John Laudun
John Laudun (on ground) unsuccessfully avoiding being tackled by the Tee Mamou’s Women’s Mardi Gras.
BIOGRAPHY
While John Laudun is a native of Louisiana, he has only recently returned to join the faculty as both a folklorist and a creative writer. He put himself through college by working jobs like roofing a school in rural Louisiana one summer or, later, becoming a management consultant for a short time and traveling (literally) around the world to teach managers and executives of Fortune 500 companies what something like culture might mean and why it might be important to pay attention to it. Fortunately, for everyone, he knew all along he was happier on the ground, learning from the women's Mardi Gras in Tee Mamou how to play and from individuals like Rives Verrette how to fish or make a crab trap or navigate the basin.
His formal education, in terms of degrees, has come from Louisiana State University (B.A., philosophy and English, with an emphasis in creative writing), from Syracuse University (M.A., literature), and from Indiana University (Ph.D., folklore studies). He has been Jacob K. Javitz Fellow, a four-year appointment which included studies at Syracuse and Indiana, and a MacArthur Scholar, appointed to the Indiana Center for Global Change and World Peace as well as an associate instructor with the IU Folklore Institute and Department of Afro-American Studies.
His publications include poems and essays in various small journals, a radio commentary series, scholarly articles on folklore, African American literature, critical theory, as well as production of the La Vie en Acadie Folklife Festival, one of the Festivals Acadiens, which itself is one of the nation's largest festivals.
BRIEF CURRICULUM VITAE
Below is a brief survey of the work that John Laudun thought would be of most interest to those interested in the creative writing concentrations at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. For more information on his folklore activities, please see the folklore home page.
Courses Taught
Introduction to
African American Literature; Louisiana Folklore; American Folklore; Folklore in
Culture; Our Dark Hearts: Exploring Evil in Film, Folklore, and Literature.
Recent
Publications
"The Poetics of
Vernacular Spaces" in Southern Folklore, "Orality and Life
Writing" in the Encyclopedia of Life Writing, and "Talking
Shit in Rayne" in the Louisiana Folklore Miscellany.
Presentations
American Folklore
Society, Modern Language Association, Multi-Ethnic Literature in the United
States, American Comparative Literature Association, Narrative.
Research Interests
Nonfiction, folk art,
oral history, folk.
ON TEACHING AND/OR WRITING
As even a casual reading of one of his poems, "Louis McCoy," available in our on-line anthology, reveals, John Laudun is very interested in the productive tension between reality and the choices we must make in representing it. In the case of the poem, he took advantage of the villanelle form to reflect the slightly repetitive style of speech he grew up hearing along the Bayou Teche in St. Mary parish. His training as a folklorist has taken him into tough inner-city neighborhoods as well as bucolic farmsteads. The challenge is always, as Roland Barthes noted, to get not just an image but the just image. In addition to the challenge to writers to be as thoughtful as possible, he feels it is equally important for scholars to recognize the importance of communicating as clearly and as broadly as possible, which is why he has happily joined the creative writing faculty to teach reading and writing nonfiction. His assignments and readings reflect this necessary pairing, since students often find themselves reading, for example both Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God as well as her ethnography Mules and Men in his classes; they also find themselves making sketches of objects, inventorying the contents of houses or city block or parish roads or they find themselves creating brochures, photographic essays, radio features, or video documentaries.
Read
a Sample of John Laudun’s Writing
Go to UL-Lafayette Creative Writing Anthology
This site designed and maintained by The Creative Writing
Concentration of the English Department of the University of Louisiana at
Lafayette.
To contact us by mail: Director of Creative Writing, English
Department, Box 44691, UL-Lafayette, Lafayette LA 70504-4691; by telephone,
337-482-5478;
by email, jlm8047@louisiana.edu.
Last updated: May 1, 2001.