ALLEN MORRIS JONES, interviewed by David Abrams:
I think that the advice creative-writing instructors give their students, “Write what you know,” is probably sound at its core, but I think it’s also very, very dangerous. It tells a student not to venture, not to experiment, not to go outside the familiar. And I think that’s an enormous mistake. You need to write about whatever you can imagine, but I think you also need to follow your writing and those creative experiences will bolster your material. For instance, right now I’m writing about antebellum Appalachia. It’s a story about an escaped slave and it’s set in West Virginia. I’ve made one trip out there and I’ll be making another. This was a subject about which I had absolutely no experience at all.
JONES, Allen Morris. Novel: Last Year’s River. Co-editor of Where We Live: The Best of Big Sky Journal.
TIM GAUTREAUX, interviewed by Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais:
You’ve said you think every writer is limited to his place of origin. Do you see this as a hindrance?
People own the territory that they are born into. That’s the richest ore they can mine. That sounds like a theory, and like anything anybody comes up with in the way of a theory, there are exceptions to it. But that’s what I teach. Get in touch with where you’re from. No matter where you’re from, even if it’s a subdivision in Kenner, Louisiana, that is your literary heritage. If you look at it closely enough, you’ll see that it is as exotic and unique as some Central or South American culture in the mountains.
I can’t understand these people who say that anybody can write about anything and any time if they do enough research, because they cut themselves off from the speech of those they grew up with.
Do you see yourself departing from a Southern setting and researching another region, and setting a story somewhere else?
The projects I have planned now are all Louisiana projects. I think a writer forms most of his opinions and absorbs most of his nuances in the first fifteen years of his life. Somebody with a creative sensibility is born with a lot of antennae. A schoolteacher can tell you that children are much more receptive up to seventh grade than they are after. Information is just pouring into them because they are wide open to all sorts of things. That’s why I think that when they grow up to be writers, their youth is what they mine.
GAUTREAUX, Tim. Novels: The Next Step in the Dance, The Clearing. Story collections: Same Place, Same Things; Welding with Children. Work in Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Zoetrope. Southeastern Louisiana University.
