26 minute read
Author to Author Interview with Toby LeBlanc and Amos Wright
Author to Author Interview with Toby LeBlanc and Amos Wright
Toby LeBlanc is a mental health therapist in Austin, Texas. Writing is a way his own stories can live alongside the ones he hears every day from others. Originally from Scott, Louisiana (the undisputed Boudin Capital of the World), Toby grew up in a world filled with French. Before you navigate away to search "boudin," know that it is a type of sausage with origins in France, which has since been perfected in South Louisiana using lots of rice and spice. Toby's lineage goes back to some of the first Acadians to land on the shores of Nova Scotia in the 1600s, only to be exiled one hundred fifty years later. Those exiles now make some of the finest food, music, and art the world has ever seen. Some of Toby's other writing can be found in Coffin Bell Journal, Deep South Magazine, and Barrelhouse Magazine. His upcoming short story collection Soaked (February 2025), which focuses on climate change and its impact on Louisiana culture, will be published by Cornerstone Press in Wisconsin.
Dark Roux is the story of a Cajun family simmering on the verge of burning to ruin. As Mardi Gras approaches, the Mouton family finds itself falling to pieces. Each is struggling on their own. Will battles feeling out of place and his sexual orientation, Addie feels stuck in love and adulthood, Beatrice flails in her role as a mother, and John fights feeling weak. It is the death of Auguste Chenevert–their patriarch–which shows them a way forward. Each must find what their culture means to them, and what they mean to each other. Told from each of the four family member’s perspectives in turn, Dark Roux is how Americanization impacts the most sacred of Cajun cultural mores. Dark Roux was a finalist for the National Indie Excellence Award in the Southeast region.
1. Being from Louisiana, you know there’s four types of roux: white, blond, brown, and dark, which cooks for the longest. The novel even opens with a roux recipe that I might have to try myself. Can you elaborate on the choice of dark roux?
A dark roux is the base of many Cajun dishes and is an integral part of our cuisine. Dark roux takes the longest because it has to be kept at a low heat. Patience is essential. Also, if you stop stirring the roux for too long it will burn. This was the metaphor I used to approach Cajun culture in the novel. Watching one's culture evolve takes patience and it is not something that can be rushed. It must change in its own time. But I also think Cajun culture stagnates at times, threatening to burn down what has made it beautiful. We get stuck in the "old ways" of racism and xenophobia (and a foreigner to a Cajun may just mean they are from North Louisiana). In the book I try to challenge where we could stir more to keep our roux nice and smooth as the world, and its people, modernizes around us. Can we integrate with technology and continue to interact with the land in a respectful way? What does family look like now that there isn't a crop to look after, fishing lines to run, or cattle to herd? These are just a couple places our culture needs to be stirred.
2. In a region known for fluid racial identities, Cajun identity looms large, but it also shares the page with Black, Creole, and white identities. These racial fluidities and boundary formations are not lost on the characters. What is the novel telling us about these identities?
The term Cajun has been used in so many ways, by so many people, that I think it has become confusing - even to the people it originally described. I have listened to questions of lineage and its purity inside my ethnicity. I've been part of conversations where folks tried to explain away a part of their identity. But many of the cuisines, music, and speech we associate with Cajuns are really shared, and informed by, the other identities you just mentioned. We are all children of Louisiana and we have all brought our ingredients to the pot of gumbo: okra from the stolen People of Africa, ground sassafras from the Indigenous, roux from the Acadians, all creolized (term borrowed from Leah Chase, God rest her soul) to make something better. Auguste Chenevert, the patriarch in Dark Roux, wouldn't bother with which ingredient is the most important, or the most pure, but instead focus on how you stir them together. A dish is brought forward from the ingredients to make something that is of all its parts, but also something more. That's how it gets its character. He'd say character is what gives someone, or even a place, their flavor. Then he'd tell you to grab a bowl, sit down, and eat with your neighbor, who is probably your cousin anyway.
3. The Moutons are one of the most famous (infamous?) families in Acadiana going all the way back to the Louisiana governor, Alexandre Mouton. Naming the family Mouton was no accident. Can you elaborate on this decision?
