My Street

When I first saw this picture published on my neighbor's blog Katrina: A Midcity Blog, I really didn't want to go back. Although the shotgun double where I live is not in this picture, the absolute devastation of this image taken in mid-September made the storm more real for me than any of the surreal news footage because it was/is just a typical New Orleans street, one that I walked down on my way to the local coffee shop to prepare for classes or meet a new colleague. Now with the spectacular waters receded, the modest homes on this street were left wounded, raw and bare, for all of us to see.

Writing, Manuscripts, and Katrina: New Orleans Writers discuss their Loss

The Wall Street Journal did a story today on New Orleans' writers including UNO English Dept.'s very own Niyi Osundare and Kris Lackey! Words Can't Describe What Some Writers In New Orleans Lost. Their many stories of losing manuscripts of prose and poetry are quite devastating. Even more profound is Niyi's story of barely escaping the floodwaters with his wife and ending up in a shelter in Alabama. Fortunately, he is now a visiting writer at Franklin Pierce College in New Hampshire this semester, but what an experience!

BTW, this article is a great example of a feature article with its compelling lead-in, interviews with a variety of writers from NO, and exciting details and character profiles as well as its very focused angle on how writers have suffered tremendously from Katrina.

More Return of Cultural Stuff

It looks like the Prytania Theatre is now open for those of you in the area who may want to see Wallace and Grommet's Curse of the Were Rabbit.

Website and Audio Memorial

To Kick Off the Memorial Component of our class blog, I'm going to provide a few links that may be useful for article ideas, but are also powerful testimonies from people about the storm.

The first is a website entitled Alive in Truth which is "an all-volunteer, grassroots effort to record oral and written history about the lives of displaced New Orleanians, in their own words.
The project is founded and coordinated by New Orleans native Abe Louise Young, a nationally-awarded poet." It seems like this website is collecting stories primarily from those evacuees who were in the Superdome, Convention Center, or rescued from their homes, but they are open to all testimonies and encourage people to submit their own stories and/or collect oral histories and post them on the website.

Secondly, This American Life, an audio narrative program on NPR, hosted by Ira Shor, did two fantastic shows on Katrina. Episode 296 is called After the Flood and Episode 297 is named This is Not My Beautiful House. They are both well worth listening to in their entirety as they offer a variety of testimonials from people affected by Katrina. You can buy and/or download them for a fee or listen for free with RealPlayer or ITunes.