Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

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The South as a territory of narrative composition, therefore, is at times influential and at other times merely a backdrop to the ego that pictures itself on that soil. While region and landscape certainly tie into how lives get formed in the South, there are also other factors that shape narratives. I am thinking specifically of natural disasters and how they define the composition of life narratives. More specifically, I am thinking about Hurricane Katrina and the devastating impact it had upon lives in Louisiana, Mississippi, and the broader area of the Gulf Coast. For years after the Hurricane did its unprecedented damage in 2005, narrators across the South were recounting their experiences during that time period. Professors from various universities, professional writers, and just plain folks penned their responses to the devastation that Katrina heaped upon their lives. Dillard professor and well-known African American literary scholar Jerry W. Ward Jr. published The Katrina Papers: A Journey of Trauma and Recovery (2008), a memoir that contains a mixture of theory and artistic forms, including poetry. Joanne V. Gabbin, founder of the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, sponsored a write-in of sorts, in which anyone affected by Katrina could compose a poem about the experience or compose a prose narrative. Gabbin also edited Mourning Katrina: A Poetic Response to Tragedy in 2009. Katrina has arguably been the most written about natural disaster that ever occurred on southern United States soil.