Well Bottom Blues

I see that Loyola University is having a Katrina/Federal Flood Memorial conference with two panels of literary writers titled Writers on the Storm, composed only of established literary writers. Ignored are the citizen journalists and powerful diarists of the event who came to call themselves the NOLA Bloggers. These people, not writers by trade, poured forth millions of words that caught the attention of the nation, of major media like NPR and the Los Angeles Times, were picked up by the editorial page of the Times Picayune, and were cited by filmmaker David Simon as inspirations for Treme. They organized an annual conference on the future of New Orleans called Rising Tide that continued for 6 years and brought nationally recognized featured speakers.

Most were not capital W writers: there was a college professor, a librarian, a petroleum geologist, a computer programmer, a neighborhood activist and textile artist went on to form the news organization The Lens, a civil engineer who worked for That Government Agency with Engineers in the title who lost his home in Gentilly, a social worker who wrote about having just pulled apart the pieces of his collapsed family home and found the body of their mother and who stood on the curb processing that as a Katrina tour bus passed. They were Essayists (and some poets) of Witness.

These people championed and celebrated and defended and mourned New Orleans in a way that equaled and often exceeded the work of recognized, mainstream authors.. Their work was so powerful a friend and I published A Howling in the Wires to try to preserve some of that electronic and so ephemeral writing. No shade intended to most of the invited  literary writers featured who produced wonderful work, mostly poetry, in the aftermath. Yes, please read Karisma Price, Jessica Kinnison, Brad Richard and Carolyn Hembree, who produced powerful poetic responses to that event. 

It’s just criminal to so formally forget the literary output of thise powerful guerilla authors among the NOLA Bloggers who wrote so well out of an urgent personal need, not just to process grief but to stand up and defend New Orleans when people spoke of abandoning it, who literally gave blood, sweat and tears, action married to words, to the city out of love.