On August 26, 2005, I taught my English classes at Xavier University in New Orleans, as usual, thinking that Hurricane Katrina would turn east toward Florida. By that evening, however, the situation had changed and the storm was bearing down on the Gulf Coast. So the next day I left my home in River Ridge, Louisiana, and began a monthlong journey that took me and my kids to three different cities in the state: first to Alexandria, in central Louisiana, then to Kinder and Marksville, and finally back to River Ridge, where I was fortunate to find that my home had suffered only minimal wind damage.

A couple of weeks before I was able to return home, however, I began thinking about what it means to write in the wake of a storm’s devastation, about how a hurricane evacuation affects the writing process. Words rushed forth like the storm’s waters.

I miss my computer. I miss the window that opens to a green and bushy yard. I miss the way my cats stretch their sleepy bodies against me now and again. I miss the knickknacks that surround the screen’s base like sacrificial offerings—a palm-size bottle adorned with the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a small gourd engraved with a picture of a Chinese ox, a moss-green rock from Mermaid Cove....

There was more, lots more, and it all led to something I thought to be profound and marvelous. But I never got around to writing any of it down, so I lost it. I was too busy pacing around my third “home” in two weeks’ time—a furnished apartment in my ex-husband’s hometown—trying to figure out where I had put things. I had to make a series of phone calls to get the gas turned on, the cable connected. I had to wash my laundry in the sink.

When I was finished hanging clothes in the shower to dry, I had to apply for food stamps and FEMA assistance. I had to dash to the local weekly newspaper office, where I was allowed to check my e-mail during lunch hour. If that wasn’t enough time (and it never was), I’d run over to the library and wait my turn for thirty minutes on the computer. By then it was time to drive through a maze of small towns and ripe fields to pick up my kids from a school so different from the one back home in River Ridge, all the while trying to decide whether I would cook dinner or just hit the nearby casino’s buffet instead.

Somewhere between wondering if my shirt was too wrinkled to wear, driving the thirty miles to the Wi-Fi hot spot I finally discovered, and chatting with the gracious Cajun locals who offered sympathy everywhere I turned, I bemoaned the fact that, once I got back home, I would lose the creative edge that I had unwittingly acquired by being a displaced writer. Once I got home, I reasoned, all the technical things I had taken for granted in my daily life would be back and ready to be unappreciated once more.

But I have been home for a while now, and I still have to hit a hot spot to check my e-mail. Snail mail now truly moves at a snail’s pace. The phone line has a death rattle that drowns out the dial tone. The laptop I thought to take from my office at Xavier won’t communicate with my home printer. I am unable to transfer all that I wrote on the laptop (when I still had that displaced edge) to my personal computer because the laptop doesn’t have a disk drive, and while it does have a USB port, I’m just not willing to buy computer hardware with my Red Cross debit card.

Before Katrina, everyone in the New Orleans area lived in fear of The Big One hitting, but no one ever really thought it would. As a result, whenever I evacuated, I packed a few things that I couldn’t do without, threw photographs and other irreplaceable items on the highest shelf, then left, never really thinking I’d be gone longer than three days. Each time, I packed my writer’s essentials, updating CDs and floppy disks before dumping them into a heavy, plastic, baby-blue makeup case that is so old the tag still states my parents’ address from 1968 as my own. I threw in whatever project I was working on, along with a few odds and ends of notes or research, and I was ready to go.    

Each time, I felt good knowing that, should worse come to worse, I had saved my work. Good or bad, it was all there. Never had I contemplated how displacement would affect my writing. But how can it not? Imagine being suddenly torn from your home, watching the city you love slowly die on national television, wondering if your home has survived, where your friends are staying, whether you have access to funds, if you will have a job when all is said and done. You hug strangers, cry in your food, stare at the TV, notice the strange way people look at you, and realize this is really happening.

After the shock of that realization, after mourning the hundreds of casualties, I realized that I had been given rich material for a dozen personal essays, raw inspiration for several books of water-logged poetry, and a hard-to-shake diaspora theme that will surely haunt my short stories for years to come. But my routine was interrupted, my sense of security was wrangled worse than a wind-twisted gutter, and my favorite workspace was, if not totally destroyed, then off-limits for weeks, maybe months. I lost more than a cozy spot by a window that opens to a view of a green and bushy yard. It was the routine of a life specifically molded to allow for such reflections, such outpouring, that was missing. I was, of course, one of the very lucky ones. Though I ultimately lost my tenure-track position, my children are safe, I am safe, and we are in our home.

New Orleans poet Gina Ferrara is another fortunate soul who felt the effects of the evacuation on her writing process. Leaving for Jackson, Mississippi, on a Sunday morning, she packed for a three-day stay, making sure to take along a CD that contained all her poetry. When the storm veered east at the last minute, Ferrara felt sure that she would be returning home soon enough. But “then the levee broke,” Ferrara says, “and I saw my city slipping away.”

