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Artist Walter Anderson was born in New Orleans in 1903. His family eventually moved to Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and founded Shearwater Pottery. Walter decorated the pottery but also painted murals and made other drawings of area wildlife throughout his life. He is most well known now for his watercolors of Horn Island, 12 miles off the coast. There is a museum in Ocean Springs showcasing Walter’s art, and an exhibition of his work was shown in the Smithsonian in 2003. But as author Hester Bass explains on the opening page of The Secret World of Walter Anderson, “He may be the most famous American artist you’ve never heard of.”

Anderson is a very unusual subject for a picture book. Bass stretches out here to 48 pages so she has plenty of space to tell the story of the man and his art. This is very much a title for older middle-grade or young-adult readers as Anderson is a complicated subject and reclusive man who loved his family but apparently could not live with them. His art was the most dominant part of his life, and so Bass explains to readers what that meant and most significantly, what he accomplished on Horn Island.

With the beautiful understated illustrations from E.B. Lewis to accompany the text, The Secret World of Walter Anderson is an inside look at a man who was dedicated to studying and drawing nature. Anderson went to great extremes to capture wildlife in its environment, even weathering a hurricane on Horn Island. Most interestingly, however, he also harbored a secret; a small locked room in his cottage that everyone was forbidden to enter. It was only after his death in 1965 that his wife looked inside. What she was found was art everywhere — the walls, the ceiling, every inch of the small room was decorated as a “Gulf Coast day.” It was stunning, and as Bass explains in her detailed author’s note at the book’s conclusion, the room was moved to the Walter Anderson Museum of Art (where Bass’s husband is former director). Visitors can fully immerse themselves in his vision there and appreciate his utterly unique view.

When Katrina hit, Walter Anderson’s art, his family’s homes and Shearwater Pottery were not immune. Sixteen buildings at the Anderson compound were damaged or destroyed by the storm, and the pottery showroom and workrooms were “gutted.” The museum, further inland, was safe, but the family’s heritage — the actual physical places where the Andersons lived and created their arts and crafts — suffered great destruction. This is a cultural loss to Mississippi and to a larger extent, the folk art history of America. Yet it is through titles like this one, through opportunities to learn just who Walter Anderson was and what he created, that we can continue to celebrate his gifts. Bass has done a first-rate job of capturing why we need to know about this man and further, how his struggles did not prevent him from making many beautiful things.

Walter Anderson was an important American artist. Making sure that young people know about him is a very worthwhile endeavor. Bass’s extensive note and bibliography at the conclusion show it to be a serious work. Homeschoolers in particular should seek this one out. But don’t view it as a source of study alone — The Secret World of Walter Anderson is just fascinating reading. He was a most interesting man and a compelling example of someone who moved outside the mainstream while making a powerful contribution to American art. He saw a corner of the world, loved it and made sure that everyone who came after him would know it as well. Kudos to Hester Bass for both recognizing how valuable his story is for young people and then conveying it in such a lively and engaging manner. My son wants to go on a visit to Mississippi to see Anderson’s cottage room — I can’t think of a higher compliment to Bass and illustrator Lewis than that.

The Katrina Papers
By Jerry W. Ward Jr.
Univ of New Orleans Publishing 2008
ISBN 0-9728143-3-7
233 pages

Of all the books written about post-Katrina New Orleans, there has yet to be anything as revealing or intimate as Jerry Ward Jr.’s The Katrina Papers. Ward, a professor of English and African American World Studies at Dillard University in the city, began keeping a diary immediately after the storm. Here are his thoughts from the trip out of New Orleans on August 28th:

