NOLA Writers - Post Katrina

Along with the entire city, Katrina also washed out a lot of literary history and inspiration for writers. Of course, that was less of a loss than the houses which the writers lost. And what's left in New Orleans for writers to write about? Katrina, of course. The literary output of NOLA writers now has a single-minded laser like focus on non-fiction accounts of the devastation and the tragedy of a city drowned and a culture lost.

Jason Berry, writing for NPR has a column which is an excellent place to start an exploration into the life of Katrina, the hurricane: "Jed Horne's Breach of Faith has been praised as one of the best books about Katrina so far. A veteran editor of The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune, Horne delivers pathos in the survivor stories, and shows a shrewd eye for detail." - Katrina Books Shed New Light on Disaster

This article in Slate, New Orleans writers pen city's rebirth story, discusses how "Katrina is an unavoidable touchstone for New Orleans writers as they get back to their craft. Since the disaster, it's been largely a subject of nonfiction, such as Douglas Brinkley's tome "The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast" and "The Five People You Meet In Hell: Surviving Katrina," Smallwood's tale of French Quarter denizens who stayed put while most citizens evacuated."

There's one thing I have been wanting to let out of my chest for a long time. On the day that Katrina struck, I was glued to my screen. Alternating between the weather reports and trying to find updates on the net, I knew about The Times Picayune's staffers bravely struggling on inspite of the power outage and breaking glass.

I knew about the levee breaches a few hours after they happened, from the Bayoubuzz blog. I can't find the link right now, but as the next few days unfolded and I watched with growing anger the administration's claims that they had no way of knowing about the levee breaches in time, the one thing that kept hitting me again and again was "How could I, sitting thousands of miles away, in front of a computer screen, know about the levee breaches in a few hours, and the entire official machinery not know about it for a full day?" I still don't know and probably never will. Maybe I will, if I were to read a few in-depth books about Katrina by writers who were in New Orleans, and have first hand accounts of exactly what happened.