A Little Bit about Me (and Katrina): Doreen Piano

When Katrina struck the Gulf Coast on August 27, 2005, I'd just finished my first week of teaching at the University of New Orleans. I'd moved to New Orleans in early August to begin a position at UNO as an assistant professor of Rhetoric and Composition in the English Dept.

Weeks after the hurricane hit, I had two images in my head, one was of the chair of my dept. telling faculty members at a meeting the Thursday before the storm that the semester had gotten off to a much better start than last fall when during the first week of school everyone had evacuated for Ivan, and the second was again an academic moment during my job interview when the committee members, upon being asked why they liked where they worked, made several typical comments about the student population, the classes they taught, and their colleagues, and the chair after listening to them, gave me a smile and said, And it is New Orleans! to which everyone including me nodded our heads vigorously.

Despite knowing what a screwed up southern city it was both through my own half dozen visits to the city and my friends' accounts who lived there, I had eagerly looked forward to the move. When I finally arrived in the t-shirt stickiness of early August, I was not disappointed. I rented half of a double shotgun in MidCity. Even in the hot summer evenings, I made it a ritual to walk around the bayou and take in the oasis of natural beauty while the sun was setting. My neighbors were friendly, the local coffeeshop harbored a variety of people who had seemed to make it their second home, even something about the bizarre logic of driving in a city where you couldn't make a left turn at an intersection appealed to me.

Although I had almost considered evacuating 'vertically' with friends who had lived there most of their lives, I, like most folks that I knew, including my friends who shelved their incity evacuation plans, sped away by car, my cat Jaffa Cakes riding shotgun as we departed the city with a few suitcases, a box of research and teaching materials, and a favorite leather jacket I took "just in case." After realizing that this evacuation was going to be longer than a three night hotel stay, I slowly made my way to Tucson AZ where I had lived in the 1980s and where I had a friend who housed me and my cat and our things. I've been here now for almost two months and will return to NO in mid November to resume my new life.

Welcome to Writing the Hurricane: A Class Blog

In fall of 2005, New Orleans was vaulted into the limelight of national and international news due to Hurricane Katrina. Within days, every aspect of New Orleans culture had been picked apart and analyzed by social commentators, news journalists, professional writers, artists, and authors. From this intense scrutiny of our city emerged numerous human interest stories due to the natural disaster that will remain forever etched in our collective minds. Furthermore, New Orleans itself acted as a reflection of the many social ills and environmental hazards that have beset many American cities while retaining its own indelible culture that sets itself apart from the rest of the nation. As someone I know who lived in New Orleans for years and moved away from the city recently said, "When I left New Orleans, I crossed the border back into the U.S."

For many of us affected by the storm, our own particular view/image/experience of Hurricane Katrina may or may not have been part of the national story which emerged or it may have only been the tip of the iceberg or it may have been misrepresented or not really understood. It is for this reason that I began teaching a non-fiction writing class called Writing Hurricane Katrina: Natural Disaster and the North American Psyche when the University of New Orleans restarted its fall semester in October 2005.