Environmental Disaster, Erosion of Home: A Conversation with Stephanie Soileau

The bayous of Louisiana are disappearing. The people of Pelerin Parish in Stephanie Soileau’s debut, Should the Waters Take Us (Doubleday, 2026), have their own claim on the land, each straining to eke out a living from livelihoods they feel simultaneously indebted to and oppressed by. They are fighting to accept the many ways they are losing their home.

I identify with the deep sense of loss that comes with your roots vanishing in the name of progress. Even though I couldn’t wait to leave my hometown as a teenager, I’ve been grieving  the disappearance of trivial monuments: a favorite store, a playground, an ugly sculpture. For the characters in this novel, the stakes are much higher because their monuments—and the land beneath them—are vanishing at an alarming rate. The characters have to confront the unsustainable ways of living they were born into—the only ways they know how to be—and must decide what they are willing to sacrifice to hold on to the status quo.

From the environmental costs of the oil industry and levee system, to the small daily choices that are made just to make it to tomorrow, the novel shows how trying to preserve one way of living can destroy another. One wonders whether the only difference between preservation and theft is a matter of perspective. Told through five viewpoints over multiple generations in Pelerin Parish, most of the novel takes place in 2010. Bad decisions and bad weather toss these lives into fates they hadn’t expected, but perhaps deserve.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Soileau over Zoom and email where we discussed the complicated nature of ownership, the long-term effects of short-sighted decisions, and the importance of looking below the surface of seemingly enchanting ways of living. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Rumpus: Should The Waters Take Us is as much a story about the bayous of Louisiana as it is about the people who have lived there for generations. Was there one side that you were more drawn to when you first started the novel?

Stephanie Soileau: I was interested in the place because it’s been formed by and is the source of a lot of really interesting moral and practical quandaries. The coast of Louisiana is losing land at a fairly high rate due to erosion. The statistics are something like twenty-five to thirty-five square miles a year. It’s already lost essentially the state of Delaware, which is a lot, right? People live in this place and are so attached to this place. It’s not uncommon for people to be so deeply attached to their little corner of the world. I won’t say that’s especially true in Louisiana, but sometimes it feels that way. Because it’s such a singular landscape and a very nourishing landscape if it’s functioning correctly. You can pull everything you need to eat right out of the water.

Rumpus: Throughout the novel you question the idea of ownership—who owns the land, but also what happens when you own land that is disappearing.

Soileau: People love South Louisiana. They want to stay there in spite of all of the hurricanes and land loss and they’re hanging on by their fingernails. But at the same time, every connection to home is tenuous. So bringing in this long historical context, going back to 1603, I was hoping to highlight the idea that, “Yes, we’ve become attached to places, but they aren’t always our places.” And they often aren’t permanently our places, however much we feel like we want to make them so.

Rumpus: And that historical view really drives that point home as we follow these families over centuries. When you started, did you imagine it being a multi-generational story?

Soileau: Yeah, that was always a piece of it, but I wasn’t necessarily thinking of the characters in the historical episodes as literally the ancestors of the characters in the present. It was more that I wanted these legacies, these stories from the past, these moments in history to be hanging over the present, as foundational stories, a mythos that helps to illuminate who these people are and how they behave right now. I took a lot of inspiration from the book of Genesis, especially the story of Jacob and Esau, which is one of my favorites, mainly because Jacob is such an asshole. And yet he receives God’s blessing, steals it, really, and thus, he gets more of a share in his world. It seemed like a perfect analog for the kind of quandary that was happening in Louisiana, or in many places that are becoming less rural and are sort of entering the modern world. Jacob is the modern man—he lives in tents—and his brother is the huntsman who lives [in] the field.

The modernizing forces of the oil industry, of even the things we do in order to settle on this difficult landscape, like building levees around the Mississippi River so that it doesn’t flood—this robs the landscape of its processes of renewal, and it is a drifting away from traditional livelihood and natural ecologies. The land is disappearing because we have made it so that we can live reliably on the land. 

Rumpus: The ripple effects in your story, some manmade and some natural, show how trying to preserve one thing or one place ends up destroying something or someone down the line. Calamity seems a part of the culture there. Outsiders might say, “Well, just move,” but to them this is just life.

Soileau: Right. I started writing this book just before Hurricane Katrina happened because I had learned about the coastal land loss problem. And then Katrina happened. I was following the news online and hearing questions from people around me where I live in Chicago, and in the always terrible The New York Times comment sections, where every time a hurricane happens or something like the Deepwater Horizon spill happens, people ask, “Why are these dummies still trying to make a life there?”