There were two intentions behind this. First is the history you mentioned with the Mouton name. Governor Mouton was a plantation owner. There was also General Mouton who served in the Confederate Army. Since this family was closely associated with white supremacy, I thought it could add a bit of characterization to the bearer of the name in this story: John Mouton. John believes he deserves more simply because of who he is. He compensates for his lack of work, morality, and for his pain, by adhering to mores of those forefathers. There are plenty of other exhortations I'll let you read to find out. But the other reason I wanted to use the name is because it means "sheep" in French. When I thought of the family in this novel, I thought of how they were following (like little sheep) what they'd been told about their culture rather than finding out what the culture means to them.
4. Dark Roux contains a non-trivial amount of untranslated Cajun French and the characters code-switch between English and Cajun French depending on context and their interlocutor. Given that Cajun French has a history of official Anglophone suppression in Louisiana, do you feel compelled to challenge this? What was the reason for the code-switching?
As I grew up, elders slipped into French when they had words not meant for the little ones' ears. Any multilingual person will tell you that language frames your world. Prairies and swamps make more sense in French to me. The code-switching you see in the book is how we actually talk. By immersing a reader in a world where one language does not have complete dominance, I hoped to give a real, lived experience. I even debated on not italicizing the French lines in the novel (as I have seen other multilingual authors do lately). Though that would have made Auguste's "Frenglish" even more difficult to read. It is not uncommon to hear a French word or three seasoning heavily-accented English. I've even heard recently that not only our French is considered a dialect, but our English, too. Speaking French used to be seen as a sign of ignorance; something to rise above. Language suppression happened so quickly in Louisiana that in two generations my family stopped speaking French at home. I'm happy to see so many language activists in Louisiana trying to preserve this integral part of who we are.
5. Mardi Gras is the most well-known cultural export of Louisiana. Even though Mardi Gras is not monolithic, as the cultural practices in New Orleans are not the same as the Cajun courir, the world knows Bourbon Street shenanigans the best. How do you write about such a hyper-localized, nuanced and unique event like Mardi Gras? What does this seasonal celebration mean to you as an author and to your characters?
“Will, the youngest in the novel, said "Mardi Gras is." Full stop. Each of the characters in Dark Roux lose themselves in the traditions. Writing their experiences of Mardi Gras set them up as three dimensional characters for me. While their experiences vary as much as a New Orleans vs. Church Point Mardi Gras, Carnival is available to anyone who is willing to give themselves over to it. When the drums of the high school band thump deep in your chest, when you run after a terrified chicken across mud and barbed wires, when you wake up drinking with your cousins and go to bed after dancing with strangers, when you let your mischievous self out and everyone is happy to see it, you will know Mardi Gras. It will find parts of you that you didn't know were there. Last weekend I was having a conversation about Mardi Gras with my daughter. She asked why I miss it so much (since I now live in Austin, TX) and I caught myself saying, "It's the only time of year everyone, no matter who they are, will feel some joy." But to remain true to the tradition, the aftermath of Mardi Gras in the novel is as important as Fat Tuesday. Since Mardi Gras is the beginning of the Catholic Lenten season, the torment and temptations that follow the party are many.
6. Acadiana is a region rich with artists, artisans, musicians, Creole cowboys, and culinary geniuses. How do you relate to these other aesthetic traditions? What does it mean to be a Cajun novelist? Would you describe yourself thus?
It seems like I'd have to get Gino Delafose to knight me, to have George Rodrigue to speak my name from the beyond, or at least have Tim Gautreaux email me to say he liked Dark Roux before I'd count myself among the artists from this region. Is bowing a way of relating to the greats? The region I come from grows talent and brilliance better than it grows crawfish. The masters of the aesthetic traditions in Louisiana are all trying to depict what makes this place so unexplainable. Just like Keagan LeJeune showed perfectly in Finding Myself Lost in Louisiana, when you think you have it, that you finally found what makes this place home, it disappears down the bayou. At best, I hope to tell enough stories to further color the rich diaspora of art and culture that bursts from this area. I will never tire of the attempt to depict my culture, this beautiful way of living and relating, with people from outside Louisiana. But in honesty, I'm content to parler with "us" from Louisiana. Because when your gumbo impresses Maw Maw from down the street, that's something special.
