and God knows where. The McDonald’s Irish bar, which became a very frequent occurrence the world over. But the only real Irish bars are in Ireland, New York and London.

So we were expanding our horizons anyway. We never regretted playing to larger audiences. The whole point was to play to the largest possible audience. What you then have to do is figure out a way of reducing the size of the venue down to the size of an Irish bar — rather than scaling up what you do to the size of an arena or a stadium. It’s not difficult if you stay true to what you do. I’m always fascinated by the solutions other people find to this problem. I don’t really understand what is to be gained by doing what U2 do, which is to get ever bigger stage sets and ever bigger 200-truck entourages to carry your stage around. It’s a failure of imagination or something if you have to do that. I actually think that particular band are now at a point where they are finding themselves that, if it’s not a failure of imagination, it’s certainly something that has come to a natural end. And the only way they can survive, I think, is to figure out a way to make the venue smaller, like we did.

I was going to ask you about U2. They seem like a supernova, just primed to implode.
Yeah, there is that. I think that’s a danger. You leave yourself wide open for that if you go down the stadium rock route. We’re canny, but we weren’t calculated about it. We just said, ‘Look, if we keep doing what we’re doing, and more and more people come to see us, we will know if we’re doing it right. But if we start getting it wrong, we’ll also know.’ We have sort of tempered things as we’ve gone along. There are certain places where they won’t tolerate us playing a large venue. In London, at a certain point when you get big enough, you play Wembley Arena rather than playing three nights at the Brixton Academy. But when we did that, we found we didn’t like doing that, and the fans didn’t like seeing us there. It wasn’t the same atmosphere. It was a massive gig, and it was a hugely successful gig on every level, but it wasn’t right; it wasn’t what we wanted to do. So we went back to doing the three nights in a row at the 5,000-seater venue. We’ve never found a happy medium in Dublin. So we’re doing three shows at a theater there this Christmas, instead of trying to win a losing battles against hopelessly acoustic venues that seat 8,000 people at a time. There are some places where we can quite happily play to 8,000 people at once. It’s just nicer to scale it down to something that’s more manageable for the audience and for the band.

There’s a quote from one of you that I thought was telling, about how not doing new material is what’s keeping the band happy. Is that still the case?
I think that remains true. Inevitably people want to know if you’re doing new material; it’s a perfectly natural question. But it’s never one that we’ve particularly given a great thought to ourselves. Certainly it’s been discussed and broached by management, and we looked at the possibilities there. But I think the only way we can really do it is to allow ourselves to kind of get back on the hamster wheel, to an extent. Because you can’t just put out an album now and hope it will sell a certain number of copies that will allow you to make another record. The music business doesn’t work like that anymore. It doesn’t allow for honorable failure; it doesn’t allow for modest success. I think it’s become a point of major angst for all the major artists in the world today who do make records still. Because if they sold nine million of the last one, and this one looks like it’s only going to sell four million, they become like a company trading on Wall Street: They become negative equity. That’s very damaging for them, and very damaging for the record company. The corporatization of the music business has been very damaging to music in general, I think. Fortunately it has gone parallel with an alternative culture that’s found its voice through the Internet and so on, so it hasn’t been all bad. But it does mean that we would have to compete, and I don’t think we feel like competing.

How’s the dynamic of the current lineup?
This eight-piece lineup is now together twice as long as it was the first time round. That kind of crept up on us, and it surprised the hell out of us to realize. Because it feels like a lot shorter than it did the first time round. It seems like we’re nowhere near halfway through it. It will last as long as it remains fun, as long as people stay healthy enough to do it, I think.

