Festival Events

This session will cover the joys, pitfalls and potentials of self-publishing. Both Himelstein and Shannon got their starts in the world of self-publishing and have remained practitioners even as they guide University of New Orleans Press in their day jobs. Shannon recently published Trace-Chasing: Race, Place, Time & Emmett Till, her most comprehensive zine to date, while Himelstein has just published Let Us Die in New Ways: The Gospel according to Moses.

The crime novel has always scrutinized how the justice system works, either by shining an unflinching light on its pitfalls, biases, and injustices or by showing it running as smoothly as a Swiss watch. With more and more public scrutiny on crime and policing, does the crime writer have a responsibility to show the system working or to expose its inconsistencies and flaws? When does justice cross the line into vengeance? Is taking the law into one’s own hands ever justified, or is it merely vigilantism? Join us as five amazing authors discuss writing about crime, the justice system, and how their work explores and reflects those fine lines between personal morality and human justice. J.M. Redmann moderates this discussion with S.A. Cosby, Margot Douaihy, Genevieve Essig, and Michael Nava.

Historian Douglas Brinkley, the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and professor of history at Rice University, discusses the lifetime of research and scholarship that has led to his most recent book, Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening. Brinkley’s book continues his exploration of the legacies of Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt,  Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. It is a stirring portrait of the Long Sixties (1960-1973) and the writers such as Rachel Carson and activists who opened doors of environmental awareness, and how their work informs and illuminates the great climate change questions of our time. Veteran journalist Errol Laborde conducts the interview.

In this discussion, writers in fields from sports to collecting explore the joys and pitfalls of choosing to write about what they do for pleasure. Does it turn something you do for relaxation into well, work? Does it add a performative aspect to what was pure experience? How do you add to a field that may already have been explored? In short, does it make it more or less fun? And in all these fields, there are certain questions to be explored—amateur and professional status, the frustration of learning, gaining expertise, the demands of practice, the thrill of the hunt, the sense of satisfaction or mastery. Whether you’re a fly-fisher or a book collector, these writers will talk about the emotional intensity that illuminates this sort of writing. Panelists includeTyler Bridges, Jacinta Saffold, and Christopher Schaberg, with moderator Miles Harvey.

As politics becomes more polarized, has journalism followed suit? With the rise of cable news and online sources that didn’t exist a few years ago, where people get their news matters more than ever. And traditional news organizations often find themselves in the trenches with advocacy journalism, whether in coverage of politics or civil rights or the environment. Veteran political columnist Stephanie Grace moderates a panel of journalists who have written for a number of platforms, including Jarvis DeBerry, Pam Radtke, and Katy Reckdahl

Often a great puzzle in writing a short story has to do with determining how much of the characters’ histories–their pasts–has to be included. The traditional method for doing so employs flashbacks, often at the start of the story. We’ll talk about long time and short time in short stories, using examples from writers like Alice Munro and Evan Connell, and we’ll have a Q&A at the end to talk about other specific examples, including your own.

“You can read a city the way you read a book,” geographer Richard Campanella once said, and he has shown us the layers of meaning in the New Orleans landscape. In this panel, Campanella joins C.W. Cannon, who writes about the social and political landscape, T.R. Johnson, who maps the literary landscape in A Writer’s City, and Peter Wolf, whose Sugar King gives us a history of New Orleans Jewish community through the life of a single individual, his great-great grandfather Leon Godchaux. These talented and very different  writers explore the various lenses through which they view our complicated and beautiful urban territory. Moderated by David Johnson.

As book banning efforts grow and spread, with moves to suppress AP courses in African-American history and decrease access to LGBTQ materials, writers must become ever stronger champions of their work. How do we support libraries and bookstores that are right on the front lines of these efforts? This panel surveys the scene from a variety of perspectives. Kerri Westenberg has covered book banning for 64 Parishes. Gregg Shapiro writes for numerous LGBTQ pubications, and Sonnet Ireland has served as president of the Louisiana Library Association. Chris Smith, director of adult programming at the Jefferson Parish Library moderates.

Louisiana’s environmental problems are so numerous that they’ve inspired writers to address such issues as climate change, the management of rivers and water resources, and the hope for survival in the frequent storms. All of these complicated interactions between humans and landscape make for writing that is as compelling as a novel—and as terrifying as a horror novel. Here, some of the best practitioners of the craft discuss topics as varied as the fate of a single bird, the shrimping industry, or a much loved and well-observed bayou landscape. Panelists included Rien Fertel, emma x lirette, and Kelby Ouchley, with moderator Oliver Houck.

Award-winning author Rebecca Makkai plumbs the depths of memory and trauma in I Have Some Questions for You, her highly anticipated new novel, which Jennifer Egan calls “a true literary mystery—haunting and hard to put down.” C. Morgan Babst, author of The Floating World, will join Makkai in a conversation about the ability of fiction to explore complex cultural issues, while keeping us at the edges of our seats.

One of Tennessee Williams’s characters in Vieux Carré tells the audience, “Writers are shameless spies.” Not only was Williams a sponge when it came to people, he also soaked up the atmosphere, history, speech, weather, politics, and cultural memory of the places where he lived and wrote. The choice of where he set his plays and stories was never random, and it always served as a foundation for his characters and stories. On this panel, Margit Longbrake will talk about the distinct and unmistakable influence of New Orleans on Williams, Tom Mitchell will discuss the twenty years he lived in St. Louis and the often-overlooked impact that Missouri and the Midwest had on Williams’s writing, and David Kaplan will examine Williams’s deep artistic and personal connection to Provincetown, Massachusetts. Thomas Keith will moderate. 

