It was January and hot. I was walking toward St. Genevieve Cathedral on Bayou Liberty like I did every Sunday morning to attend Mass, alone. I was dressed in my Catechism clothes, a blue plaid short sleeved shirt and khaki pants with Buster Brown shoes. The sky was overcast but it was a light gray, a high wind blew above the tall pines, the highway I walked on toward the Cathedral had wide and deep ditches on either side, and I was always worried I might fall into one of them as I walked the mile from the large wooden house where I lived with my mother and her boyfriend.
Louis E. Bourgeois was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in the Slidell/LaCombe area, as well as East New Orleans on Bayou Sauvage. In 1996 he earned a B.A. from Louisiana State University in English and in 2002 was the first graduate of The University of Mississippi’s MFA program in creative writing.
He has published translations, fiction, memoirs, poetry, and interviews in over two hundred magazine and journals in North America, Europe, and Asia. In 2004, he was the winner of the University of Milwaukee’s Cream City Review’s poetry contest for his poem “The Shed: The Daughter of Shadows Speaks from Max Beckmann’s The Dream (1921).”