7. I’ve recently become interested in Kundera’s concept of the unachieved in evaluating my own work. What do you think Dark Roux achieves and what is left unachieved?
I love this question. Dark Roux starts a conversation. What makes a culture? What makes an identity? What happens to culture when Anglo-American superculture works at odds with their historical ethnic culture? What is worth keeping? How do you change what isn't working? How do you make room for everyone as the changes happen? What is left unachieved is, of course, are the answers to these questions. And the reason is simple: while the characters have their own answers, I haven't answered them for myself yet. Asking them is probably why I wrote this book. Once I do answer them for myself, maybe that could be another book.
8. You’re a mental health therapist. Like many marginalized groups, Cajuns are no strangers to intergenerational trauma from historical displacement and the 18th century Expulsion of the Acadians by the British from Acadia. Without imposing historical or psychological determinism on the Mouton family, how does this shared history impact the characters?
The "Grand Derangement" (as we like to call it) still lives in the psyches of Cajuns today. When the British purposefully split families and cast them out to different ports around the world it left us with the determination that we will never be separated again. You can see this struggle play out with both Addie and Will in the novel. Both have different feelings about leaving Lafayette and their family, but both feel pressure to remain at home. To this day, few Cajuns live outside of south Louisiana. If anything we just move closer to one another. I lived in my grandmother's backyard. This is how, until the early to mid 20th century, we retained an insulated identity preserved in time. It's also how we remained one of America's internal foreigners.
9. What are you working on now? What projects do you have planned?
Right now I'm playing with a novella that focuses on grief, parenting, and Antarctica. I don't really know where it's going so I'm just along for the ride. I have a novel that I've been showing to some people and it was even a finalist in a contest. It's based during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and tries to tackle the racism, classism, and colorism of the city from eye-level. I'm also considering a follow up to Dark Roux that focuses more on how Cajuns commodified our culture. Stay tuned!
Amos Wright is from Alabama. His first short story collection, Nobody Knows How It Got This Good was published by Livingston Press (University of West Alabama) in 2018. Livingston Press published his first novel titled Petrochemical Nocturne in 2023.
The Mississippi River. HAZMAT. Boxing. Suicide by cop. New Orleans Saints football. Chemical explosions. The Angola prison rodeo. Chlorine gas ghost ships. Through these symbols and themes we learn about Toussaint, (an African-American named after the Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture) and his formative experiences in the Standard Heights neighborhood of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Petrochemical Nocturne is an indictment of what Toussaint describes as “that dystopian haunted carnival cruise line called America,” as Standard Heights and the ExxonMobil refinery which has destroyed it supply the energy and refined petroleum products which enable contemporary consumerism.
A discursive exploration of environmental racism, southern history, the prison-industrial complex, police brutality, intergenerational trauma, and climate change, Petrochemical Nocturne is both paean and eulogy for the former enslaved communities of Cancer Alley, the erasure of an entire people from a poisoned landscape.
1. Your title references music. I did find your writing melodic with a repetition of themes the way a classical piece would. But why a nocturne?
In a state known for its rich musical tradition, a nocturne is perhaps the least Louisianan. It’s not zydeco or jazz. A traditional nocturne evokes the night, a composition characterized by a dreamy, lugubrious, contemplative quality which is reflected somewhat in the prose. Metaphorically, the petrochemical plant siren – the warning system used to alert the plant and the surrounding community of an industrial accident – itself is the petrochemical nocturne, a blend of the ominous and the aesthetic. I was preoccupied by the contrast between the industrial siren, which can be quite eerie and post-apocalyptic, and the melodic nature of the classical nocturne.
2. Toussaint, a Black man from Baton Rouge and your main character, is the story of the Petrochemical Nocturne. Your narrator, a white man from Alabama, remains anonymous. Can you say more about why you chose to tell the story this way?
