June 24, 2016
If you read the foreward of Martin Pousson’s new book, “Black Sheep Boy,” closely, you’ll get a hint of what lies ahead in his chronicle of a young gay man in Louisiana’s Cajun bayou, whose actions seem to leave everything “out in the open for anyone to see” and lead him to who knows where.
Pousson, a professor of English at California State University, Northridge, called his book “a novel in stories”: stories that tap into the Cajon bayou of his youth — with its unique mix of races, languages and cultures — and incorporate the mythologies, Christian and others, that permeate the region.
“I wanted to tell the story of the protagonist, but not only his story,” Pousson said. “I wanted to tell the story of the people and culture of the region, of a history that is largely unknown. In many ways, it’s a lost history, but it remains in mythology. When I came of age, there was a realization that this culture was dying because the language was disappearing. I wanted to find a way to preserve that history, that culture, that mythology.” Article continues