Alive and well on the web: Frederick Barthelme and The 39 Steps – Oxford American Jesuit Dog – ELJ – Elm Leaves Journal The Owls of Solomon Place – Oxford American The Thunder and the Hurricane – Oxford American Ode to Swimming Naked – Oxford American The Hillendale House: Moving Out Mother – Virginia Quarterly Review Crime Watcher – The Morning News A Man – Spork Press Stop – The Literary Review After The Flood -Guernica Famous Fathers – Narrative Magazine Tell Me In Italian – Narrative Magazine When I Lived There – Mississippi Review (2006) His Hand, Restless On My Leg – Mississippi Review (2005) Ski-Doo – Mississippi Review (2004) The Water Laws – Mississippi Review (From 2001) This Life – Mississippi Review (from 1999)
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Posts from the “Katrina” Category
High-res version
While I waited at the traffic light on Canal Street, a toddler straddled his mother’s hip and kicked off his tiny red sandal. He looked down, wiggled his foot, but didn’t have words. I was driving home from the office with my music on loud. My family had just returned to New Orleans after living for four months in Houston. A continuous rusty waterline cut through buildings and houses. We lived a mile away and on a ridge. The woman stood at the bus stop dressed in turquoise scrubs, and her toddler waved his sippy cup at whoever might notice
Continue reading in r.k.v.r.y.
In 2009, Guernica asked me to guest edit an issue on the fourth anniversary of Katrina. I decided to include writers and artists who’d lived in New Orleans before and after Katrina. I wanted work from people on the ground who experienced her first-hand, and who then came back to go to school, to teach, to help in the rebuild. I wanted work from people who were ready to talk about what happened head-on, or not. Some of us may not have been writing about Katrina, but we were writing after her, and the loss and anger and frustration were fuel. They still are. It’s 2015 and these pieces will always shake me up. Guernica/A Magazine of Art & Politics.
Categories: Katrina, Non Fiction
We were like widows with living husbands, available, but taken.
pia z. ehrhardt
Posted on September 15, 2015
For four months after Katrina, my family split into uneven halves. My husband lived in Baton Rouge, and I took our son, Andrew, to Houston for his fall semester. He went to Jesuit High School and four hundred of the students migrated to Strake Jesuit in Houston. At the emergency meeting held at a Mexican restaurant, the priest we all trusted with our sons, Father Hermes, opened with the Aeneid: “Perhaps someday we will rejoice to remember this day.” We weren’t ready for hope, and wasn’t Hermes the god of mischief? Read more from “The Moms Of Hermann Park”. (Thanks to Mark Yakich and The New Orleans Review)
Categories: Katrina, Non Fiction
We’d been back in New Orleans for just two months when our house was burglarized, and my husband, Malcolm’s, car was stolen. It was February, 2006, Mardi Gras season and freezing. Our son Andrew had gotten home at 11:30 p.m. and he’d not locked the back door. Someone jumped our eight-foot fence, walked through the kitchen and into the front hall, took money out of Malcolm’s wallet and picked up the keys to his SUV. What he didn’t take: a cold beer from the fridge, the Bose radio, the cigar box on the counter stuffed with pocket change. The thief’s stealing was focused: cash and wheels. And he left the back door wide open, which is how Malcolm knew something was wrong the next…
A ruined city, my ruined city, couldn’t compete with what was more important.
pia z. ehrhardt
Posted on September 5, 2015
On a cold morning in January, my father showed up on our front porch. He said he was in town for a haircut; there was a salon he and his second wife went to in Bucktown, a neighborhood that hadn’t flooded. My husband and son and I had just returned to New Orleans to live together again under one roof. My father didn’t ask for a disaster tour, but I put him in the car and drove him around to see the continuous rusty water line that sliced through homes and businesses, and ran above the front door of my stepson’s house in Lakeview. I explained how they’d lost everything. “Their daughter was born two weeks after Katrina,” I told my father. “I’m sort…
Categories: Katrina, Non Fiction
In August of 2007, our co-worker, Sherri’s, daughter was killed by an ex-boyfriend. He followed her car home, slipped under the arm of the security gate, and then shot her multiple times in her apartment. He went back to the parking lot and killed himself. The complex has them on videotape: Daneel standing her ground, telling him “It’s over, Manny. Go home,” and then walking back up the stairs to her place, Manny in his car, getting his gun from the glove compartment, loading it with bullets kept in the trunk, walking back up to Daneel’s, then back down to his car before putting the gun under his chin. It took him thirteen minutes to die. Read more. Re-published on THE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN. Many thanks to Brad…
Categories: Katrina, Non Fiction
Tagged: K10, Katrina, New Orleans
I started tutoring the Moorhead sisters twice a week at their charter school on Napoleon Avenue. It was one of the first schools to open after Katrina with 319 students enrolled. The Moorhead sisters got to school by city bus. They had evacuated Katrina late – in a rainstorm – and saw the car in front of theirs drive over the spillway. Everyone in it died. Their family had lost their home and they’d relocated to a double on Elysian Fields. Their mom was an RN at Touro Infirmary, but she’d decided to open her own catering business. The sisters were both in the 7th grade because LaDell had repeated. She was quiet and serious, with a smile that tripped me up, it was…
Categories: Katrina
Tagged: K10, Katrina, New Orleans
Not much bad health-wise had ever happened to me until my appendix burst at the end of 2011. For two and a half weeks my internist had misdiagnosed my stomach pain. She was a mild mannered thirty-something woman who took careful notes but never really looked me in the eye. Impaction? An x-ray had ruled out blockage. Diverticulitis? Ovarian cysts? There was a weird ridge on my right side that she pressed, mystified. Over those seventeen days she prescribed: Fleet enemas, laxatives, white foods, no nuts or seeds, liquids only, and a torrent of antibiotics – aimless warriors, shadow boxers – which slowed the infection but tore up my stomach. I couldn’t keep any food down. I’d lost 15 pounds. When my lab work showed…
In May of 2013 a great horned owl fell into our backyard while I unloaded grocery bags from my car. I froze and kept a distance. We’d been watching the family; this looked like the female. She and her mate had made a nest in the live oak behind our house, or, rather, they’d been squatting in a nest built by black crows who daily mobbed them with swoops and scolds. Babies—we counted two—had hatched. At night, one parent guarded the clutch while the other hunted in the park across the street. A red clay finial on the roof of our house served as a lookout perch, or the crooked telephone pole. The owl sighted prey, its thick head on a swivel. My husband…
JUST LIVE HERE. 