I suppose it was an attempt to submerge the white narrator’s identity, to make him nameless as Toussaint’s ancestors were nameless. Although the story is told, or relayed, by a white narrator, it is very much Toussaint’s story. I was conflicted by the ethics of this narrative construction – a black man’s story retold by a white narrator – but I saw no other way to do it and the result is, I’m sure, still fraught. This was also a deliberate strategy to problematize slave narratives, as some had prefaces written by white men.
In this narrative model, there is no Kantian “thing-in-itself” behind the language, no narrative noumenon to be discovered. However, this is belied by the insertion of photographic reproductions of archival materials like a slave census or Alex Gardner’s Civil War photos in the narrative, which seem to suggest that the narrative’s “thing-in-itself” is accessible while the surrounding story would suggest otherwise. As every postmodernist knows, any embedded story retold by another narrator will be subject to distortions, exaggerations, omissions, maybe outright mendacities. But Toussaint’s story, as told by Toussaint to the white narrator (who in turn relates it to the reader who brings their own mental framework to it), and in many cases told to Toussaint by his parents or other community members, is also subject to those same narrative risks, so the net result is layer upon layer of distortion and occlusion, which creates an epistemological problem: the impossibility, as things are, of interracial dialogue, of ever knowing one another, and the moral imperative and necessity of trying.
3. Your writing style has been called Faulknerian. Petrochemical Nocturne sent me to the dictionary several times the same way he did. Are you a disciple of Faulkner? Who do you look to inform your writing?
Hopefully the reading process wasn’t too painful. I’m sure the comparison is supposed to be complimentary, but I bristle at it now. I really think Faulkner, like Joyce or Beckett, is nonpareil; they may leave imitators, but no true heirs. As a Southerner, I don’t think writing in the shadow of Faulkner is healthy or productive, those ghosts have to be exorcised before one can write without that shadow darkening every word. I certainly went through a heavy Faulkner phase when I was younger, but I haven’t read Faulkner in probably fifteen years, and have mostly stopped reading so-called Southern literature or anything set in the South. Lately, I’ve found it too limiting and have moved on to other themes, other modes. But that doesn’t mean Faulkner had no influence. I haven’t read the Bible much lately either, but it was such an influential book for me, at a young age, that its metaphors and images are almost second nature.
Secondly, “Faulknerian” can be bandied about as a descriptive shorthand for any prose, especially Southern, that is perceived to be difficult or have convoluted syntax. In certain contexts it might even be a polite dismissal. If that is the criterion, then Petrochemical is definitely Faulknerian. Since Petrochemical was written seven years ago now, though it was just published last year, I have made a more conscious effort in subsequent projects to try to tame some of the feral verbal constructions. Without downplaying Faulkner’s influence, I do owe him a debt for one of my first substantive exposures to complex literary sentence construction. Our “move fast and break things” society has so fetishized the immediately digestible and Twitter-sized (I refuse to call it X) discourse; thought reduced to bullet points and political celebrities whose policy agendas are little more than inarticulate grunts that a Faulknerian counterpoint feels like an act of sedition. This may be a matter of aesthetic preference or philosophical position, but I think it was Derrida who said that complex concepts require complex language for expression. Take that for what it’s worth, since many would find Derrida unreadable. I vacillate on Derrida’s maxim myself, but there’s probably something to it. Even better, Wittgenstein said, “the limits of my language are the limits of my world.” As a writer, and a language-bound being, I think this is experientially true.
Lastly, in terms of setting, Faulkner was more rural and agrarian; my settings are more urban and industrial. Chronologically, Faulkner was closer in time to many of the historical traumas that Petrochemical explores. Having said all that to disavow Faulkner, I’ve probably made myself sound more Faulknerian than ever. I guess I’ll go read some Faulkner now.
