DALTON WAYNE HOOVER is a writer, editor, and reader from southeast Louisiana and an MFA candidate at LSU, where he dabbles in all genres. He is an Army Infantry veteran, a culinary school dropout, an amateur outdoorsman, and a professional musician. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Country Roads Magazine, Backcountry Journal, and MDF Quarterly. His music can be found where all music can be streamed/stolen. When not writing, he can be found deep in the woods or attempting to be a worthwhile husband and father.
Dalton Wayne Hoover (DWH): The question I have is one I feel like everybody gets asked in interviews, but what are some of your literary influences? What are some of the influences that you had when you first started out on Home of the Happy? Because I know this book took you some time.
Jordan LaHaye Fontenot (JLF): What I was reading at the time is what got me interested in creative nonfiction in the first place, which is where I spend pretty much all my time now. Joan Didion had a pretty big impact, but also other Southern writers, like Jesmyn Ward, and then essayists like Leslie Jamison, Lauren Groff, who really writes fiction, but her voice feels a little bit biographical in some of her short stories, and the way she writes about place has always kept me coming back. And then some of her stuff is mostly talking about Florida but her other stuff is totally different from that, which I love. She has such range.
But for this book, I wasn't a big true crime reader. I came across it in podcasts and documentaries, but I wasn't at all a deep crime or true crime junkie. Whenever it looked like I might be kind of writing something in that vein, I was really careful. I wanted my project to not be of a certain kind of true crime, if that makes sense. I wanted to protect it as my family's story, and so I was looking for people who treated that subject with some care and art, you know?
I had help from Josh Wheeler at LSU, who made some great recommendations to me early on. Maggie Nelson, I love everything she does, but she wrote two books, one was called Jane, and the other, The Red Parts, and they kind of go together. They're about her aunt who died before she was born in a really brutal way and those two books had a big impact on the way I wrote my book. And then others, classics of the genre, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and The Fact of a Body by Alex Marzano Lesnovich. Eric Larson's Devil in the White City. So, where journalism meets crime, and especially if there was a personal connection. Those were the things I was looking for and drawing from.
DWH: Love all of those writers, fantastic choices. So, you hinted at my next question, which's one others ask me all the time: Why nonfiction?
As a nonfiction writer myself, I'm always asked, Why not fiction? Why not screenwriting? Poetry? Nonfiction's treated as an afterthought. It’s as if nobody wants to read an essay collection unless you're established. So, what drew you to nonfiction as opposed to the other genres?
JLF: It's hard to articulate, as I'm sure you kind of know. When I started out in creative writing, I was immediately very intimidated by poetry and fiction. I didn't feel competent in those areas. I struggled through, and then when I started reading really good nonfiction, creative nonfiction, it just clicked. I thinkmy brain works better in that framework of trying to articulate and understand things that exist, versus making up stories and characters. That said, I've been trying to write more fiction and hope someday to publish it. I haven't shared any of it yet, but I read mostly fiction. Obviously, I read a lot of nonfiction, but I feel like I do that more for craft reasons than when I read fiction. I read it for fun, but I’ve always felt more comfortable with CNF. It just felt like where I belonged.
DWH: That is a solid answer. Yeah, these are things I'm constantly thinking about. Anytime I get to talk to another person who chooses to write mostly nonfiction. I'm always very interested in why they did that, especially as I experiment more with other genres.
Well, that’s a great segway into poetry! I'm interested in the relationship between Evangeline and your work, and I’m interested in Evangeline's relationship with Louisiana as a whole. I was told recently that Wadsworth never actually came to Louisiana, or at least he didn't before he wrote the poem. The title of your book comes from there, correct?
JLF: Yes! It is complicated. Longfellow didn't come to Louisiana. He also didn't go to Acadie, as far as I know. He was really writing a myth. It wasn't based in fact. It's based on a real historical event inspired by a historical event but it doesn't have any real experience rooted in it. So the fact that Evangeline has become this archetype is very interesting, and there was actually an exhibit at the West Baton Rouge Museum a couple years ago that laid out the cultural impact of Evangeline and the way it's in advertising and movies, and all the different ways it's been interpreted. A lot of poets today, contemporary Cajun poets, have actually confronted it in really interesting ways and talk about the way the stereotype of this woman who spends her life searching for a man; what does that contribute to Cajun culture? I could talk about this forever. But for me in this book, honestly, I started including Evangeline before I really contemplated all of that. This book took me forever, as you know, over 8 years. So I first started bringing Evangeline in at the beginning, sort of as I was trying to find a way to introduce the history of the Acadians, and what felt very obvious to me, partly because of the name; Evangeline Parish is where I grew up. Also that was my introduction to our history. That scene in the book where I'm learning about the poem in English class in sixth grade is the first time I heard that story, and so it felt like I could use that to introduce readers who weren't familiar with our history to the story of the Cajun people. It was a tool. And then I had to complicate it a little bit, you know, I went in and added the fact that Longfellow had never been to Louisiana, it was a very simplistic way for us to understand it, but it's held some cultural resonance that I found interesting. And I loved that phrase, “home of the happy,” as sort of a way to think about this idea that's been passed down for generations of lost paradise; this land, the homeland that we lost, and thinking about my homeland that felt so perfect. So there were a lot of things for me working with that phrase, home of the happy. Which is partly why it landed as my title. Also, I really struggled to name the book. We had so many other options, we couldn't figure it out. So when I found that, I was like, okay, We're going with it.