I know you just went through an ordeal with throat cancer. How’s the recovery going?
It was a pretty ropy two years. The worst thing about getting cancer is not so much getting cancer as getting treatment for cancer. It took me two years just to get the f—king chemo drugs out of my system. All sorts of things happen to your body that have never happened before, including in my case going deaf for three months. It affected my whole life: going to the theater and not hearing anything. My lifestyle was removed from me when I went deaf. Not just the part of it that accounts for me being the guitarist for the Pogues. It was an enormous relief when that turned out to be just a side effect of the chemotherapy. I’m already deaf in one ear anyway, since birth. For all intents and purposes, I was totally deaf. I was able to work on the box set while all that was going on because I was using a laptop with really heavy-duty headphones turned up full. And I was still just hearing the faintest amount of music. But enough to get the box set done. It was one of those moments in life where you think, ‘F—k this! I’m not going to let this near deafness stop me from doing this box set.’ (Laughs) I think ultimately that’s what gets you through shit like cancer: just a determination that it’s not going to slow you down. The determination to carry on, regardless, is what got me through. It’s quite a trip, f—king hell.

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In five years’ time, Barb Johnson went from an oft-injured carpenter and sometime scribbler to an MFA holder whose thesis, More of This World or Maybe Another, drew a book deal from HarperCollins before graduation. How did she do it? As the colorful, ever-humble author might never say: chops, babe. Today at 5:30 p.m., at the Garden District Book Shop, Johnson reads from and signs her first work. Following is a conversation we had over Pimm’s Cups at the Napoleon House for an article in the current Gambit. You know, research.

This has been quite a charmed year for you.

I’ve spent this whole year going, “What?” I found out they bought the book — it was probably a week before I graduated, May 2008. It’s my thesis, with two extra stories. Refined and reordered. I wasn’t working on the book; I was working on a number of short stories. I combined two characters. One summer I wrote the story about when Dooley was a kid. I really liked writing that story. Some of them are just very satisfying to write. I didn’t know how to end that story. I’m still not crazy about the ending. Had I to do it over, I would change it.

So these stories are never really finished.

I’m always thinking about it. The other day I’m walking across the living room and all of a sudden, I’m like, “Ohh …” The right ending for “Keeping Her Difficult Balance.” I thought the ending on that was too heavy-handed in my mind. She falls, but it should’ve been more visual about the spray, and how the flames do this. That’s always really fun for me. I love writing really visual stuff. That’s kind of how I think, in pictures. Just have to translate it into words, and that takes a certain amount of time.

I love the first story of Delia — it really sets the tone for the book.

That came out of an actual assignment. I was so resistant to writing a story about southwest Louisiana, who knows why. Writing a story about the gay girls? Not going to do that. Amanda (Boyden) was really good about it: She would give everybody a really specific assignment based on whatever it was she could see you were resisting. That started out as a one-page. She would give you a scene: an ugly girl on her first date. That’s not how I think. I’m going to make her a kick-ass girl! The ugliness is going to be completely somebody else’s assumption; that won’t be her perception of herself. I’m very long-winded, so that was five pages. Delia, the character, grew out of that assignment. I’m really grateful to Amanda, because I really would never have written that, ever. That led to “Keeping Her Difficult Balance.” Then I thought, that Dooley kid could be her brother. Then this family history started evolving from there. And I had Luis and Pudge. I thought, what if Pudge was Luis’ father? That would be hilarious.

When was the book deal first proposed?

I got an email from agent, who I’d gotten my second year. I was a finalist in a Tennessee Williams short story contest. It was for “St. Luis of Palmyra,” the only one I had that was really a story, in my mind. He contacted me through the university. He’s forwarding an email from an editor, and I didn’t understand it. Does this mean they want to look at the story? So I forwarded it to Amanda. I said, “Amanda, what does this mean?” She said, “You got a book deal.” I said, “How can you tell?”

So “St. Luis” really started it all.

That’s where it all started. That one’s really close to my heart.

And now it’s included in a Dostoyevsky compilation.

Bizarre! I was a bonus story to Dostoyevsky. The concept is, read the classics, and here’s a modern story that you might want to learn about. I find out a week before I graduate that I have a book deal, and that I have to say yay or nay. Are you kidding me, my thesis? I kept thinking they were going to go, “We like your thesis, we like these stories. What we need you to do is, change Delia to a boy, do this, do that. We need some product endorsement. … Just kidding. We thought we wanted it.” None of that happened. They were refined to make it linked.

