March, 2009

If it’s not too late for the T-P to have stuff this morning about last weekend’s Tennessee Williams and New Orleans Literary Festival, then it’s not too late for me to post about it.

On Friday, several writers held master classes, but at $25 a pop, I couldn’t afford to go to more than one. I saved my cash for Saturday, when the special guests would make appearances throughout the day at panel discussions.

After jazz funeral music and an announcement to stop by the mint julep stand out front, the “Southern Gothic” panel began. The panelists: Rick Bragg, author of I Am a Soldier too: The Jessica Lynch Story and several memoirs about his southern family and former NYTimes reporter (he resigned after being accused of passing off the work of interns as his own, which didn’t come up at all during the discussion); John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and former Esquire editor and columnist; Tim Gautreaux, a short story writer and novelist who has been published in the Atlantic, Harper’s and GQ; and Amanda Boyden, a midwest transplant and writing professor at the University of New Orleans.

Explaining “Southern gothic,” Berendt said it should be called “Southern grotesque” because of the focus on metal and physical ailments, i.e. one-armed, one-legged, one-whatever men. “Is healthcare really that bad in the South?” he asked, and the room erupted in laughter. All agreed that Southern storytelling involves a love for detail. Stories up North are good, just not as good. Berendt said the difference is that when you talk to people in the South, you have a conversation; it’s not a Q&A. People want to have a conversation, and before you know it, they’ve answered all the questions you didn’t have to ask.

The room emptied for the next panel about feature writing with the editor of New Orleans’s Gambit weekly, Katherine Bouton, former deputy editor for the NYT Magazine and current NYT books/theater editor and Chris Hedges, former NYT reporter and author of several books about combat in the Middle East. After arguing over what constituted a feature, the discussion moved to the future of feature writing and whether or not it exists. Bouton thinks it does, online, and that sparked a whole discussion about online journalism.

Hedges slammed online journalism and blogs. I was disappointed that he took such a strong position against moving online. Sure, there are bloggers and Huffington Post, etc, but if you can’t acknowledge how the medium and the market has developed, how can you move forward? This is 2009 — it’s a few years too late to be in denial. He’s lucky that he’s at a point in his career where he can bash the Internet, keep his words in print and afford to eat every day. Student journalists are being taught to write and produce all sorts of content for the web. Print publications have been figuring out how to move to the web for years. Online content is a given, it’s just unknown how it can make money for the people who produce it.

David Simon, best known for writing/producing “The Wire” and a former Baltimore journalist, spoke with fellow producer Eric Overmyer about their latest pilot project, “Tremé,” which follows musicians returning to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. All of his fictionalized work is highly reported, a skill leftover from his journalism career. For Tremé, Simon used Jed Horne’s book “Breach of Faith” to map a timeline. He did admit to cheating on some things, like the return of Hubig’s fried pies. Add screenwriting to the list of alternative careers for a journalism grad.

When my sister was down here last year, she got her fortune told in the French Quarter by a woman with four teeth. My sister insisted that I seek her out when my mom was visiting this week to have my own fortune told. I don’t break promises, so yesterday we hunted down a fortune teller. It was a breezy, overcast day, so the pickings were slim, but we chose a woman with a head scarf over an old man with pink hair.

As soon as we sat down, I noticed the huge mounds of dirt underneath each fingernail on each hand. She also had several scabs and sores — symptoms of secondary syphilis, my aunt pointed out later. Ew.

“I’m not psychic. I’m empathetic,” she said. “I can read your emotions and get a reading out of that.”

Mom went first. The woman underestimated her age because at one point told mom that when she reached 45, her childhood dream of the perfect life (house, husband, kids, job) would come true. Later I reminded mom that at age 45, those parts of the childhood dream life were there. She could have four kids — she has three, I guess you could count the dog. She was right on about the new job, a possible move and a large financial issue in the future (brother moving home? selling the house? who knows?!?)

My turn. My mom struggled to stay seated across the table while the woman told me a lot things that were true or close to it. Interesting highlights:

• In the last six months I’ve worried about finances, but I’ll be okay because I have family to support me.
• I was a good student and could do higher math but didn’t like it.
• In the next two months, something I’ve been working very hard on will pay off.
• I’m stubborn with a long fuse. I can put up with a lot of crap, but when I can’t anymore, watch out.
• I will meet a man who will do all sorts of wonderful things for me, even if he can’t tell me why.

Dead wrong on a few things: the last six months have been a time of fertility, thinking about marriage, I’m always the bride, etc.

