Biguenet’s American story

John Biguenet will receive the Louisiana Writer Award in conjunction with the festival, the 13th writer recognized by the State Library’s Center for the Book since 2000. “You know, 13 is considered lucky in Italy,” he says, appropriate coming from a half-Italian New Orleanian and the editor of Foreign Fictions. In even a short conversation, Biguenet, a playwright and novelist, draws from a wealth of cultures and disciplines.

“I did my MFA in poetry,” he says, unspooling the history of his career: translation work, award-winning stories and novel, best-selling plays and groundbreaking New York Times columns about New Orleans “since the flood.”

Biguenet has grappled with the failure of the levees, of government and societal systems, across several years and many genres. He calls this rich material an American story because “New Orleans is where the future came first.” When he discusses that time now, seven years later, the horrific stories he tells are spoken matter-of-factly and without bitterness.

“We have a different relationship with things now,” he says.

He searched the mythologies of other cultures because he found that America has no narrative structure to explain the loss of an entire city, and most people still can’t understand what happened to New Orleans. The solution was iconic architecture, which Biguenet used to frame his trilogy of plays—a roof in Rising Water, the stylistic building in Shotgun, and a home destroyed by Mold. He is currently writing this last play, as well as a new novel that, like his first novel Oyster, is set in 1957.

He says he is honored to join the company of the previous Writer Award winners, most recently Jim Wilcox and Valerie Martin. Of the Louisiana Book Festival, he says, “There’s a staggering amount of talent in the green room, and it’s an occasion where one can recognize how many significant writers come from a relatively small state.”

Asked why he thinks that is the case, Biguenet says, “At the mouth of the country’s biggest river, everything eventually comes to Louisiana. We’re in the right place to hear and tell stories.”