Three Answers: Tom Piazza

by Dick Donahue, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 12/19/2005

Today's Three Answers are from Tom Piazza, whose latest book, Why New Orleans Matters, was published last month by Regan Books. Piazza will be reading in New York tonight (7:00 at Half King, 505 West 23rd St), and tomorrow (7:00 at KGB Bar, 85 East Fourth St.) before returning to New Orleans.

PW: Why does New Orleans matter?

TP: New Orleans is, in my vision of it, a small model of all the best of America. You have a truly multicultural city, in which all social and ethnic and economic levels of society have somehow managed to fashion a distinct and beautiful culture out of the tensions among their differences—the tensions among the French and the Spanish and African-Americans and Caribbean people and Italian and Irish and everybody else. In a larger sense that is the story of the United States culture also, but in New Orleans the expressions of that culture have included jazz, rhythm and blues, a distinctive cuisine and so much more. And an attitude towards life that includes a spiritual resilience which has spoken to people around the world—for a couple of hundred years, it might be added.

PW: Will it be possible for New Orleans to regain its former glory, and what will that take?

TP: If there’s the political and economic will to restore the levees correctly, then yes, the city can come back. It will come back somewhat differently, of course, because so much of the population that has given New Orleans its most striking character through the years has been scattered to the winds, and many of them will not come back. But the majority of people do want to return—and they will, if they feel there will be a city to come back to. That’s the mechanical answer. The answer beyond that is that if any city in the world can muster what it would take to come back from a disaster like this, then New Orleans can. Any city where people dance in the streets at funerals to celebrate the continuity of life can come back from something like this. But it’s going to depend on the entire country giving back some of that extraordinary love that New Orleans has put out for all these years—and I guess I’m speaking specifically about the federal government.

PW: How did this book come about?

TP: In the week after Katrina, my editor at Regan Books, Cal Morgan, called me in Missouri, where we had evacuated, and asked if there was anything that they could do for us. I said, ‘Well, I should probably write something about this.’ Because I was watching this disaster on television—like tens of thousands of other people from New Orleans—and going a little crazy. So we quickly formulated the format of the book. We knew it had to be short and very personal and directly from the heart—a book about why New Orleans had to survive. When Cal asked if I could write it in a month, I realized that that was the only way to write it—the only way to capture the immediacy of the event and all the emotions surrounding the event. So I wrote the book in two and a half weeks in a cotton gin in Malden, Missouri.