DWH: Okay, so to build on that, one of the chapters in the first part is titled, “In the Home of the Happy,” and, like you said, this is where you kind of lay out some of the Cajun history. I feel like there's just so much going on down here, historically, that's always been of interest to outsiders, for lack of a better term. So how do you choose what to write about when you talk about the Cajun history of the area? And how do you distill hundreds of years of history into a couple of pages to just give somebody a working knowledge?
JLF: It was such a challenge. My original drafts were much longer and probably sort of boring if you're trying to read about true crime, and you get this big chapter in the middle about the history because it felt really important. But it definitely was just a task of distilling. I went through several rounds because they were part of what I went through my whole genealogy at one point, and this was my ancestor who came down and this is where they landed and they owned slaves and included all of these details and in the end had to pull only what felt very necessary, and what was important to understanding what happened. I was trying to not necessarily give the historical account as much as the cultural understanding of the historical account, which is much blurrier and not historically precise. But there were certain things I wanted to include that don't often get included. It was very brief but the I’d read all about the Mi'kmaq people up in Acadie were a huge part of getting the French settlers there situated and teaching them how to live in that environment and that doesn't get included very often in stories about the Acadian people. It was actually a big part of why they didn't want to sign the treaty that led to the expulsion. It's an intricate, complicated story that deserves books all on its own, for sure.
DWH: Yeah, absolutely. I was very impressed with just that little part. How you can just take so much of the culture and boil it down to just a few pages like that and make it very readable. I feel like somebody could pick up this book who had no idea what anything was like in Louisiana and have a solid knowledge of it, even after just hearing your story.
JLF: I hope so. I hope people would go back and maybe try to be curious and learn more. Also, working with an editor and an agent who are not from here was a huge benefit because that helped me figure out how to convey to outsiders and they pointed out things I would have missed as just being too in it.
DWH: So, all of that being said, I wanted to talk a little bit about the differences in the Cajun communities. I’m from the Florida Parishes of southeast Louisiana, which I tell people often have more in common with south Mississippi and east Alabama than it does with what we think of as Louisiana, or Acadiana I should say. The culture reaches all fringes of the state, but I wasn't exactly raised in a cultural Cajun household, if that makes sense. And then a few years back I did the Ancestry thing and they told me that I am indeed ethnically Cajun. I can trace my lineage back to the Acadian expulsion and a single ancestor, even the though my family traded cypress swamp for pine savannahs long ago. And I guess I just wanted to talk about the difference between being culturally Cajun and ethnically Cajun, because not everybody can trace their lineage back, but anybody who spends a lot of time here is touched by all of the lifeways.
JLF: Of course. That's such a great question. I'm really glad you asked that. This was another thing I struggled with in the book, was trying to communicate this briefly, because I could write another whole book on it. But in Evangeline Parish most people actually aren't of Acadian descent. Most of my ancestors came directly from France. The Lahaye’s came from France. They did not come from Acadie. And the Deshotels, Emily Deshotel, my great grandmother’s family, came from Quebec, which is Canada, but it’s still not Acadie, and not technically Cajun ancestry. Most people in Evangeline Parish have one of those two and so I did a whole genealogical thing through my grandmother's side. There's a whole line that comes straight from the diaspora, but how to communicate that because people in Evangeline Parish think they're Cajun. They call themselves Cajun, the culture there is so Cajun, and even though our bloodlines don't necessarily all lead back to Acadie. We're so many things now. So I tried to acknowledge that, and it was just that idea that if you were white and you grew up in Evangeline Parish, you were a Cajun person. And that's a whole other conversation. But, yeah, it's definitely not straightforward.
DWH: So, we talked about the book's origins. I wonder why exactly you wanted to tell this story, because you say multiple times throughout the book that prior to opening up to certain family members about this, the entire subject of Aubrey wasn't spoken of.
