As Not Seen in NOLA - My Writing

I've been working on my own writing lately, which involves editing two almost finished collections of short stories, a novella, and numerous other texts. The first collection of short stories - "The Flower Vendor's Daughter and Other Stories" have been described as magical realism and take place in New Haven, Connecticut, where I watched and was part of a subculture of artists trying to survive in the oppressive shadow of Yale. Some of those stories were incorporated in my thesis when I was a graduate student at University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop. I wasn't happy with the collection when I graduated and spent several years trying to purge the conventional rhetoric that saturated the MFA program from my creative process. After years of drinking to deal with the angst I experienced in the MFA program, I got sober. This was not an easy process, and I spent the first two years after Hurricane Katrina trying to quit drinking. My sobriety date is August 11, 2007. By then, I'd moved on to writing about other topics, including covering Post Katrina issues for NOLAfugees in a series of articles that one could argue chronicled my own demise and rise from the proverbial gutter of alcoholism.

The first writing I completed sober includes a series of short stories titled "The Cyanide Hole," which are set in the toxic land of New Orleans immediately after Katrina. One could go so far as to refer to this collection as "A story of struggle, madness, addiction, rehabilitation and redemption in post-apocalyptic NOLA," which is similar to the description of Chris Rose's unwritten book, for which he raised over $50k in a Kickstarter campaign.

Substitute "domestic violence" and "single women" for "fame" and "fatherhood" and perhaps any Kickstarter I potentially pitched would illicit enough pity for me to raise a grand or two.  But I'm not good at fundraising, which should be obvious if one examines the past three years during which I spent all my wages on activism related activities. During this time, I neglected my own writing to chronicle social justice movements in New Orleans. My citizen journalism has been published on this blog and on whosestreets.tumblr.com.

Chris Rose's Kickstarter and the backlash Michael Patrick Welch has received for writing about Rose this week have inspired me to complete my own Post Katrina book, which is almost finished.

So hello world, I wrote a book about struggle, madness, addiction, rehabilitation, and redemption in Post Katrina New Orleans. This collection of short stories is fictitious and portions can be read on my blog Postcards of The Hanging.  These are only some of the stories included in that collection, and they're undergoing heavy editing.

I'm currently working in the service industry and teaching college writing as an adjunct and making time to put the final touches on my writing. I'm still participating in local grassroots activism as well. If you'd like to donate to help me wait tables a little less and write a little more, I have a GoFundMe donations campaign here: http://www.gofundme.com/smallaffair 

Or don't donate. I've been able to survive domestic violence, stay sober for almost eight years, write, teach, captain a Mardi Gras Krewe, participate in grassroots activism, struggle to work as a college educator in a state with crippling cuts to education, wait tables, and keep on writing when I can. I've never had a Kickstarter because I don't have the time to promote a Kickstarter and would rather be writing, making art, and documenting social justice issues.

I wrote to Chris Rose in 2010, and my email, which was never returned, included the following:

I have considered starting a blog about this because I am unfortunately writing in a vacuum. I've admired your ability to avoid said vacuum, so I decided to contact you to, if nothing else, update you about this "cultural phenomenon".   Do you ever give advice to writers who do not know how to find their place in the world? I understand if you are not interested in this type of correspondence, but any suggestions would be helpful, even if they involve social networking.


I don't fault Rose for not replying. He was busy navigating his way through his own demons. The local community has rescued him from the proverbial vacuum yet again, at least for a while. Hopefully New Orleans will be so kind to the other writers who have not been so fortunate.

With Love and Squalor,

Tara Jill