The house where Ferrara and her husband, Jonathan Kline, stayed did not have a computer, and she did not own a notebook computer—a situation that has since changed, after weeks of being away from home—so she did as she used to do before all of this technology: She went to the store and bought a notebook, of the spiral-bound variety. “I bought a red notebook and some mechanical lead pencils, and I began writing poems by hand,” she says. “I found that this was a totally different process [from] using the computer. Writing poems by hand is slower and it seems to be more of a permanent process. The page looks like graffiti, with arrows pointing in up and down directions, scratch-outs, and edits done in different colored inks.”

Ferrara dealt with this slight adjustment to her writing process easily enough, and got used to waiting for her turn on the computers at the public library. It wasn’t until she tried to access her work on the disc that she realized she had grabbed the wrong CD. “My poems were in New Orleans and I didn't have a clue about [the condition of] my house,” she says.

It would be weeks later that Ferrara would learn that her poems were safe. The water filled her street, but did not enter her house. In the many days that passed before she was allowed the single, simple mercy of being able to enter her own home, she saw televised images of nearby houses that were ruined by water. It was at that point in the evacuation that Ferrara wrote in an e-mail: “I can only hope that my poems are alright. Somewhere in the sludge surrounding my house is a disc with all of my work, and, in the interim, I have my red notebook.”

Patrice Melnick was all set to celebrate the milestone that all writers look forward to—the publication of her first book—when Katrina hit. While Turning Up the Volume (Xavier Review Press) was indeed published, there was no time to celebrate, no days of wine and readings, and, for the moment, no way to access the books. They are stored in a building that was flooded, on the fenced-off campus of Xavier University. The books “are safe in the library, [which is] well above the flood stage,” says Robert Skinner, the managing editor of Xavier Review Press. Noting that it is already listed on Amazon.com, he wryly adds that the book is “officially out there now—we just can’t send any copies out.”

Melnick, who splits her time between New Orleans, where she is the associate editor of Xavier Review Press, and Grand Coteau, Louisiana, admits that she hasn’t given much thought to the book since evacuating the area for Katrina and then waiting out Hurricane Rita. “I don’t want to do any readings or press until I am more settled, and have access to the books,” she says. “I don't see any point in a book party until things are closer to normal and books are easier to get to. I am trying to get back to writing, too, but I'm frustrated by interruptions and computer problems.”

Melnick was quick to point out her blessings: “a second home with a bed to come to, a place to live, and a husband with a job away from New Orleans.” Adding to those the fact that her Crescent City home had only minimal wind damage, she considers herself very lucky indeed. But for ten days after Katrina passed, she and her husband shared their two-bedroom house with four adults, a three-year-old, and two dogs. After Rita stormed through, a friend parked his camper in her backyard, and another friend, healing from a broken heel—an injury sustained as he tried to throw a tarp over a blown-off roof—camped out on the sofa. The constant parade of evacuees was “good for writing material,” Melnick says, “but there was no private place to do that writing. And I felt so strange and unsettled inside, it was hard to just sit and write.”

When I contacted Thomas Bonner Jr., the chair of Xavier’s English department and the editor of Xavier Review Books, for information on how the storm had affected the publication of Turning Up the Volume, I also asked how his work, as a writer, had been interrupted by the storm. He wrote back to say that Melnick’s books were safe, that the official pub date would be put on hold, and so on. But his personal experience with the storm was far more disturbing. He and his wife, Judith, had been on the Gulf Coast celebrating their anniversary when it became apparent that Katrina was heading for New Orleans. There was no time to go home first. The Bonners left for their daughters’ homes in Georgia.

Back in New Orleans, the water rose and rose until only the rooftops of houses could be seen. Helicopters passed overhead as reporters waded through the streets, squinting into cameras to declare the city dead. Views of flooded blocks were eventually replaced with up-close shots of furniture covered with mold, cabinets toppled, refrigerators shifted, photographs ruined. Lives changed. Two weeks after Katrina hit, Bonner had yet to see his home. In an e-mail he wrote:

"As far as my own writing, I have been terribly distracted by losing my home and its contents, including our library and art. Forty years of research notes, drafts, and copies of my creative and scholarly work are gone, as are Judith’s art historical and art critical research and writings (and her sketches, paintings, and painting supplies). Our current mutual project, the biography of John Faulkner, has been dealt a serious blow as ten years of notes and documents are likely destroyed. It will be almost like starting anew. A draft of a long story set in Taos is gone. The only creative work I know to survive is a draft of a series of poems reflecting the landscape and culture of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico, which I had sent to my daughter in Georgia to read."

Waves of guilt crashed against prayers of gratitude as I sat there, staring at the screen. The old blue makeup case—stuffed with my work, my words, not all of them worth keeping, God knows, but all of them most certainly there as a piece-by-piece testament to what I’ve been trying to do as a writer, as a person, over the last twenty-something years of my life was shoved safely against a wall in an apartment haphazardly arranged and only momentarily mine. But mine, still, it was.

Katheryn Krotzer Laborde is a freelance writer in River Ridge, Louisiana.