4. Place is a character in your writing. What does a location need to become a place for you?
Excellent distinction between location and place, because not all locations are places. A location has geographic coordinates, which are quantitative measurements in a geodetic coordinate system, but a place has a quality that results from the cultural interactions of human settlement. Knowing that Baton Rouge’s coordinates lie at 30°26′51″N 91°10′43″W might tell you how to navigate there, but it won’t tell you anything about it as a place. The middle of the ocean is a location, but it isn’t a place. We’re now at a point in the technological singularity, having converted everywhere to a mere location, or a bland space for the operation of functions (a parking lot, for instance), that we must mass manufacture place or place-like locations. Hence the term placemaking in urban planning practice. As if place can be manufactured in a community workshop or design charrette. We must consciously make places, simulating them if we can’t make them, since they no longer seem to arise organically, if they ever did. Many of the novel’s settings, such as Standard Heights, are communities that, through the operations of the petrochemical economy, have been reduced to locations only, non-places haunted by spatial ghosts. I could write a whole monograph on place, but place, which has indeterminate and fluid boundaries is a sort of anthropocentric whereness, a spatialized gestalt emerging out of the interactions among political economy, culture, religion, institutions, language, the natural and built environments, collective memory, technology, etc. Petrochemical attempts to interrogate the place that is Cancer Alley which emerges from the interactions of the petrochemical economy, the Mississippi River, French and Spanish colonial history, petrochemical infrastructure (industrial plants especially), Mardi Gras, racialized caste systems, the police, and the people who live there.
5. Your writing is honest and unflinching. You go after absurdity like Mayweather for a knockout. You spare your reader none of the rage, and subsequent feelings of hopelessness, that come from seeing the inequities of the South. But you are on book two, with several other works in cue. What keeps you chipping away at “chlorine ghost ships”(financial and social injustices) and “Great White Hope” (white supremacy)?
Petrochemical was conceived precisely not to spare anyone the rage or hopelessness of the South’s historical inequities. Even though rage and hopelessness are practically a national currency in American society, and I don’t want to add to that, I think the very act of writing and communication is, at least at some level, fundament-ally optimistic, despite whatever the nihilists may say.
Petrochemical was written some time ago now, and because of the glacial pace of the publishing process, by the time a book sees print the author has often moved on. This can create a public perception that a recently published book represents an author’s current idée fixe. Sometimes it does, sometimes not. In this case, I’ve largely moved on from explicitly Southern themes. I’m sure I will return to Southern themes eventually, but for now I’m done, or they’re done with me.
The one exception is a projected novel on Alabama football I’m hoping to write sooner than later, and I have several unpublished Southern novels that may or may not ever see the light of day.
Otherwise, I’m still chipping away at those themes, albeit in different guises, settings, modalities, or from more tangential angles. You probably wouldn’t know it from all the talk about Faulkner, but I have an interest in science fiction, weird fiction, cyberpunk, and literary horror. I have a deep interest in finance and the internal mechanics of capitalism, so more recent projects have focused on wealth inequality and class, which are certainly present in Petrochemical, albeit in forms more submerged than explicit. In that sense, I guess I’m chipping away at other things, but chipping away at the same fundamental problems nonetheless.
6. In your journey to tackle white supremacy as a white man, what have you learned? Other white men might want to know (ahem).
I’ve learned that I have a lot of work to do. And I genuinely don’t mean that as some platitude of false humility. I doubt the methodical deconstruction of one’s inherited mental structures has any terminal endpoint. I think we have to consider that it might not even be totally possible. Like most developmental processes it will continue until Dylan Thomas’ “dying of the light.” At the cultural or species level, it will likely continue until another extinction event (asteroid impact, climate change catastrophe, non-aligned evil AI) makes it a moot point. This type of inward deconstruction also exercises mental muscles of metacognition, the ability to reflect and analyze your own responses to events and stimuli, which aside from race issues is just a generally valuable life skill. Be warned that turning the scalpel of mental deconstruction upon oneself may be painful. I try to be Socratic about these things. I don’t have all the answers, nor do I have all the questions, though writing is an attempt to find them.
