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.