Q & A: Tom Piazza

Within weeks of the biblical disaster called Katrina, New Orleans novelist-turned-hurricane refugee Tom Piazza wrote an impassioned book-length essay, Why New Orleans Matters (just out in paperback), that celebrated the city's rich past and pleaded for its future survival. Now, on the storm's third anniversary, the author returns with City of Refuge (LJ 8/08), a novel that vividly recaptures the catastrophe and its aftermath through the stories of two families, the black Williamses and the white Donaldsons. The book is the 2008 selection for the One Book One New Orleans community-wide reading program.

What is the mood in the city today? How are the recovery efforts going?

This spring in general the city began to feel like itself. With public events like Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest, it started to feel like what we remembered New Orleans to be before the storm. On the other hand, there are still large parts of the city, like the lower Ninth Ward and Gentilly, where very little has happened. A lot of the obvious evidence of the storm has been cleared away. But if you didn't know what had been there before, you would think this was an undeveloped area where people are putting up a couple of houses.

It may be hard for those who don't live here to understand how three years on you can say that schools and other infrastructures and organizations that make up the grassroots cultural life of the city are still limping. If there's one thing that City of Refuge does, I hope, is to drive home to readers something of the human dimension and scale of what happened down here. This was not just a handful of houses that got flooded. This was something that cut so deep, and New Orleans is as complicated a cultural, social, and economic ecosystem as you can find in a major city. So when a devastation goes past a certain point, it's not just a matter of simply rebuilding.

You published Why New Orleans Matters fairly quickly after Katrina. How did the novel come about?

I had been traveling a lot after Why New Orleans Matters came out. In March of 2006, I had been asked to speak at Sweetbriar College in Virginia. What came along with the speaking engagement was a brief two-week residency at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. I was not thinking about writing a novel about Katrina. I was ready to move on to something else six months after the storm. But the book literally started writing itself. It was the most extraordinary writing experience I ever had. In about ten days at that residency, I wrote 10,000 words of the novel and a complete synopsis. That's not how I normally work. I never plan things beforehand. But with City of Refuge, I knew within two weeks the entire plotline and the characters and what their trajectories were for those six months, starting just before the storm and ending on Ash Wednesday.

Did you draw on your own personal Katrina experiences in writing the book?

As a novelist, the process by which you process information, thoughts, and emotions is a little mysterious, even to yourself. I don't think there was anything autobiographical, in orthodox terms, in the novel, but certainly I brought my own emotional experiences and reaction to Katrina to the writing of the book and to my understanding of the characters.

Your novel expresses anger at those people who blamed Katrina victims for their misfortune. What do you want readers to take from City of Refuge?

What novels can do is draw readers into the full human complexity of a situation so that they understand not only from the outside the events that transpired but also from the inside the full range of emotional affect. As far as New Orleans goes, I would just hope that nobody could read this book without developing a deeper and more human understanding of what happened to individuals in this disaster. In going through the experiences of these two different families, who both have to make profound choices of a very different sort, readers will have a better appreciation of what happened in New Orleans and more importantly in our country as a result of Katrina.

What is your next writing project?

I'm working on two projects: a collection of nonfiction pieces, some about music, some about literature and politics in a kind of before and after Katrina. The novel centers around a reclusive antiwar priest from the 1960s and a journalist who is searching for this guy. I'm having fun writing something in a very different track.