You defied Hurricane Ivan but Hurricane Katrina makes you enter the I-10 contraflow traffic and flee New Orleans for Mississippi. Katrina is a 5, a force to retreat from. You hurriedly pack –- vital documents, granola bars and water, sports clothing and toiletries for a week, put on your Army dog tags for good luck [You did survive Vietnam], lock up the house and leave at 12:06 with a backward glance at John Scott’s “Spirit House” on the corner of St. Bernard and Gentilly. Is Katrina a post-modern war goddess or God’s agent come to punish New Orleans or Satan’s gumbo, poisoning for Lake Pontchartrain? You don’t clock the miles or the hours: New Orleans to I-55 North to MS 98 and Natchez (no available rooms), Vicksburg (no rooms), Monroe, LA (no room) and back to a rest stop and fretful sleep after 15 hours of driving. Monday afternoon you find shelter, a much-needed hot shower, and food at the First Baptist Church of Vicksburg. You had planned to teach Rousseau’s The Social Contract this semester? You shall live it now as a “homeless” person among other displaced strangers.

Ward then spends a year chronicling the damage to his city and its thriving literary culture, his struggle to return to his home and his job, his continued outreach to friends and family and his endless frustration by how difficult the simplest things become in the face of all-consuming layers of bureaucracy. He also writes about activities related to his profession, which is, of course, something he continues to pursue even in the face of such extremely altered personal circumstances. And he records the little things, the common things, which now seem so distant as to be unrecognizable. From the shelter in Vicksburg:

I have become weary of the small talk, the mumbling and grunting that passes for conversation. I am saddened by the loss of rich conversations with my friends in New Orleans. I am going deeper into a Grand Canyon of dissatisfaction. I begin to feel listless. I mumble and grunt.

Ward’s struggle with depression continues throughout his post-Katrina year, but what makes his journals so riveting is his constant fight against the abyss; his determination to find value and a “real life” in this new world that has been thrust upon him. He must fight the scourge of mold and flood damage in his home just as everyone else, but he is also still a professor at heart and so cannot resist his love of language and learning. Here is an example from December 22:

In telling stories about the South, Faulkner worked like Jackson Pollack. He dripped ink all over his pages to achieve the sense of plenitude. In contrast, [Ernest] Gaines does not fear a vacuum. He tells stories of the South with the economy of a gifted Chinese painter. A few words suffice.

It is Ward’s continued focus on working, his diligent determination to not stray from his love of students and learning that propels The Katrina Papers forward. His losses are great, however, and it is lists like this (written in the third person in vain hope of achieving some distance perhaps) that will hit home for fellow writers:

The room used as an office sustained losses that will cause Mr. Ward to be in agony for months. He will grieve over the loss of his two-volume Oxford English Dictionary. Many reference books, autographed books, papers pertaining to the Richard Wright Encyclopedia and the Cambridge History of African American Literature, Ward’s manuscripts for Reading Race Reading America, Hollis Watkins: An Oral Autobiography and To Shatter the Iris of Innocence (poetry) are beyond recovery.

Later, while clearing out so many water damaged and molding documents and books, Ward comes to a sorrowful conclusion:

It is strange. Emptiness fills you. It is strange. As you dump one load of the poetry chapbooks and poetry volumes from the wheelbarrow, two chapbooks fly to the sidewalk. They are works by Dudley Randall and Audre Lord. You lovingly gather them up for deposit in a safe, dry place. There is a message here. The English language needs a new word: MISSAGE. The second message is this: For several years you had considered starting the Project on the History of Black Writing database by using your collective hard-to-find or totally limited self-published poetry books. The dream deferred is now your dream destroyed. Live with the emptiness.

In many ways, those of us not on the Gulf Coast have become jaded about destruction, invulnerable to descriptions of destroyed homes, decaying refrigerators, piles of debris that used to be important and now are only so much trash waiting to be dealt with and masking our collective vision of a reclaimed, revitalized landscape (and thus reclaimed and revitalized lives). Ward’s patient revelations of what he has lost –- of the plans now derailed, the goals that much more difficult to achieve, the sheer volumes of history that dwelled only in his particular office and home -- forces readers to reconsider post-Katrina New Orleans. (The work lost on his Richard Wright Encyclopedia is particularly painful for the author.) There was a thriving intellectual world in that city that many of us have never acknowledged, are blissfully unaware of, and now it has been tossed and trucked away. Ward is a witness, however, and his pain, so vividly depicted on the days in which it is felt, cannot be ignored.

