Accidental Blogger

The beguiling city of New Orleans has inspired many a literary mind. Tennessee Williams, Walker Percy, Ann Rice and John Kennedy Toole, to name only a few.  In Toole’s memorable satire, A Confederacy of Dunces , New Orleans is as much a living, breathing character as the motley human crew who populate the book. (I have often wondered why there is no well known detective series set in the Big Easy like there are in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit or Chicago. Is New Orleans not gritty enough to tickle the imagination of a hard edged mystery writer?  There is even a street named Mystery there. A little googling led me to discover that others too have puzzled over the same question.) The hypnotic and boisterous southern city had over the years carefully cultivated itself as a muse to artists and performers. But the old New Orleans also acquired the image of a slightly overexposed and jaded drama queen with a hint of decadence and debauchery. In the late summer of 2005, came Katrina in all its fury to blow away the veneer of the slouchy, laid back attitude of endless celebrations and replaced it with fear, death, heartbreak and visibly rising crime. Long time residents fled the city in droves. Some came back to rebuild, others don’t plan to return. In the tragic aftermath of Katrina and the soup of conflicting emotions of hope and despair it left in its wake, writers have found fertile ground for new works of fiction and non-fiction. Having lost a number of its residents to the storm, the city now attracts aspiring authors from all over the country. The new literary phoenix of New Orleans is rising not from the ashes but from soggy mud.

When Lara Naughton arrived in New Orleans last year to spend one month working on a novel, she had no idea that she would later pack up her busy life in Los Angeles and move here. A year ago, she bought a condo in the Central Business District and got a job teaching creative writing to gifted teenagers at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts. Like many literati before her, Naughton has found fodder for her writing among the madness, the magic and the mindlessness of post-Katrina New Orleans. Even at its worst, there will always be another character on the next bar stool whose story needs telling.

Even now, as record crime statistics force many to turn their back on New Orleans, the creative spirit here thrives. Perhaps especially now, Naughton says, "There’s nothing that’s going to be as interesting as watching and being a part of a place that is so broken."

Naughton is one of many writers who have embraced New Orleans post-Katrina. Individually and collectively, they feel a calling to capture the emotions of the storm’s aftermath along with the peculiar culture of New Orleans, a culture that refused to die in Katrina’s floodwaters.

Janis Turk, a travel writer based in New Orleans and Austin, explains it thus: "There is a sense among writers here that we are standing at the edge of the most important, definitive moments in New Orleans’ history, and we’ve been handed the grave responsibility of accurately, fairly — and without wincing or looking away — bearing witness to all that has happened. The largest natural disaster in the history of this nation happened here."

Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Ford grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, but lived in New Orleans for many years. "Home is a place you choose," he told a packed audience at this year’s Tennessee Williams Festival. Ford decided to come back after writing an op-ed piece for The New York Times about Katrina. He said that he and his wife, who were living in Maine at the time, sat and "cried and cried" over the ravaged city….

Novelist and investigative journalist Jason Berry says post-Katrina writers have an exciting opportunity. "Everyone who is serious about what’s going on here has to struggle with the heavy sorrow and the losses and burdens that people carry — without ignoring that grand sense of comedy that is so much a part of the literary landscape and the society and the cultural reality of these latitudes," he says.

During his evacuation from the city, Berry was comforted by embracing its culture, driving around and listening to Professor Longhair, Fats Domino and James Booker. New Orleans’ literary culture, he predicts, will soon be stronger than ever.

"A flood of literature is coming out of the place, fiction and nonfiction," Berry says, "because everyone is dealing with these angels in the mud."

See the full story here.