Southeastern Louisiana University’s own writer in residence, Tim Gautreaux, gave a reading from an essay entitled “Left Handed Love,” in which he defined love through a series of stories.  The reading was held in the Contemporary Art Gallery on Oct. 31 as part of Fanfare.
Gautreaux, whose essay was largely about the telling of different men in his family history, stated that he decided to read “Left Handed Love” simply because he has never read it before. The decision of what and how to write the essay, though, was not so easy.
“When she asked me to contribute, I thought, that’s the hardest topic of all,” said Gautreaux, referencing Mickey Pearlman, a New York editor who added Gautreaux’s essay to her collection entitled “A few thousand words about love.”
“How do you define love? What does it mean to me personally?” he continued.
Gautreaux had to define love indirectly and decided to do this by telling about older people in his life who took the time to be with him as a child and teach him.
“I realized, well I couldn’t do anything for them, but they were trying to do something for me, and that’s what love is. Doing something without expecting payback,” said Gautreaux.
Gautreaux, who explained how one’s youth is “pure gold for a writer” has been writing since his own youth. He had creative writing assignments since grammar school and would write around 1,500 words once or twice a week to a pen pal in Canada.
“I eventually began exhausting news, so I began making up stuff to tell him,” Gautreaux remembered. “I told him I had a pet alligator and a pet duck-all of which was not true of course.”
Telling stories from an early age, Gautreaux eventually found himself studying poetry under James Dickey before switching to fiction after a course at Loyola. He attended Nicholls State University and received a doctoral degree in English Literature from the University of South Carolina.
Gautreaux taught creative writing and literature at Southeastern from 1972 to 2003, while directing the creative writing program.
He has published multiple novels, short stories and works including “Welding with Children,” “The Clearing,” “Same Place, Same Things” and “The Missing.”
Gautreaux has also received the Louisiana Writer Award, the National Magazine Award, the John Dos Passos Prize, the Heasley Prize, the Southeastern Booksellers Association Award for Best Novel and more.