I myself don’t know what it means to miss New Orleans. I never left.

As I now, finally, have power and am able to read my September e-mails, I find that scribes from Carlos Fuentes to Richard Ford have written about what this place meant to them. And, I hope, and believe, what it will continue to mean.

But while many one-time and part-time residents of our city weigh in, I have not yet read anything from the hundred or so of us who stayed here in the French Quarter, those too stupid with love for this place to leave it for Katrina. Those who stayed for fear the city we know, and perhaps even the love we have for it, might slip away.   

We are now finally, finally exhaling, exhausted, alone, even lonely, as returning neighbors flood into these spaces we had to ourselves, rip our city’s attention away from us, walk our always cracked and crooked sidewalks, now more cracked and crooked, and barges again slide through our river’s panorama. The ghosts of we who never left can only nod and wink at each other as we skulk through these new shadows.

It will be years before we can distill all that has happened into vocabulary and voice. And years before all will stop happening. But, now, we need restoration. Not renovation. You restore, you don’t renovate, your spirit.

Between my apartment and the Mississippi River lies only a Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum. Since it opened, I’ve watched the young people who worked there, leaning against their building below the hanging Ripley’s sign, dawdling away their workdays gazing vacantly at drifting clumps of tourists.

Outside right now, there are, instead, young men in fatigues standing on that same corner, tapping their fingers on their M-16s, ticking away their own work routine. Yesterday the Ripley’s sign was still on the sidewalk beside them, where it has been since Katrina pulled it down. They told me it was going to the dump along with the other displaced urban décor on the curb—tree limbs, garbage bags, a lamppost. So I hauled it up to my apartment, stuck it on my mantel here beside me. Believe it.

As the army does now, the kids at Ripley’s spent many slow hours there. People did not come to New Orleans to see a franchise they could see in New York or Vegas, intriguing family entertainment as their museums may be, nor to eat at the Fatburger next door.

Many came knowing only what they had read about us. Our literature is a reason eight million people stayed in our hotels and ate at our restaurants every year. The men and women who have transformed themselves into writers here have etched New Orleans into the world’s consciousness.

From French Romanticists like Chateaubriand to Whitman to Faulkner to Ford, for almost three hundred years authors have penned an indelible, silent music from this Crescent City’s heart. As Andrei Codrescu, a newer transplant, pointed out, “If New Orleans went into the memorial plaque business for all the writers who ever lived here they would have to brass-plate the whole town.”

The French Quarter is the oldest Bohemia in the United States. Our credentials surpass New York’s Greenwich Village or San Francisco’s Tenderloin. We’ve seen three hundred years’ worth of flood and fire, plague and war. And we can see another three hundred, stack those memorial brass plates three deep. But our writers must come home first, bring others, and inspire future writers to come. Believe it or not, they do have something to come back to.

But it is only natural that, for now, exodus consumes headlines and hearts. And profound, shame-filled grief for the many no one could save, as well as for those who may never come back.

A few days after Katrina, I walked alongside a mother pulling her baby in a plastic bin through waist-deep water from the Superdome to the convention center, and sat beside a father just returned in a new Escalade to his Lakeview home, ten feet deep in mold and mud, while he smiled, strained to remember the faces in his family photos now gone. Both of these people are today in Houston, their new home.

Mud has always been an indelible part of our landscape—whether it’s our river, convulsing with the sediment and garbage of a country, or the Mardi Gras muck three feet deep along Bourbon Street’s gutters minutes after midnight on Ash Wednesday, the embodiment of human excess in all its forms. But for the last month, mud became our landscape, an inescapable common ground.

So those who do come back must dig. Where we can, we need to incorporate into our city what is left, painful though it will be, whether that be a destroyed Ripley’s sign or a neighborhood. We cannot wipe it clean away, and put in its place a new string of franchises or casinos.

We’ve done every bit we can to hold down the fort. Now, writers of the past, present, and future, it is your turn. Return, grab your brooms and shovels, sponges and mops, and get to work, as we here already have. If you need to borrow any of these things, give me a call.

Until Katrina, I often rattled and wobbled through these streets on my half-busted ’56 women’s Schwinn bicycle, weaving through trash and vagrants, limos and horse carriages, stopping everywhere along the way, sharing stories of yesterday and creating those of today to be told tomorrow on the same corners, in bars, cafés, and courtyards. But for the last few weeks, I’ve rattled and wobbled through ash-gray, empty shells of neighborhoods, their only color the red spray paint marking the number of bodies and dead dogs inside homes (which is almost always zero), neighborhoods I never had the chance to know, and ones that may never again inspire stories. The warehouse that stored my publishing company’s books, now molded and crusted in sediment, is in such a neighborhood. But, just as those books will be reprinted, those places that can be salvaged await restoration. And beg their future tales to be told.

Why have these places played muse to so many writers? There are plenty of answers, clichés, all of them true, and plenty of words incessantly invoked to describe the literary appeal of New Orleans: Desire. Seduction. Uniqueness. Timelessness. History. Eccentricity. Diversity. Culture. Religion. Hedonism. Contradictions. Intoxication. Laissez les  bonnes temps roule—let the good times roll. The city that care forgot. The city that forgot to care.

Unnoticed by his phalanx of security, I watched from my third-floor apartment window as our president used a couple of these clichés himself. Photo perfect, he stood in Jackson Square to give his seminal address on this emergency, just feet from Ripley’s. Behind him loomed St. Louis Cathedral, its clocked stopped at 6:26, as Katrina left it, and in front of that, also behind him, another president, Andrew Jackson, upon his veined horse.

The longer you gaze at Jackson’s monument, the more unsure of its momentum you become. The general appears not quite sure if he should charge forward, following the American tendency toward endless reinvention; backward into the swamp of yesterday; or rear in the glory of what we still have today, however dirty it is.

Well, the clock is moving again. Jackson, of course, has stayed put. But the city again turns around him, creaking slowly now.

Tennessee Williams called this a place where poets “huddle together for some dim, communal comfort.” He said, “I have been a part of their groups because of the desperate necessity for the companionship of one’s own kind.” This is the flesh and blood over the bones of affordable living that is Bohemia. Those who can come home, please do. Be the voice to stop the rising tide of museum-quality preservation and corporate honky-tonks. The world may be holding its breath. But it is you who must take the first step, home, now.

America’s oldest Bohemia is taking a last gasp before reincarnation. Never has a place felt stranger. And never have I felt more at home, nor has home ever been more precious to me. We cannot afford to lose the things that have made this city. And we cannot afford to lose those who have written it.

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans? Well, now she misses you.

Believe it.

Joshua Clark is the editor of Light of New Orleans Publishing. Proceeds of his company's first book, French Quarter Review, now go to KARES (Katrina Arts Relief and Emergency Support).