How long have you lived in Mid-City?

Off and on, a long time. Except for maybe seven years out of 30. Broadmoor, briefly. Irish Channel, briefly. I remember Mid-City in the ’70s and ’80s. It was a different group of immigrants. Lots of old people. My favorite thing in the world is to get people to tell me the history of the neighborhood, what used to be where. I taught at Warren Easton for five years. ’84 to ’89. There was a horrible amount of crime. You would hear gunfire every night. The kids in homeroom would teach each other how to hold up people in the parking lot at the grocery store — because their arms were full, how easy that was. I was teaching people who had beaten a gay man to death because he asked them if they’d like to have sex. And instead of saying no, they got six of their friends and beat the crap out of him. But I loved the kids. I was very bad in high school, did not enjoy high school. I was very happy there. I don’t do well with systems that are very broken and very resistant to getting fixed.

Tell me about your previous life as a carpenter.

I was a carpenter right up until storm. I’m from Lake Charles, been living here for 30 years. The storm trashed my shop. It was somewhat fortuitous. It’s not like it was fun right away, don’t get me wrong. It forced me to choose. The choice was so enormous; there was water up to the ceiling. I live on Palmyra, right near Jeff Davis.

How quickly did you come back?

I snuck in with a friend couple of weeks after the storm to see. I initially evacuated to Lake Charles. But, Hurricane Rita. That weekend I had gone to Lafayette to visit some friends. My shop was still underwater. I live on the second floor. The house had storm damage, so I lived on my balcony. Lots of people were doing that. I had a tarp. Go Red Cross! You could use it for everything.

I drove back in a month after the storm. I wasn’t supposed to stay, but I didn’t want to leave either. The only reason I was staying on the balcony was because it was too hot to be in the house. Essentially spent most of the day trying to clean up the neighborhood. There were incredible piles of storm debris just to get up to my landing. Clearing a path from the street to the stairs. It was odd, because I was in school. I was like, Should I rebuild my business?

How long before you were back at UNO?

I didn’t take any (time off). It was the most miraculous, underreported, heroic thing I’ve ever witnessed or been a part of. Little UNO, as broke as they can be, was completely wiped out. We’re all everywhere. One person finds another person finds another person, and the entire university was reconstructed online. Sometime in September we started classes online. This was going to be my third semester, beginning of my second year. Because everybody was so crazy, including me, it was the biggest relief in the world to have something to focus on. I was just there writing, and in the day going to look for someplace to charge my computer and find some WiFi.

And that’s where the seeds of these stories were sewn?

Some of them, yeah. There was one story that I wrote almost in its entirety on that balcony. (“Killer Heart,” about a heatstroke.) Because it’s kind of hot, you know? So I was just pretending in my mind to be somewhere not in Mid-City. It’s the only story that is in New Orleans but not in Mid-City; it’s in the Irish Channel. I could visualize that. It was such a relief in mind to go somewhere. I’m sitting there in the pitch-freaking-black, and it stinks stinks stinks. As a carpenter I always had a miner’s lamp, because I always had to be inside cabinets. Just sitting out there, typing away or reading stories. I’d head out to the suburbs and download them, take them back home.

How did your experience in school change after the storm?

We essentially did the same thing we’d been doing. Two people submit their stories. You read them, you critique them. We went back and made a new schedule, started turning in stories. Just crazy to think about. People were sleeping under their mother’s dining room story with 18 other people. Nobody wrote about the storm. Nobody’s writing an evacuation story. It was great. It was fantastic. Because it was so the opposite of what was actually right downstairs.

What moved you to begin the masters program?

I think my niece motivated me most of all. I was getting too old to do what I was doing. Carpentry I got into to put myself through school. I got into my own business on a leap of faith. This guy told me once, “I just pick up whatever I want to do with my time, and I make that a business.” I don’t know, that doesn’t seem like it would work. … All of a sudden I had a business making furniture, then I was a general contractor as well. It’s so physical and so hard, and I was so injured it was making me miserable. My knees, back, neck. Tennis elbow in both elbows. Rotator cuff. There was a certain part of each year spent in pain.