New Orleans is below sea level, it’s gonna be gone in a hundred years, so why sustain that? Should The Waters Take Us was really an attempt, if not to answer that question, then at least to lay the question out in a way that was more legible for people on the outside. It’s a regional story, yes, but look at what’s happening in Europe right now; record-breaking heat, wildfires. The climate changes happening region by region adds up to a more global, universal issue.

Rumpus: It’s something we will all have to face at some point. The character, Boy, exemplifies someone who grew up living off the land and doesn’t know any different. You can’t imagine him working a nine-to-five.

Soileau: Yeah, absolutely not.

Rumpus: This also goes for Boy’s uncle, Jacot. They both feel like they own this land, but they want very different things from it to survive—Boy wants to live off the land and Jacot wants to live off the oil underneath it. It created a really compelling tension because it’s this battle of ownership. Have you seen this play out in real life?

Soileau: Yeah. It was interesting to me learning about Louisiana land law—which is sort of Kafka-esque—and how mineral rights work, how the ownership of land that sometimes turns to water works. It was a complicated legal situation to get my mind around and then also to make accessible in fiction without taking over the narrative.

Rumpus: Hats off for explaining the legal definition of “navigable waters” in a way that was interesting and didn’t disrupt the flow of the novel.

Soileau: What I learned based on oral histories, especially one in particular about the history of the oil industry in South Lafourche Parish—which is the parish this book is modeled after—is how casual land use was. You would have your piece of property on the bayou and the properties have these long tails going off back into the marsh. You would use as much of that as you needed for your family or go out into the deeper marsh and work on some other piece of land.

Nobody cared about boundaries until the oil industry came in and told them that it was actually worth something. Otherwise it was not so formal, but was treated more as a commons, as I understand it. Once it became a question of leasing surface rights and mineral rights and getting actual cash from the landscape instead of what you need for subsistence, then boundaries became a much more relevant question.

Rumpus: Not that this is a legal novel, but it addresses the question of: What are boundaries when the boundaries are disappearing?

Soileau: Exactly.

Rumpus: I won’t say capitalism is the main antagonist in the novel, but maybe the oil industry is one of the throughline antagonists—and not just in Louisiana. One of the four main perspectives in the novel is Fabian Dakolo, a priest sent to the parish from Nigeria. Was it also your intent from the beginning to give a more global perspective?

Soileau: Yeah, absolutely. For one thing, the oil industry is obviously an antagonist. But it was also important to me to demonstrate that the choices that are made that ultimately read as antagonism, or incredibly damaging policy, happen on a smaller scale. These are people on the ground making decisions in the moment about their own livelihoods.

When Louisianans let the oil industry develop their property, they think they’re going to be making money from it and will be able to sustain the lifestyle that they really love because they have this other source of income. People have a hard time fully imagining—or believing in—long-term consequences, even when the evidence is right in front of them, which is why there are so many climate change deniers in that part of the world, too.

I wanted an outsider’s perspective, and specifically a Nigerian perspective, to highlight that this is a global issue. Whatever Louisiana or the US faces in terms of the depredations of the oil industry or the environmental damage caused by the oil industry, it’s so much worse elsewhere where the people who live there do not necessarily have the resources or platform to press for change. As horrible as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was, it got a lot of attention, people jumped into action and there was money poured into solving the problem. Not so in places like the Niger Delta, where there’s a persistent spilling and persistent beleaguerment of the environment with no consequences for Shell and Big Oil.

Rumpus: The novel shows how this short-sightedness in the people of Pelerin Parish has long-term effects. They are just trying to make ends meet month-to-month. They also aren’t being given all the information by the oil companies. Jacot is complicit in this as the go-between for the oil companies and the people who own the land in the bayou, but he doesn’t really have all the information, either. He just wants the three dollars they pay him a day.

By telling the story from five different perspectives, we get to understand these people who are, to one degree or another, making choices I didn’t agree with. But I also empathized with those choices. What was your approach to choosing these characters and then getting into their life to represent it in such an empathizing way?

Soileau: My favorite fiction asks questions and doesn’t necessarily provide answers. It gives the full equation and you can draw whatever conclusions you want from that equation. The calculus is often complicated. A danger in writing a story about the oil industry would lie in oversimplifying the characters’ motivations or their virtues. I absolutely didn’t want it to be “the evil landowner” against the righteous “man of the field.” I wanted Boy, who I would assume people would tend to side with because he’s not taking money from the oil industry—he’s completely outside of that business—I didn’t want him to seem like “the noble savage.” He claims to be Indigenous: he’s not. He’s an opportunist just like everybody else. And Jacot, who is in bed with the oil industry, is also an opportunist, but with loving reasons. He originally took a job with the oil industry because he was in love and wanted to impress his lady. And also, being an oysterman in those days pretty much sucked.