I think, though, that the highest value of The Katrina Papers lies in Ward’s careful recording of life in general in the city. He recounts additions to the local language: “The new New Orleans lexicon will include hurrication (a hurricane vacation) and traumaticalize. We may also begin to speak of people who have been FEMAed by the Federal Excuse Making Agency.” They are jokes to a certain degree, but born from real events and real frustrations; evidence of a new country growing on our shores, a city cut adrift in so many ways from the way the rest of us live. Ward is a man still stunned by the foreignness of so much of his daily life; he is a man who cannot let go of his uncertainty:

Last August, I had completed the syllabi for my courses and had great expectations for 2005-2006. This year, I am sad and loaded with limited expectations. I have not written any syllabi. This inactivity frightens me. I feel disconnected from course objectives or goals. I fill my mind with trivia that has nothing to do with my helping any student to think well. I am on a road in 1959. I am walking with Mack the Knife, Venus, Charlie Brown and Stagger Lee. We have blown out 16 candles and are going to Kansas City.

Unless you were there, the full force of Katrina and failure of the levees on New Orleans will never be fully understood; it will always be something that happened far away to someone else, to “those poor people.” But Jerry Ward has accomplished something unique and powerful with The Katrina Papers: he has found a way to bring readers along on his journey through the storm and what came next. His careful recording of fleeing the hurricane, returning, and rebuilding a life of letters in a city he loves is less a compelling narrative and more a possession of the life of another –- a prolonged exposure of one man’s heart and soul and intellect. We do not visit with Jerry Ward through The Katrina Papers; we inhabit him. The power of this connection cannot be overstated. The value of Ward’s record should only grow in the years to come.

By Paul Volponi
Viking 2008
ISBN 0-670-06160-0
144 pages

With Hurricane Song, author Paul Volponi has written a unique and intense novel on Hurricane Katrina for teen readers. Set almost entirely within the Superdome, this is the story of one family and how they coped with the rising tension and severe living conditions in the building both during and after the storm. All the elements many of us heard about in the dome are present here: the oppressive heat and appalling living conditions, the uneven law enforcement presence and the violent episodes from those who took advantage of the situation to harass and rob families taking refuge. The story of Miles, his musician father and uncle and the people they hunker down with is the story that we think we already know from the television and news reports, but by making it personal, by giving it names and faces and a family that has its own drama in place long before the storm, Volponi gives his book a sense of urgency that will shock readers. We think we already knew what happened in the Superdome; sit through several days with Miles, and it hits home in a way that a thirty-second news clip never could.

Hurricane Song opens on Sunday, August 28th with high school sophomore Miles wondering again if he made the right choice in coming to live with his father. His parents divorced when he was small, and he grew up mostly with his mother in Chicago and visited his father over vacations. But she has recently remarried and now has several stepchildren. Miles felt pushed out of the family and when the option to live with his jazz playing father in New Orleans was presented, he jumped at it. The two of them have struggled to connect, however, with Miles not understanding how music can be so important and his father at a loss as to the appeal of football. The two don’t know how to talk through their problems. Miles is beginning to wonder if maybe the relationship is just too strained to salvage. He is still sorting out what to do when Katrina forces him (and his father and uncle) to try and leave. Traffic and car troubles prevent them from making it all the way to Baton Rouge, and they find themselves stuck with only the Superdome. By the second chapter, they are standing in line to get in. Here is what they see:

"National Guard soldiers in camouflage fatigues stood at the door with their machine guns pointed straight up in the air. They looked us over like we’d crossed the border from another country without any papers. I locked eyes with one of them who had a thick square jaw, and his grip on the gun got tighter."