Did you know it would be writing?

I did. What would I like? I’m not going to think about making a living at it. But I’ve always liked to write. I had no idea if I’m a good writer or a bad writer. I’d never written a short story, didn’t know how any of that worked. But I’d written. I thought, as soon as you make one small shift in any direction, everything else shifts. Then you start coming across things you wouldn’t have in the path of being a carpenter. It’s the same thing, but different. Would you like to be injured in new and improved ways?

Decided that I would try to get into an MFA program. I went to UNO for undergrad, for English. I did what all English majors do: I became a carpenter. The first 10 schools I applied to the first year, all 10 turned me down. Every one. They would say, “Send two stories or 30 pages,” so I sent 30 pages. Stuff I was fooling around with. Everything I do is real character-driven. The first drafts of things are often hilarious. They’re funny, and it’s too superficial. That allows me to just get that out of my system. Big deal, you make people laugh. Easy.

Did any of the characters survive?

All the characters survived. The story, in Guernica, called “Issue Is.” That was originally set here (at Napoleon House), and the name of it was “No Stupid Shoes.” It was something that people do as a writing exercise. Friend having ad-hoc summer workshop. He wanted to learn how to just do dialogue back-and-forth, and communicate characterization with gesture and all the things. I have no idea what I’m doing. None. One woman was trying to convince the other one to take ballroom dancing lessons, and the other one doesn’t want to. I’m going to workshop later tonight with people I graduated with. Somebody’s turned in three chapters of a novel. Several people are working on novels, me included. Mostly I’m working on getting my book launched right now.

How did More of This World begin to take form as a book?

The stories didn’t start out to be connected. Dooley was this other guy who kind of merged into this other character. I had to change the name so I’d stop thinking of him as this other guy. I have three brothers, so I have a little bit of insight. Things that I think are adorable, guys are like, “He would never have survived the playground.”

In school, you only write short stories. I had no notion this was going to be a book. I spent a lot of time in school trying to write a novel that was not very good, because plot is very hard for me. In an attempt to make the plot work, I’m ignoring characterization, which is my strength. Eventually I had to go, “Oh! For the sake of finishing, I will have to write short stories for my thesis.” You write three a semester for six semesters, that’s 18 stories, if not 21. Non-fiction terrifies me. I feel like the sky is the limit. Fiction, it almost always occurs to me naturally, because it’ll be some made-up person doing some made-up thing. The facts won’t strain me at all.

Were you surprised to see recurring themes?

I was very surprised. People would point out the images. I don’t think like that: Here’s an image, or here’s a theme. I don’t even think of those as that. Now here’s the stuff I like to write. The rest of the stuff is just story to hang on that kind of moment. The other thing everybody says is, “It’s so violent! Somebody’s always getting mangled or dying, birds, pigs, dead babies.” That’s not violent. That’s just life.

In what order did you write them?

“What Was Left” was probably the first story. And it was probably 40 pages long. That’s what I used to do: write 60 pages, cut back to 40. Get some feedback, then try to cut it back to a story, instead of a series of episodes. Adding subtlety to the character, adding grades of meaning. Refining the character. [Pudge] was sort of laughable, and that wasn’t what I was shooting for; I didn’t want people to laugh at him. That one started out with a line that’s not even in the story anymore. The thing that I thought about was a flashback in this guy’s life that I thought about when I was a kid. I was at a birthday party, and we’re all singing “Happy Birthday,” and this kid sneezes all over the cake. And I thought, what does that do to you? How do you grow up and remember that? I don’t know what she did; I don’t know how she managed that memory.

Tell me about the new book.

It kind of picks up where Luis’ story (leaves off), the very next day. There are going to be some new characters, but it will kind of revolve around all of them. St. Luis’ Palmyra. It’s just another question I had: How’s that kid going to grow up? As opposed to Pudge.

How did the $50,000 AROHO grant come about?

