Saints and Sinners

This past weekend, I attended my second Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans. The chief topic on most of our minds was not literature, however, but the state of the city post-Katrina. It's nice to see that much of the French Quarter and other areas frequented by tourists are in good shape and look as if relatively little affected by the hurricane. However, there are other areas of the city, where tourists don't go (except on specially organized "Katrina tours") where the full extent of the damage is still visible and still fully felt, even two years later.

One of the biggest changes in New Orleans (besides the signs advertising buildings for sale everywhere) is the lack of tourists. During my stay, I noticed a significant drop in the crowds that used to throng Bourbon Street and Jackson Square. It's easy to walk right in and get a table at high-end restaurants that used to require a reservation made weeks in advance just to look at you. At one very toney restaurant, a customer sitting next to me turned to me and said, "Thank you for visiting our city." I heard the same refrain repeated everywhere.

One wonders why our president has not taken advantage of the famous "bully pulpit" our leaders are supposed to be so fond of, and does not exhort Americans to visit New Orleans and bring their tourist dollars. In his place, let me offer a plea to anyone who happens to read this blog. Please try to visit New Orleans, not just for them, but also for you. It's still a beautiful and special city where you can have a great time, and now is a great time to see it before the hordes of tourists inevitably (one hopes) return.

On a happier note, the Saints and Sinners festival was its old fun and inspirational self. Besides meeting and renewing acquaintances with other queer writers, I really enjoyed and learned a lot from the panels I went to. One highlight was a talk on creating character through the senses by novelist Jim Grimsley, who is always erudite on fiction and prose. He referred us all to two essential essays by Flannery O'Connor from the collection Mystery and Manners, which I ran out and bought. In it, O'Connor argues that fiction depends on recreating specific sensory impressions to convey experience and meaning to a reader.

I asked Grimsley, who teaches writing at Emory, what he might say to students who argue that they don't want to create a specific character or use specific language in their work. "That's just dumb!" he said. "When you eat a bowl of soup, you don't want it to taste like dishwater. You want it to taste like something, not nothing."

I'll be sure to remember that one for a long time.

PEN'd out

Dear Readers,

For the past week or so, I've been a guest blogger for the PEN World Voices International Literary Festival. For this entry, I'm inviting you to check out my thoughts on some of the panels I attended, including conversations on travel writing, immigration and Europe, and the state of Iraq.

These can all be found at: http://www.pen.org/MemberBlog.php/prmProfileID/19249

Happy Reading!

Best,
Aaron