JLF: It was partly just that I really wanted to know. I wanted to know what happened to my family. I wanted to understand how this impacted their lives, because it was just a sudden kind of hit that this huge thing had happened to all of them and I had no idea about it. And then it became I wanted to know what really happened. I started out a little delusional thinking I really could figure that out and obviously it ends up being much more complicated than that. But I think too that my dad was pushing me forward with it. I think he saw it as a way to find some sense of understanding about this crazy thing that had happened to him and his family. Not everyone in the family feels that way. But my dad had a desire to bring it back into the conversation and to re-evaluate it to a certain extent. He felt like I was a good person for that, which I'm so grateful for. There were moments where I really almost stopped doing it and he was like “You have to, I need you to finish it, it has to happen.” He was a really big part of getting it done for sure.
DWH: I'm always drawn to that part in the book where, and I can't remember exactly what your dad says to you but he says at some point you're going to have to decide when to stop, basically. And that's a very interesting thing to me, because the book is left a little open-ended. What was it like just deciding where a stopping point was?
JLF: To be honest, it was partly about me; I couldn't keep devoting the energy and stress that I was devoting to it without an end date in sight. It just wasn't healthy. But also the publishing of it all, right? So we had a we had a schedule and we pushed that schedule back several times waiting for these hearings to happen and they weren't happening and we could do this for 10 years, probably. And so we had to figure out a way to end it as is or we keep waiting. The hearing that we were waiting for still hasn't happened, and the book's been out for 7 months now. So we had to get the book out. We wanted people, honestly, to be talking about it because there are questions to be raised and perhaps people might come forward. Figuring out how to end it was really difficult. I'm happy with where we landed. I know it's not a super satisfying ending, but I also think that speaks to life and the reality of these sorts of things. It's not fiction, it's not a story that we make up and come wrap up with a bow and that's the simple truth of the matter.
DWH: Right, yeah, I think that the ending is so poignant to me because of that, because it just imitates life in general. It's very matter of fact. This is just the way it happened, and this is where we're going to end. And I really appreciated that from a craft perspective too, because you even talk about it towards the end of the book, if this was a fiction book, if this was a novel, you would just figure out a way to end it. Either he did it or he didn't type of thing. I like that it's not just ended with a bow on top. It's such an open-ended thing, it's so much to chew on. I appreciate that tremendously.
JLF: Are stories worth telling if they don't end satisfactorily? There was a Goodreads review, and it basically said, I really hated that the book ended without solving anything. And I'm like, that's so funny, because you missed the whole point. Was the alternative that I just don't tell the story at all, because there's not a satisfying ending? When it comes to nonfiction, that's something you have to grapple with, and hopefully you can use craft to come up with an ending that feels like an ending, at least.
DWH: In the book, you engage with Evangeline Parrish's patriarchy. You also engage with the racist nature of Evangeline Parish, especially at that point in time. I think a lot of it comes to a head when we talk about John Brady Balfa’s first defense attorney, Julie Cullen, and how she was treated in Evangeline Parish. So I'm wondering if, during your research, you ran into any of these problems that we all know is not just historical, these are still things that happen on a daily basis.
JLF: I definitely had the bait; old men calling me baby mostly. The fact that I was also really young too. I was 20 when I started a lot of this. People definitely didn't take me super seriously, and there were sometimes where I learned, or I sensed ahead of time, that I might get more out of someone if I brought my dad along to talk to them, that they would respond better to a man than to me. So there was to that degree. There's definitely a patriarchal culture that's sort of embedded in the small-town Cajun-ness of that area. As far as in the courthouse, I've experienced less of it. The people there treated me with respect. I think I really benefited from being an insider in a way that Julie Cullen didn't. She had a lot of things going against her, being one of the first women they had ever seen in a courthouse as an attorney, as well as being from the city. I was able to get into the courthouse during COVID to look at that file, because the district attorney's son was living with my little brother at college. You know the town's so small and I talk about that a lot in the book. There's a lot of interrelations, which I think is part of what went wrong here. But I also benefited from that quite a bit.
DWH: Food constantly rears its head when you write about Louisiana. I'm interested to talk to a fellow Louisianian about food culture in general. You use a lot of food metaphors in the book and you talk about everything happening around food. Obviously, food is incredibly important to Louisiana, maybe even more so to Acadiana, but how important was food to this book?