Being from Alabama, I grew up with a profound sense that my home state was complicit with systemic injustice. Urban renewal and the highway building programs were particularly harmful in Birmingham. Jim Crow segregated public facilities. The Tuskegee syphilis experiment. Everyone knows (or should) the terrorist bombings and the fire hoses and the police dogs. To sum up the situation, Charles Morgan Jr., a (white) Civil Rights lawyer and local hero wrote, “What’s it like living in Birmingham? No one ever really has known and no one will until this city becomes part of the United States. Birmingham is not a dying city; it is dead.” His was the most damning indictment of my hometown I had ever read. Eventually, I realized that deadness was not a natural state of affairs, an inexorable condition, but the result of human agency and policy choices: we did this to ourselves, which also meant it could be undone. Much later, I read Fanon, Baldwin, Richard Wright, Albert Murray, DuBois, Huey P. Newton, H. Rap Brown, Angela Davis, et al. First, it must be acknowledged that reading (as a mediated experience) will take you only so far, as reading is not a substitute for interacting with people of a different race or class, but it can certainly be a catalyst for disrupting those inherited mental structures in the beginning; nonetheless, this reading was really instrumental in discursively developing my native and inchoate sense that something is rotten in the state of Alabama, to paraphrase Hamlet. Intuitively, I always knew it was true, but systematic reading refined my ability to articulate it. It hardly needs to be said that this is not the kind of reading to be found in the Alabama public education curriculum.
I’m not the first to make the analogy, but white supremacy can be thought of as a mental illness, or some illogical syndrome adjacent to mental illness. To understand this illness, it’s important to do opposition research. Some may balk at this and that’s fine. Just as with military intelligence, or strategizing for an opponent in a football game, how do you know what your opponent is doing if you’re not gathering intelligence on them? In this process, I’ve read some very nasty unsavory critters, white supremacists, eugenicists, alt-right trolls, neo-fascist clowns, post-truth bozos, neo-Confederates, as well as authors from the 19th century whose names are better forgotten. It is often unpleasant, but necessary reading, I think, and it places today’s dilemmas in historical context. Look, I grew up in Alabama, a state that were it not for the Supreme Court and the courage of the Civil Rights Movement would have completely perfected institutions of a racial caste system by now. Growing up in a state like that, you understand that not everyone who suffers from this mental illness is out in the streets with a bullhorn or bombing churches or publishing insane manifestos. Many of the people in my home state, and elsewhere, suffering from this racially coded mass mental illness are just “regular folks.” Those afflicted with this illness are in your schools, churches, political office, ballfields, neighborhoods, wherever. This can be a difficult reality to come to terms with. Opposition research is not for the faint of heart. I try to remember what Nietzsche said about fighting monsters, “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster...for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”
7. Are there any pieces of you that you don’t think come through in your work? Personality quirks? Outlooks? Whole personas?
Since fiction is very much an act of ventriloquism, I’m sure parts of me are omitted. Those are probably the most difficult parts to discern precisely because they’re omitted. Despite the first-person narration and the veneer of historical authenticity, this is very much fictional. That said, my interest in sports is evident from the many references to the New Orleans Saints and boxing.
8. You’ve been interviewed by the Southern Literary Review, Shelby Living Magazine, and the Alabama Writer’s Enclave. Who would you want to interview?
In the context of this novel, I think it would be interesting to interview some of the ExxonMobil plant operators and managers, the people who actually work in that industrial environment, as well as former residents of Standard Heights. I’m not an ethnographer, historian, or journalist, so no interviews were conducted for this novel, but those are important stories to tell, especially since Standard Heights (the place where the novel is mostly set and which was largely destroyed by ExxonMobil) has been effectively erased and the petrochemical plant environment is a closed system, an isolated dystopia mostly disconnected from the outside world, even though it supplies the material basis of our way of life. It would also be interesting to interview ExxonMobil’s C-Suite and to triangulate their versions with events on the ground.
9. What is your writer’s dream? Multimillionaire locked in a cabin in Maine? Billionaire with merch rights for your teen characters? World Peace? Bourbon Distillery?
It’s really quite simple: having the time, which in America usually means having the resources, to be able to write without interruption. Obviously, this is a pipe dream. If I somehow lucked into a windfall of a billion dollars, I would invest enough of it in index funds and other passive income instruments to write without interruption, and then donate the remainder to things like climate change initiatives and land conservation. If anyone knows how money can buy world peace, I will entertain proposals.