How does an idea become a book? LSU Press acquisitions editor Jenny Keegan will shed light on the book publishing process from concept to proposal to publication, sharing tips and examples on how to craft proposals and manuscripts, how to find the right publisher for your work, and what to expect when working with your editor and other publishing staff.  This sesion will primarily focus on the types of book LSU Press publishes (nonfiction for general audiences) and will include ample time for Q&A.

Mark Bologna, host of the Beyond Bourbon Street podcast, presents a beginner’s guide, discussing reasons to consider podcasting (pros & cons), expectations, how to start, including things you need to do, equipment, and how to publish and market, as well as the pitfalls. Bring your questions!

This session will discuss techniques useful for writing novels, short story collections, memoirs, and poetry books. Specifically, this talk will consider New Orleans’ unique historical and cultural aspects as well as how those aspects influence our writing. Some of the time will be devoted to in-class exercises and open conversation.

The lure of writing historical fiction is great—the pleasures of diligent research and discovery, the joy of escape to another time, perhaps another place. These four writers describe what drew them to the varied historical periods into which they immersed themselves and what it was like to live in them for a while. Whether it’s Vietnam or ancient Rome, you’ll find yourself transported. Panelists include Katy Simpson Smith, Elisa M. Speranza, E.M. Tran, and Kitty Zeldis, with C. Morgan Babst, moderating.

In this session, we’ll take a closer look at elements of prose style. We’ll look at a few prose examples, paying special attention to the sentence and the paragraph. We’ll also discuss word choice, sentence length, paragraph length, syntax, compression, and expansion. Last, we’ll talk about the ways poetry might help us gain a deeper understanding of stylistic choices in prose.

In this discussion, writers in fields from sports to collecting explore the joys and pitfalls of choosing to write about what they do for pleasure. Does it turn something you do for relaxation into well, work? Does it add a performative aspect to what was pure experience? How do you add to a field that may already have been explored? In short, does it make it more or less fun? And in all these fields, there are certain questions to be explored—amateur and professional status, the frustration of learning, gaining expertise, the demands of practice, the thrill of the hunt, the sense of satisfaction or mastery. Whether you’re a fly-fisher or a book collector, these writers will talk about the emotional intensity that illuminates this sort of writing. Panelists includeTyler Bridges, Jacinta Saffold, and Christopher Schaberg, with moderator Miles Harvey.

In 1989, the members of this panel met each other at the University of Michigan, where four of them were pursuing their MFAs and one of them was teaching. During the subsequent three decades, they’ve kept in close touch, reading each other’s work, supporting each other’s careers, celebrating each other’s successes and offering consolation and guidance in the face of each other’s inevitable setbacks. This panel sets out to answer the question of how writers can build and maintain a permanent cohort of like-minded colleagues. Panelists include Charles Baxter, Williams Lychack, Michael Paterniti, and Cammie McGovern, with moderator Miles Harvey.

The powerful experience of reading a memoir is often finding meaning in lives not our own, and making powerful connections with people so different from ourselves. This panel includes four memoirists: David Armand recalls his tumultuous and violent family life; Chris Belcher chronicles her life as a sex worker in Los Angeles; Grammy-nominated Scott Billington revisits a long and distinguished career in music; and Mark Chesnut pursues his career as a travel writer as he struggles to care for his ailing, aging mother. Moderator David Swatling draws these writers out on the human conditions that inspired their work.

In this session, we’ll explore telling stories through the senses, through atmosphere, through objects: with the New Orleans-set novel The Awakening as our centerpiece, we’ll consider Kate Chopin’s approach to mood, tone, setting. Shadow-play and ambience can do more than just set the scene, but also contribute to the narrative, to character development, and poetically communicate what’s at the heart of your work.

“History” and “fiction” appear on different shelves in libraries and bookstores, but they meet in the swampy ground of “Historical Fiction.” The term itself seems to contradict itself—we think, “Either it happened or it didn’t happen.” Yet both history and fiction require the writer to take raw facts and impose an interpretation on them. In this craft session, Tom Piazza will explore the tricky territory between factual accuracy and imaginative license. Is there even such a thing as “historical fiction?” Where does research stop and creative imagination take over? And how long ago do events need to have happened for us to call them “historical?”

Go to any writers’ conference and during the usual question and answer session, someone will ask the inevitable question: Where do you get your ideas? Responses are many and varied. Some writers can’t imagine running out of ideas, worried they don’t have time to write the books they already have in mind. Others describe the need to be in a state akin to grace, where ideas flow through you to fruition. It’s a different process for everyone. These writers—all working in various forms—describe how they cultivate inner readiness for the creative moment and the rich inner lives necessary for the imaginative resources of their work. Panelists include S.A. Cosby, Caroline Frost,  Cheryl A. Head, and Timothy Schaffert, with Olivia Claire Friedman moderating.

Young adult readers are discerning in their reading habits—they know what they like—and they are a growing force in the book market. How to please readers who are past the point of picture books and middle-grade tales, but not quite ready for adult fiction? Some writers do it by addressing social problems head on; others turn to fantasy and worldbuilding. But all successful YA authors develop characters with power and agency. What particular set of skills do these writers bring to their work? Cammie McGovern moderates a discussion with YA authors Marti Dumas, Daniel Jose Older, Farrah Rochon, and Brittany N. Williams.