Because they came in at the last minute and had to abandon their car, the family does not have much food (it wouldn't have been an issue in Baton Rouge); as it turns out, a lot of families don’t have enough food. The whole plan behind using the Superdome as a massive shelter might have looked good on paper but the reality that Miles sees proves that the city’s disaster planners did not have a clue. People are hungry and thirsty, there is very little fresh air, and the toilets quickly rebel from overuse. The biggest issue, however, is security. There will always be people who thrive in chaos, and Miles finds himself at odds with a wandering pack of teenage thugs who shake down people for cash. The fact that he knows this group doesn’t make his interactions with them any easier; they are looking for trouble and when they can’t find it, they are happy to make some of their own.

As we know, almost everyone who went into the Superdome came back out. Some of them died there, however — mostly the elderly or the sick — and Volponi does not shy away from this reality. In the end, survival is not the end of the story for Miles as he and his father find themselves, like many other people, learning what matters most when they are surrounded by the sudden loss of everything. It’s not an unexpected ending, but it is certainly a poignant one. By then, after all they have been through, you really really want Miles to have a happy ending. New Orleans has not been getting one, so at least Volponi can make it right for one family; at least he can make all they went through in the Superdome somehow worthwhile.

That’s why we read fiction sometimes; so we can get that ending we all hope for.

Hurricane Song is a very intense book; almost every page takes place in the dome. I was struck while reading it by how rough it was, and I wanted to find out just how Volponi could be certain that his version of events was true. In a recent email exchange, he explained how he researched the book:

I viewed many online diaries of people who were there, got a chance to ask questions of people who survived the hurricane, got a chance to speak with some people around the country who went down to help, read the news accounts, and watched CNN. I watched one TV interview during the storm of a man who was going to brave anything to go back through the city to see what happened to the club where he played jazz. That incredible passion for a patch of ground instantly inspired me to take on this novel. I think the situation fits my strength as a writer, because as a novelist I consider myself a reporter as well, describing the reflection in society's mirror.

As it happens, Paul Volponi is uniquely suited to write a book about a teenager coping with violent peer pressure; this is a situation he has seen before:

I taught teens to read and write on Rikers Island for six years and have been in the middle of some tense situations and violence, so I may have been able to transfer some of those experiences to the confrontations that occurred inside the Superdome. I realize that not every description in the novel can be exact because I simply wasn't there. Rather, I believe the feelings conveyed in this book are the important thing. And I hope it will give young adult readers, high school and junior high teachers, a chance at a type of historical fiction that teens today have actually lived through and can relate to.

There have been a lot of books written about Katrina and the failure of the levees, but few of them have been written in a way that relates to teenagers. Hurricane Song is one of those rare literary moments where an author and subject that are perfectly suited for each other come together. I’m sure many more people will write novels around Katrina in the future but the story of Miles and his family deserves special note regardless of how crowded this field becomes. This is the story of a teenage boy in a bad place who finds personal courage and family support when he needs them most and when they are in short supply among too many of the people around him. Lucky for readers, it was written by an author who knows his subject all too well and took the time to do his homework and get the story right. Don’t start it until you have a couple of hours to yourself — this is one you won’t be able put down. I promise.

Leaning With Intent to Fall
By Ethan Clark
Garrett County Press 2007
ISBN 1-891053-04-7
186 pages

As much as the press has tried to analyze and investigate the many different facets of New Orleans culture in the wake of Katrina and the failure of the levees, there are still aspects of the city’s culture that remained terminally overlooked. Reviewing Stories Care Forgot: An Anthology of New Orleans Zines provides readers with an introduction to the thriving zine pre-hurricane culture, but editor Ethan Clark’s new memoir provides an even more intimate look at the punks, partiers and endless array of questioning teenagers and twentysomethings who flow in and out of the city on vision quests they hardly acknowledge let alone are able to articulate. Clark ended up there after some time spent selling fireworks in Wisconsin and seeing way too much of a small segment of the interstate highway system while trying to hitchhike out of Kansas (in desperation he finally ended up on a bus). His reasons for choosing New Orleans made as much sense as the fireworks gig, but his recollections of his time spent there (and elsewhere) are a perfect window on one of those ever present but barely recorded aspects of American life. He’s very close in his new book, Leaning With Intent to Fall, to being the Sarah Vowell of low paying jobs, squats and living in your van, and readers wanting a clearer picture of New Orleans would do well to read what Clark has to say.

