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ESSAYS

No Bad Season: How to Love a New Orleans Summer
Snowballs, Creole tomatoes, and the hot, hot city all to ourselves

I like to say New Orleans has three good seasons, and summer isn’t one. There are the hurricanes, of course, and then ...read more

GARDEN AND GUN | June 21, 2023
Vigil Mass, or, A Friday Lunch at Galatoire’s
We’re all going to die — so we live. We have lunch.

I was halfway through my pompano when a man in a gray wool suit stood up from his table along the mirrored ...read more

RESY | September 22, 2021
Forecast of an Aftermath : On Hurrican Ian
“It does not matter if you lost a little or a lot, if you evacuated or rode it out. You have lived through something devastating”

August 31, 2021, two days after Hurricane Ida made landfall as a Category 4 just outside New Orleans, where I live, I ...read more

GARDEN AND GUN | September 29, 2022
A Louisiana Artist’s Beautiful Beasts: On Brandon Ballengé
Brandon Ballengée interprets the natural world in the lab, on canvas, and beyond

A hundred yards behind Brandon Ballengée’s art studio, in a former cane field near Lafayette, Louisiana, his dog lollops right over a ...read more

GARDEN AND GUN | February/March 2022
The Wildly Creative Way New Orleans is Celebrating Mardi Gras
If parades can’t roll and we can’t leave the house, we’ll make Mardi Gras happen in—and on—our own homes

When the mayor of New Orleans cancelled Mardi Gras 2021 late last November, crews sheathed their half-built floats in plastic to await ...read more

GARDEN AND GUN | February 2021
The House of Myth: On the architecture of white supremacy
On the architecture of white supremacy
The house my grandparents built was one story, brick. It sat modestly on its suburban lot, a stone’s throw from New Orleans, ...read more
OXFORD AMERICAN | March 1, 2019 | Notable Essay, THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2019
What Happens on Bourbon St. Stays on Bourbon St.
On New Orleans's Vulnerability to Epidemic

One month before the first coronavirus tests arrived in Louisiana, I pushed through a raucous crowd of strangers in the French Quarter ...read more

THE WASHINGTON POST | April 1, 2020
And the River Don’t Rise
Growing up in New Orleans, and dreading the river’s rise
The flash flood warning blared through the car’s speakers as we forded a side street rushing with high water. The rain crashed ...read more
THE WASHINGTON POST | July 15, 2019
Preservation

When our daughter was just a month old, Hurricane Sandy pummeled the eastern seaboard, flooding our neighbors’ houses, burning towns. While the ...read more

OXFORD AMERICAN | Spring 2017
Death is the Way to Be

In the flooding that followed Hurricane Katrina, bodies floated in the streets and slumped in folding chairs in the sun. They lay ...read more

GUERNICA | Summer 2015 Notable Essay, THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2016
Confessions of a Recovering Debutante
or, Casting off the White Dress and Stomping on It

We sat around on folding chairs, pinning ostrich plumes into one another’s hair, sharing college gossip. Near the door that led into ...read more

LENNY LETTER | February 13, 2018 
An Artist Drawn to the Beauty of the Bayou
Swamps, spoonbills, second lines: Annie Moran captures the essence of Louisiana

Inside the Gentilly studio of the artist and designer Annie Moran, okra flowers twine up a clear blue sky. Nearby, lotus leaves ...read more

GARDEN AND GUN | June/July 2020
100 Years of Oysters
at New Orleans Restaurant Casamento’s

In the antique kitchen of his family’s restaurant, C.J. Gerdes slips a handful of corn-floured oysters into one of the six blackened ...read more

SAVEUR | March 29, 2019
Chasing the Blues

I met her on a Monday night, sometime after ten. Just off the plane from New Orleans, I could still smell the ...read more

GARDEN AND GUN | October/November 2017
Ode to the Isle of Orleans
In a coastal city without beaches, a writer explains why the Big Easy is an island all the same

They called us an island once, “we” being New Orleans. Certain old maps are marked “Isle of Orleans,” and it’s true we’re ...read more

GARDEN AND GUN | June/July 2020
Everything is Not Fine If It’s Not Fine for Everyone

On November 2, 2004, I stood among other American expats outside an Irish pub in Paris, watching the election results come in. ...read more

LITERARY HUB| November 22, 2016
The Mountains Every Time
For one writer, memories and marvels rekindle each summer in the forests, waterfalls, and valleys of Western North Carolina

The man and I drove all day through the Shenandoah Valley and entered the Blue Ridge by sunset, finding the turnoff only ...read more

GARDEN AND GUN | June/July 2019
Go Hubig’s or Go Home
New Orleans—and especially one local author—celebrates the promised return of a beloved brand of fried pies

In the Marigny of New Orleans, on my friend Miriam’s kitchen wall, hangs a picture frame containing one crinkled white wax-paper wrapper. ...read more

GARDEN AND GUN | July 2019