JLF: For sure! It's so important. I mean, it's what all of my memories of my grandparents are centered around, and this family in particular were always gathered around food. A lot of the stories when I would ask my uncles and aunts about Aubrey and Emily were all about food. It’s impossible to talk about Louisiana culture without it. And it happens super organically throughout the book. You can't make this up, but Aubrey Lahaye's last meal was chicken and sausage gumbo. They pulled that from the autopsy. And then one of my favorite little anecdotes in the book is during those 10 days when Aubrey is missing, what a lot of people remember is just this rotation of people on the stove. I spoke to this FBI agent who doesn't have a connection to this area, probably has investigated hundreds of cases like Aubrey's, and he remembers that case because of all the time they spent in Emily’s kitchen. He remembered this story about my great-grandmother, this woman who is so fragile and probably hasn't slept in days, has just lost her husband, and here she is making bread. The FBI asked her for the recipe, and she laughs at him and says I don't have a recipe; do you want to just watch me make this? And he still has the recipe card he wrote down that day. There's just so much held in those interactions, about how we survive these sorts of things, and I think that that's universal. when we have hurricanes here, everybody makes a gumbo. that’s how we deal with difficulty in our communities, and across history. It's something that we share now with the generations past, so I think it’s really important to the culture and storytelling of this area.
DWH: A lot of writer’s default to academia, and you did not. I wanted to talk about choices that writers have as far as employment goes about what you do as your day job.
JLF: I was in the process of applying to MFA programs when my job opened up. I was also applying to this internship in New York City at a great literary magazine that would have been a total dream, but it paid minimum wage. So there was that. I would have had to have help from my parents, at least until I could get another job. Then this job at Country Roads Magazine opened up. It was full-time, and I would be an Assistant Editor in Baton Rouge. At first, I couldn't imagine that I was going to move back to Baton Rouge, but it was an opportunity to write about home, which is what I was going to write about anyway, and I was going to get to do it for work full-time with a salary. Not a big salary, but you know, a salary. At the end of the day, that's impossible to turn down, and knowing to a certain extent, how you can graduate from an MFA and still be looking at those jobs, you know? And I was really worried I'd never finish my book, because I went to work instead of an MFA, and I think it did take me longer, but I'm so grateful for it all. I think the path was the right path. You always wonder about all the paths not taken. Sometimes I really want to go back and get an MFA, and maybe one day I will. But it's tough to want to write for a living, there's not as many opportunities now, but at the same time there are new opportunities like all the weird TikTok online worlds, Substack, there's a lot of things emerging. People are craving long form with this inundation of short form, but it's still not for the weak to want to be a writer. I do find it to be very rewarding. So, I'm still at Country Roads and I love what I do; I love writing every day about this place and learning more about it and all these different ways that I wouldn't necessarily have done my own writing about. I like to write about food, I'm not a food writer necessarily, but I'm always editing other food writers and learning so much about how to do that well and learning about the great restaurants and concepts happening all over the state. There's just so much storytelling in Louisiana. And it's a real privilege to get to kind of oversee that to a certain extent. I will say that it's a challenge to separate my “personal” writing from work. I have a lot of self-consciousness. I just came back from this really amazing opportunity, the Eudora Welty Writers Symposium, and I was the only one there without an MFA. I had less bylines than everyone else. And part of that's because I've been working at this magazine, and almost everything I write goes in there. And I don't have a ton of energy or motivation to do a whole lot at the end of the day when I've been writing all day to come up with stories to pitch elsewhere, and so I just don't. Which of course I want to do more, I want to do better at it, but it's challenging no matter what. That's what we're all learning as we go these days.
DWH: Oh, I had a really good follow-up question that I just thought of—I should've written it down. There was something really good there.
JLF: Loving it back.
DWH: Well, honestly, that was the most poignant way to end this conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk, Jordan.
JLF: It was a pleasure. Thank you, Dalton.
On a blustery fall day, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Jordan LaHaye Fontenot for a virtual interview, me in the thriving metropolis of Baton Rouge and Jordan, fittingly, from the windswept forests of her family hunting camp. Born and raised in the culturally rich region of Acadiana in South Louisiana, her work as a writer and editor is an ongoing exploration of how the past interacts with the present, in a place where tradition reigns. Jordan is the managing editor of Country Roads Magazine, a regional magazine focusing on southern Louisiana and all of its richness, and the author of the national bestseller Home of the Happy: A Murder on the Cajun Prairie, an investigative true-crime mystery about the murder of her great-grandfather that has been described as “an impressive feat of both memoir and original reporting” and “fueled not just by desire for justice but by love for her ancestors and Cajun community.” I join Jordan in a conversation awash with literary influences, Louisiana foodways, small-town patriarchy, and the virtues of creative nonfiction.
Volume 16.1 ✧ Winter 26
Dalton Wayne Hoover