After chapters highlighting the disturbing antics of Midwestern fireworks buyers and the penchant for the people of Kansas to apparently drive back and forth between exits while ignoring increasingly desperate hitchhikers, Clark delves into his experiences in New Orleans. As a committed cyclist who depends on his bike to get back and forth to work (and make restaurant deliveries), the wild dog situation in his neighborhood is more than a bit disturbing, but Clark finds a way to take it in stride: “The poor bastards are just trying to get by, just like everyone else,” he writes. In a series of essays ranging from really bad roommates to really scary moments with the patrons of the local bar, Clark chips away at the working class sections of New Orleans, proving that there is still more to see about this city; still so much we do not know. (It became a ritual of sorts to climb inside a local monument of Robert E. Lee, and Clark tells us all about the weirdness, including a thankfully aborted attempt to cut their way into it one evening with a blow torch. I swear I’m not making this up.) From one ramshackle houseful of crazed roommates to another, Clark maintains his determination to find a job that doesn’t suck and some kind of direction for his future. And the reader, alternately shocked (he is nearly killed one night) and endeared (Clark doesn’t just move, he packs up “…tools and my records, my books and my zines and my nervous little dogs; I took down my increasingly ragged show flyers and band posters, and I loaded them all up into my antiquated yellow Dodge Maxi Van…”), stays along for the ride to see what Clark will do next, who he will meet and just what he is going to figure out in the end. The fact that he doesn’t know what he wants is infinitely reassuring and also very acutely what so much of young America understands all too well.

In the end, Clark leaves New Orleans for Asheville, North Carolina, before Katrina hits although he does include a couple of essays about returning to the city afterwards, and his sorrow over what was lost as well as the rather scary military police presence that sorely affects the casual and fun atmosphere that had so welcomed him in the past (the near death experience notwithstanding). The essays in Asheville are an excellent complement to the earlier pieces in New Orleans. They show Clark’s continued search for purpose, the significance of which he might have denied that summer in Wisconsin. In Asheville, this search becomes an increasing source of concern as he makes new friends, all of whom are also searching but doing it in a less self destructive manner. “Truth be told,” he writes, “these days I’d rather sit around listening to Otis Redding than Black Flag.”

There is a lot to enjoy in Clark’s essays; he’s honest about himself and his friends in a way that is quite disarming. He also earns points for not seeking pity. Upper class America would likely find parts of his life impossibly difficult (if not bizarre), but he is equally proud and delighted with his journey. Wisconsin, Kansas and New Orleans got Ethan Clark to Asheville, where he seems to have gotten his proverbial shit together in a big way. He is savvy enough to realize that the life he has lived is underrepresented among mainstream discussions on society and culture and he puts his words out there with this book insisting that his American dream be recognized and respected. Leaning With Intent to Fall is an excellent chance to see yet another aspect of what made New Orleans so vibrantly alive; here’s hoping Ethan Clark continues to record the lives of those around him, and doesn’t forget — for a minute — where he came from.

