“The Barcelona Brothers” by Jean-Marc Duplantier appeared in Issue 44 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about this story.
I love eating at neighborhood restaurants in New Orleans, and I love eavesdropping on other people’s conversations. I’ve never heard anyone talking about alien abductions, but it isn’t that big a stretch, really. I feel lucky to be from a place where you run into colorful and interesting people every day. An earlier draft was told from Kris’s point of view, but my friends at The New Orleans Writers Workshop helped me see that Ollie’s is the essential perspective.
What was the most difficult part in writing this story?
The least difficult part was somehow Sam’s moment at the end. He’s kind of a nut, even as a kid, well on his way to being as eccentric as these adults around him. The other characters kind of grew from Sam.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
I recommend Clint Bruce’s 2020 book Afro-Creole Poetry in French from Louisiana’s Radical Civil War-Era Newspapers: A Bilingual Edition. Bruce’s translations make accessible these important and largely forgotten poems by radical Black poets and activists in Creole New Orleans.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
It would be fun to have a drink with Carl Hiaasen, probably on his boat as he showed me good fishing spots in the Keys.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I’m currently writing a novel, a fish-out-of-water story about fishing. Now, when I want to go fishing, I can tell my family that I’m headed out to do research for my book.
Our thanks to Duplantier for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this story. Read “The Barcelona Brothers” here.
___________________________________
Jean-Marc Duplantier teaches in the Humanities Department at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. He has published short fiction in Willow Springs Magazine, The Pinch, and Boudin, and his work won first prize in the short story category of the 2021 Faulkner/Wisdom Creative Writing Competition.