Thinking About New Orleans: An Update

It's hard to judge how many writers have been displaced, dislocated and disoriented by Katrina and aftermath. I've been keeping track of some of them via our series, Thinking About New Orleans. Now it is nearly two years since we were glued to CNN watching Katrina, the flooding of the levees, and Rita, and the bitterly insulting lack of federal response. The aftermath continues. On the cusp of this year's hurricane season, Sarah K. Inman of NolaFugees.com wrote, "Summertime in New Orleans comes with the first wave of heat that makes it unbearable to be outside, and it's usually marked by the murder of an innocent or two or six."

I just checked in with a few writers from the series for an update (for more, see my blog in today's Guardian, "After the Deluge: Post-Katrina Literature").

Joshua Clark's memoir,"Heart Like Water," which he mentioned here last summer, has just been published. He spoke with NPR a week or so back. (NPR also archived Clark's reports from New Orleans during Katrina, as well as the Katrina blog that chronicled the progress of the devastation. Clark rode out the storm and became NPR's "eyes and ears in New Orleans.")

NPR's Martha Woodruff interviewed James Lee Burke , interviewed here last week, upon the publication of his new books, a short story collection, "Jesus Out to Sea," and the sixteenth in his Dave Robicheaux series, "The Tin Roof Blowdown."

Tom Piazza is finishing a novel: "I started this novel at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts March 06 after long touring for "Why New Orleans Matters.
No real 'why' about it, in the sense that the book just jumped me -- suddenly it was all there -- characters, what the characters wore, what they had on their walls, what happened to them during and after the storm, and most of the choices they were forced to make. I've always figured that you just don't argue if it comes like that. The downside is that every morning I have to slip into this Fryolator of really intensely emotionally charged imagery and action.

"The book follows two families--one black and one white--from different parts of N.O.--through their very different experiences of the hurricane and subsequent exile to Texas and Illinois, respectively. One family decides to move back to town and one doesn't. Anyway am almost finished with this draft;HC will publish it in September 2008."

Julie Smith edited "New Orleans Noir," part of the Akashic Books noir series, published in April. (She mentioned it here last year. She tells me she has not proceeded on the post-K novel she had envisioned.) You can read an excerpt from her story "Loot," part of the New Orleans Noir, here.

Six months ago, writer Ken Foster and anti-violence activist Baty Landis organized a march to city hall in New Orleans along with five thousand other people. Since then, they have worked with the city leadership, created youth music clinics, worked in the public schools and continued marching, to try to address the violent crime problem that plagues the city. Ken emailed to let me know that Baty was in New York last week to speak at a reception to benefit Silence is Violence: a movement for peace in New Orleans. Landis was here to offer news on crime and recovery in New Orleans--what local citizens are doing to turn the tide, and what the rest of us can do to help, wherever we live. Ken's new book, "Dogs I Have Met and People They Have Found," is due out in October.

Andrei Codrescu: "I'm writing a long essay on New Orleans literature for the new Harvard History of American Literature, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollers. I'm retelling the story of writing in the city from some new(ish) angles: the city as locus of magical-realism and catastrophe, and multi-lingual literature (French, German, Spanish,and English). I'm including mostly writers who've used the city as a character, and leaving out names always associated with it in tourist PR, of writers who only lived here. I would love to write a new novel, but I don't seem to stay put long enough."