Louisiana Voyages By Martha R. Field
Edited by Joan McLaughlin and Jack McLaughlin
University Press of Mississippi 2006
ISBN 1-57806-826-6
220 pages

In 1881 Martha Field began writing a Sunday column under the pseudonym of Catharine Cole for the Daily Picayune that ran for more than 10 years. She traveled all over Louisiana by rail, carriage and an exotic array of boats to write about the people and places in the state. She seems to have excelled at writing about the areas most often overlooked by northern journalists and truly embraced the rural way of life in a manner that is quite staggering when you consider the period in which she lived. Field accomplished a great deal with her columns, and her work serves as a time capsule for places long gone and rarely remembered. In 2006 the University Press of Mississippi handsomely collected many of her columns and presented them in The Louisiana Voyages: The Travel Writings of Catharine Cole

I was attracted to this title solely for the opportunity to peek into Louisiana’s past from a unique vantage point. Martha Field did not have any agenda in her writing and seems to be solely interested in telling an honest story about what she saw in her region as she traveled. Editors Joan and Jack McLaughlin are careful to point out as they introduce certain pieces that she was not a woman necessarily ahead of her time in all respects; Field might have been bold enough to travel as few women did but she clearly saw boundaries between the races and sexes that modern readers will not recognize. These are historical documents, however, and while I was delighted to discover Field was not a rampant racist, I was not surprised that she lacked an awareness of civil rights. The book is less about how people live together in southern society then it is about how they survive in rural areas and maintain viable standards of living which include economically successful towns. It is unfortunate that her ability to discern much about the lives of people in the timber trade in Livingston Parish is not evident in the work of so many contemporary journalists; Field was focused on the nuts and bolts of ordinary living in a manner that is often lost in the rush to find the next big thing today.

The columns are organized by location, and the editors provide a welcomed set of endnotes for each chapter explaining specifics about people and places that Field mentions with ease but will likely be unknown today. She writes about the island homes of the fishermen of Grand Isle, a place she visited before it was devastated by an 1893 hurricane, a school for young women in Natchitoches Parish (an endeavor she clearly admired) and the beautiful homes in the Bayou Lafourche. Turtle farming, for the purposes of soups for wealthy northerners, shows up in the column on Terrebonne Parish and, when writing about Morgan City, she covers a Cajun wedding on Grand Lake. Here’s a bit of what it was like to arrive at a wedding by boat:

No roofs were in sight, nor a friendly pennon of smoke, but from all parts of the lake, starting forth as it were from the haunts of the hunted alligators, were strange craft, all apparently in chase after us, and rapidly closing around us. A curious rigger or socket was fixed up in each boat and a man stood up rowing at a great rate, his body moving at his task as a wash-woman’s does over her board. Each oarsman was bareheaded and in his shirt sleeves, and the spectacle of the boats scudding towards us, the white shirts shining in the sunset, the wind puffing the sleeves full like sails was as curious as pretty. These were all guests hastening to the wedding.

The book is a curious collection of observations about weather and climate and almost a geography lesson on valuable natural resources. Field is meticulous about noticing each town and how well it is maintained and uses this as a barometer for an area’s economic success. She writes about who is doing well and who is suffering and points to the dozens of ways that people make do in places that seem to provide less than what is required for anything beyond basic survival. The book celebrates the creative and hard working and is endlessly optimistic about Louisiana’s future. She does note the threats and damage from hurricanes and the potential for too large an environmental impact, but her columns are quite hopeful and, considering the times in which they are written, that is exactly what the reader should expect.

I came away from Louisiana Voyages with an enormous amount of respect for Martha Field. I really can’t imagine how she managed to travel to so many out of the way places in the late 19th century when even going between major cities in the state was no simple feat. Her dedication to her column and her job is really quite remarkable — she was really quite remarkable — and I’m delighted that the University of Mississippi saw the value in Field’s work. Anyone writing a history of the south or just interested in Louisiana should seek out this book. Martha Field was there, and she wrote down what she saw in a highly informed and readable manner. The lady had a gift. Rediscovering her is like rediscovering the state itself.

AUUUGGGHH!

He's not in a suit. He's not in a tie. He's not dapper in the least.

It's Lemony Snicket and he's all.... tracksuitty.

I need to go lie down. I can't deal with this today.