I started applying for fellowships and grants immediately after graduation. As an undergrad I had gotten a grant from the Astraea Foundation. I got a $1,500 grant. The Glimmer Train thing, I got when I was in (grad) school. That was my first national publication, for “Killer Heart.” Most bizarre was, I made myself apply for AROHO competition, which was the most elaborate application you’ve ever seen. There were six essays, maybe four or five lists: school, publications, awards. It was so intimidating. I would read other people’s writing and think, “Oh, well she’s brilliant.” I’m just a little schmo carpenter.

They announced it sometime in March. I’m working on the edits for the book, and I’m like, “How much more terrific can the world be?” And somebody just calls me and goes, “You won $50,000.” Are you screwing with me? Who is this? I think I’m just a good test case. We all do this: this sort of, not me, not me. There’s shiny people who went to the really great schools, who didn’t get turned down from 10 schools. Which was also good. UNO was perfect for me. I was so happy there every single day. It’s an excellent program. It’s not a cutthroat pissing contest; it’s extremely cooperative. Everybody supports everybody, always. So then this. That was really hard to digest. Because I’m not a young person, Noah. School is a certain momentum in the direction of writing. My goal was to have a national publication before I graduated. Amanda Boyden, we all go to Parkview every Monday after workshop. Another good thing about UNO: There’s this sort of apprenticeship. There’s always somebody who’s a few steps ahead of you, and somebody who’s a few steps behind you. We all just take each other along these steps. Right now, Bill Loehfelm, who just won Amazon.com’s breakthrough novel award, is a couple years ahead of me.

Does the deal with HarperCollins include the second book?

I got some other good advice: When you sign a two-book contract, the clock starts ticking right then. I didn’t think that would lead to my best work. So I signed a one-book contract. I don’t write in a straight line. And apparently nobody else does, either, but I always have the notion they do — sit down and go, “Page 1 …” I almost never start at the beginning of a story. It’s usually sort of auditory or visual. It’s some sense — not of what’s going to happen, but who’s in it, and what kinds of things would that person do.

The rule of thumb is, 10 years after you graduate, you publish a book. But most people who graduate are not 50. I was like, “I really don’t have 10 years.” The best I could do would be to get a grant. It would be another year aimed at the thing I like to do, and other things start conspiring, because that’s the context you have. I never would have met you or any of the other people who are thinking the same kinds of things. I didn’t have these conversations with the drywall guy. I had great conversations, but I didn’t have these conversations.

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Legislators are often criticized for not reading the bills on which they cast votes, but their hallowed halls at the Louisiana State Capitol this Saturday will be filled with avid readers, and plenty of writers.

Saturday, Oct. 17, is the seventh annual Louisiana Book Festival, held in the capitol as well as the State Library of Louisiana and the State Museum in downtown Baton Rouge.

It’s the state’s biggest literary gathering this side of the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival, held in the French Quarter each March.

Best-selling authors Rick Bragg, Robert Hicks, Wally Lamb and Walter Isaacson are among more than 175 writers who will discuss their work at forums and panels and readings.

The festival is free. Check the festival Web site for details.

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Tim Gautreaux — novelist, short-story writer and retired professor at Southeastern Louisiana University — is scheduled to receive the 2009 Louisiana Writers Award in Baton Rouge Oct. 17 at the Louisiana Book Festival.

Mary Tutwiler at The Independent in Lafayette has a nice piece about Gautreaux:

All I can say is it’s about time. I’ve been reading Tim Gautreaux’s work for years, cheering every time he publishes another book of short stories or a new novel. One year, I gave everybody in my family his novel set in a logging camp in the Basin, The Clearing, for Christmas. This month, at the Louisiana Book Festival, the Morgan City native will receive the 2009 Louisiana Writer Award. It’s no surprise that the state literary folks would honor Gautreaux. He’s received accolades from just about everybody else. I just wonder why it took so long.

She’s right; Gautreaux is a wonderful writer, and his short-story collection, Welding With Children, stands as a classic piece of modern Louisiana literature. Congratulations to Gautreaux.

For more info on the Louisiana Book Festival (and the beaucoup New Orleans writers who will be attending), check out the festival Web site.

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