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John Dufresne
Louisiana Power & Light

Required

• Dufresne. Louisiana Power & Light (LP&L).
  
• Louisiana Anthology Podcast 354. Dufresne interview.
  
• Ingram. "Postmodern Storytelling in John Dufresne's Louisiana Novels."

  I don't have a lot to say beyond what's in the interview and the excellent article. I would note that Ouachita Parish is Dufresne's version of Yoknapatawpha County in Faulkner's fiction. The threads of many of his short stories and novels runs through Ouachita Parish, which serves both as physical backdrop and Greek chorus.

The original Fort Miró was a stockade built in 1970 by Commandant Jean Filhiol and named for the governor in New Orleans in hopes of getting more support from him. Unfortunately, New Orleans was rebuilding from the Great First of 1788, so not much help came from that directions. So Fort Miró was a French-speaking, Spanish-ruled, Catholic outpost in North Louisiana. Most of the white settlers in North Louisiana were English-speaking Protestants. They started a settlement on the west bank of the Ouachita named Trenton, which was geared to helping such settlers as they went west, through Shreveport to Texas. Even after the towns became Monroe and West Monroe, the differences remained. Monroe is still more Catholic, with a large group of Italian-Americans having joined the original settlers. West Monroe is still more Protestant, and has a lot of red heads with freckles to this day. As you move out into the more rural parts of the parish, you hit the areas depicted in Roberto Minervini's movie The Other Side, which depicts meth labs in swamps, armed militia, pregnant strippers getting high, neo-Confederates, and naked rednecks walking down the road. This is not a documentary, but the heightened fever dream that is the world of Billy Wayne Fontana.