What an entertaining woman — yelled at times and was quite creative in her examples for what the cards/lines in my hand meant. Apparently my fingertips indicate an aptitude for crafts, gardening and wielding a blunt object. And I’ll live to be 90 and won’t have to worry about Alzheimer’s in the last years of my life (“You’ll be able to pee in your pocket if you want to.”) With my family history, I hope that last one is true.

Springtime in Louisiana means festivals every weekend. A few weekends ago I went to a festival at a plantation west of here. If this weekend hadn’t been filled with so many visitors, I would have gone to the Oyster Festival in Amite. (Think county fair with raw, chargrilled and fried oysters. And they crown a Festival King and Pearl.)

April brings two biggies for New Orleans: the weekend French Quarter Festival and the 7-day New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, aka JazzFest. I will miss some of both because I’ll be in Missouri the week in between to defend and wrap things up (and attend the first ever journalism school prom). But there is so much at each that even missing a few days won’t make me miss everything.

JazzFest is a music celebration of Mardi Gras proportions. Everyone starts talking about it from the day the paper prints the complete schedule. The JazzFest poster is another buzzworthy topic — who created it? what’s on it? or who’s on it?

This year’s poster was recently revealed to be the work of local artist James Michalopoulos. I’ve seen the painting: musician/producer Allen Toussaint jamming in the French Quarter. A few weeks ago I wrote a feature about his funky home — a warehouse he hollowed out and built various levels from the basement to the roof. Art is everywhere. He painted the fridge bright purple. The toilet paper holder is made from two gardening gloves filled with cement, protruding from the wall and cradling a fake humerus bone as a rod for TP. Every ledge or shelf in the house is full of stuff: carnival throws, paintings, vases, trinkets. The original JazzFest canvas is at least 6 feet tall and hung next to his dining room table (a piece of painted plywood atop two metal garbage cans). He was told to keep his work secret, yet an image was posted to the JazzFest Web site.

The T-P art critic expressed his disappointment that Michalopoulos was commissioned to paint the poster — this is his fifth. Michalopoulos talks about the poster in this T-P video, taped in his other studio, not his home. For a look inside of that, you’ll have to wait until the April art and music issue of New Orleans Homes and Lifestyles.

Today was week three of Children’s PressLine. Last week, my aunt made me take my cousin because she needs a spring activity and she didn’t play softball this year. About 8-10 kids come pretty regularly, ranging in age from 8 to 13 — Eugenie is the oldest at 16. The kids read newspapers, looking for stories that are missing the youth voice. Then we talk about how we would write the story from a youth angle, who we would interview and what questions we would ask.

We’ve spent the last few weeks talking about the interview: what is it and how do we do it? The program really pushes the 5 W’s and H (who, what, when, where, why and how) to come up with questions. The hope is that these questions will avoid one word answers.

These types of questions also make good interview questions for qualitative researchers. In research methods class, we learned the benefits of doing structured interviews where you stick to a set of questions and refrain from giving any feedback. The unstructured interview lets you deviate from the set of prepared questions to ask follow ups, but still requires the interviewer to withhold personal opinion or commentary.

I prepared questions, printed them out and brought them to each interview, but it was impossible to stick to them. Sometimes it made more sense to ask a follow up question and skip the next three. Other times, like with David Hammer, the subject answered all the prepared questions without being asked.

Listening to my own voice has been painful. Many times I asked leading questions rather than open-ended questions. However, I found this effective for two reasons: 1) I didn’t have to waste time pretending I didn’t know what happened even though I had read about it extensively and 2) it gave the journalist a chance to expand on the topic I was interested in. I admit that second reason was risky, but more often than not it produced an insightful answer.

All semester I’ve been walking the line between journalist and researcher. But when I sat down across the table from one of my own kind, it was difficult to take that step back. I wanted to seem like I had done my homework. I wanted to make them comfortable with me. I wanted to hear stories. I couldn’t do that successfully, in my own sense of success out of this project, if I had stuck to a structured interview, asking questions like a research robot.

On Sunday Aunt Mary took me to her friend’s St. Joseph’s Day altar. It reminded me of a Midwestern graduation open house: coolers of pop cans, large amounts of baked pasta and salads, a sheet cake, old people you don’t know sit around the TV. Instead of a shrine to the graduate, an altar decorated with crosses, statues of saints, bread, cookies and lucky dried fava beans. A priest blessed the altar (and aforementioned beans) earlier that morning.

The Catholic feast is a Sicilian tradition honoring St. Joseph, husband to the Virgin Mary and patron saint of the family and workers. The tradition orginated in times of famine, when people prayed for more food. From my own experience, it hasn’t changed much: we ate full plates of stuffed artichokes, pasta and olive salad, made-from-scratch, and went home with a bag of cookies — a small portion of the 1000 that she made in the days leading up to the feast.