Rumpus: Who hasn’t done something dumb to win the heart of someone else?

Soileau: (laughing) Who hasn’t tried to impress their lady by taking money from Big Oil?

Rumpus: Yeah, right? Were these characters drawn from research more than, say, “the guy down the street?”

Soileau: Their personalities are definitely drawn from the guy down the street, so to speak. But the situation they’re in took a lot of digging around and trying to simplify convoluted legal and environmental processes—to simplify it as much as possible for the sake of the story.

I started getting interested in how land changed hands when I did the first set of interviews right after Katrina. I talked to this gentleman who was a recreational fishing boat captain—that’s how he made his living. He would hire out his boat to fishermen from Baton Rouge or wherever. He was Houma and—we were sitting at his friend’s kitchen table—he had a very deep and long knowledge of the marsh around him, not only from living on it, but also from stories that have been passed down. We laid out maps and he could point to any place on those maps and tell a story.

He was the one who first explained to me how the early oil men who came in were misrepresenting their business. He said, “The oil industry stole the land from these people. [pointing to the map] This used to belong to so-and-so. There used to be a church here.” But now it’s all oil and gas fields because they came in and basically lied about what they were doing. The people thought they were selling the mineral rights to their property, but they were actually signing quick claim deeds—which is something I tried to show in the book. That was the first clue I had about the complicated changing hands of property.

Rumpus: When you were doing those interviews, was it for the novel? Did you have the idea for it at that point?

Soileau: Yeah. I did what I always tell my students not to do, which is start with a theme, a moral question, and then try to build out from there. I was interested in these questions of ownership and home, but I didn’t know who should inhabit the place. It took a long time to come to the characters who would best reveal those conflicts.

Rumpus: There are a lot of, for lack of a better word, “facts” in this novel.

Soileau: (laughing) Yeah, there’s a lot of facts.

Rumpus: Not to scare anybody off: The facts are in there in the best way possible. Do you find yourself doing a lot of research to get as much knowledge as you can before you begin writing?

Soileau: In general, I feel like that’s my mode. I’ve started a new project and most of what I’m doing right now is reading about nuns and getting lost in the wilderness. For Should the Waters Take Us in particular, it was really important to me to get it right because I knew if I got it wrong there would be any number of local voices pointing out all the thousand ways that I got it wrong. Every time I scratched the surface of something there was so much more I didn’t know. But also, there are so many ways that coastal Louisiana has been misrepresented and misunderstood.

From the outside, people think of Louisiana as a sort of a monoculture. It’s “The Cajun State,” right? But it is not a monoculture. The place where I grew up in Lake Charles is a very particular corner of the state, very influenced by Texas. You move to the middle-south of the state and that’s a certain kind of Cajun-Creole culture. In the southeast, it’s a totally different culture and atmosphere. I had no personal experience with this part of the state I was writing about. It’s a fishing community, and it may sound like I’m an insider because I grew up in Louisiana, but for that particular place I was very much an outsider. It took a lot of work to get myself up to speed on how people lived and who owned what and how every disaster—hurricane, oil spill, erosion—how every disaster, in minute, daily ways, affects the people living there. It was a lot of research, a lot of talking to people.

Rumpus: Which sounds like a great way to fall in love with a place.

Soileau: I fell in love with the place before I learned how fragile it was. I was heartbroken and took a drive down Highway 1. I was like, “I’m going to go see the Gulf!” Seeing water always makes me feel better. I had Bob Dylan on the headphones, driving down in a rainstorm, and had never been down that way and was just so enchanted—enchanted in this naïve way—by what it meant to live along the bayou, for your daily activities to center around getting on your boat and going out to the Gulf and getting some shrimp and coming back in. It was beautiful, or so it seemed, as I was driving down there.

It was also enchanting how old-school Catholic it was. I grew up Catholic, and like many people who grow up Catholic, I’m still a sucker for grottos and incense. At the time when I made that first drive, there were these little chapels along the highway, along the bayou. There was one that was kind of ornate and built by some guy in memory of his wife. That one still exists as of the last time I drove down, even after Katrina and Ida. There was another one that was about the size of a closet with a little altar at the front, and the walls were covered in Post-it notes that people had left with their prayers. The walls were covered. You’d open the door and the Gulf breeze would flutter these Post-it notes. I spent probably a good hour just sort of perusing the Post-it notes. And there were so many desires and so many worries just fluttering on the wall of this little chapel down in the marsh. That one is gone. I think it got washed away.