Crossing Lake Pontchartrain follows a forty-year-old unemployed man with a collapsing marriage who moves to New Orleans, where he winds up on a journey to discover who he is and who he is not. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

Middle age supposedly is where life finds full flower with marriage and family, career, and a deepened sense of self, but reality often disappoints. Larry rekindles old creative dreams and discovers transformative personal relationships in New Orleans after the failures of his life remind him he hasn’t yet lived up to his potential. The creative throb of New Orleans renewing after Hurricane Katrina was the perfect place for this story of renewal, and after the isolation of COVID-19, it seemed to me the world was ready to shake off its stalled ways and move ahead. Finding the right people and an inspiring right place to build the second half of his life, Larry accepts that people can help him become the person he’s always wanted to be.

What things do you find interesting about the human condition that make for great fiction?

Great fiction for me is literary fiction, an approach examining broad human emotional experience through the narrow lens of character, setting, and language. By focusing on particular circumstances viewed through the inner theater of individual characters, the panorama of all humanity can be glimpsed in all its nuance of pain, love, treachery, and growth. Great fiction is at one time an awareness of what it is to be human and alone and yet to be one with all humanity threaded together by the common emotions and challenges we each know to be the human experience.

What themes were important for you to explore in this book?

Pontchartrain is a story of renewal, the shaking of a stagnant emotional collection of relationships, careers, expectations, and creative dreams. In this novel, the protagonist’s mid-life crisis of belief in himself and even in possibility itself catalyzes into growth under the influence of potent new friendships awakening him from his 40-year-old malaise. Each new person releases within him fresh thinking about his future (and past) in slightly nuanced ways. With time and work, Larry learns to assess who he is and who he isn’t. Set in post-Katrina New Orleans itself renewing after hardship, Larry Winstead models the theme of continuous renewal fueled by the social energy of human contact. Here, the inner character experience and the interplay of characters in action indulge the conversation to paint a picture of the artist as a good old boy receiving life and not trying to force it. Chop Wood Carry Water proves to be a lesson all people can benefit from when taught by people who care.

What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?

My next book will be, Arlie: Leaf River Days. I’ve written about half the novel and expect publication in 2026. I began writing Southern literary fiction after I retired from my technology career in 2006 and Arlie will complete my envisioned trilogy of the Deep South where three separate families experience the panoply of human experience each in a different stage of life. The first novel published in 2017, What the River Wants, explored a multi-generational family confronting the vagaries of time and focuses on old age, coming of age, and middle age. An old man retreats into isolation on the river before his teenage grandson journeys to rescue him from his drift into desperation. The grandfather, his forty-year-old daughter, and two teenage grandchildren each reveal their separate challenges of doubt, dreams, and treachery. The grandfather’s family story about his mom draws out from each character a fresh understanding of who they are and helps reset who they want to become. The end is a bit shocking but revelatory, and even today 8 years later it leaves me with a sensation of freshly tilled life where old becomes new and the past both returns underground and feeds the future. These character remain friends of mine I miss every day.

My second novel, Crossing Lake Pontchartrain, told in first person, traces the journey of a 40-year-old through his mid-life mess. Through the loyalty of a devoted mother and the impetus of artsy worldly new friends, this protagonist explores how time has left him emptied in modern life until inspired to revive his creative dream of writing a novel. In discovering a mutually creative relationship with a single-mother yoga instructor and resolving an old mystery of a father’s disappearance, the old life is sloughed off and replaced with loving, creative relationships.

My current writing project, Arlie, is a child in the South who has a tough time fitting in but at last discovers the inner person he might like. This novel completes the trilogy of life stages. Beginning when Arlie is six-years-old with a birthmark that undermines his confidence and development, the book follows his growth year by year and in the process examines the disturbing Southern themes of segregation in the light of Arlie’s lifelong feelings of not belonging. This trilogy avoids many of the tropes of Southern stereotypes so this novel can examine its inevitable presence through the lens of youth. For 40 years I’ve lived in New Jersey and consider myself a Southern Yankee, someone committed to decomposing the bias of both my Northern and Southern homes where oversimplified impressions fuel cultural bias rather than insight. I’ve tried to show all these characters as human rather than labeled types.

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