David McRaney  |  Journalist

Katrina recap puts professors in Playboy

Storytelling is one thing  Southerners do well, and after Hurricane Katrina, everyone seemed to have a story to tell.

For the English department at USM, just telling those stories has not been enough. Several professors have chosen to write down what they experienced and thought throughout the ordeal, and those stories are being published in a variety of publications including Playboy magazine and The New York Times.

Like William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Shelby Foote before him, Frederick Barthelme draws inspiration from the Deep South. The USM English professor has written 14 books, including the novels "Moon Deluxe," "Bob the Gambler" and "Elroy Nights." He is often featured in magazines like GQ, Esquire and The New Yorker. Barthelme also serves as the editor for the Mississippi Review and is head of the creative writing department at USM. The Mississippi Gulf Coast is often the setting for his fiction, and it follows that he would have something to say about its recent destruction.

His latest project has been two connected, but somehow divergent, articles about his personal take on Hurricane Katrina. One, for The New York Times, describes what it was like for a Hattiesburg resident after the storm, the other criticizes the American media's response to the disaster.

"I wrote about what it was like on the ground here in Hattiesburg," said Barthelme of his New York Times piece. "The whole place looked like a forest that some kind of giant had walked through."

He added, "I was just writing about Hattiesburg, New Orleans and the gas lines."

Though he touches on the role of the media in both pieces, he said that his upcoming Playboy article centers on the idea that American journalism is more concerned with entertaining than informing.

"It's about how the news, television in particular, sort of went with the most gruesome and graphic coverage it could go with," he said. "You see a reporter point to a body or a purse someone lost in a tree after she drowned as if somehow this is informing viewers about the tragedy. It is not; it is ghoulish."

William Kuskin, department chair for the USM English department, has spent much of his career studying the history of literature and its affect on culture.

"There is a lot of writing going on here at USM concerning Katrina," said Kuskin. "With Barthelme, The New York Times was looking for someone with the acuity of a well-known novelist to give them perspective."

Kuskin said that Philip Kolin, an English professor at USM, is working on a book of poetry inspired by the hurricane with invited poets, and the magazine Southern Quarterly will be featuring articles written by Kuskin and USM English professor Juliana Makuchi.

"Writing is a kind of therapy," said Kuskin. "When you write something, you articulate it. That process of articulation is important for the writer because it helps them make sense of the disordered world, and it is equally important to others who are perhaps not as familiar or comfortable with what the writer has seen."

Kuskin added that literature doesn't serve to bring closure, but it instead expresses an ordered view of chaos. According to Kuskin, art always responds to upheaval, and people need that response to be able to reflect. Kuskin also believes that the role of writers has changed in the modern era because of the barrage of media by which information is presented to the contemporary audience. In his opinion, people now must seek out literature where before it was the only option.

"The market forces driving television news are abysmal," said Kuskin. "Television news coverage is pushed to get the news out quickly with no reflection. The literary sphere is markedly different."

Kuskin believes that one day in the future, perhaps 100 years from now, someone's work will stand out and be looked to as the defining piece concerning this moment in history, and because of that, writers should be telling their stories.

Jameela Lares, an associate professor of English at USM, agrees with Kuskin, and hopes that this recent surge in output will draw attention to how talented and important the department is.

Lares said that the university press publishes a number of books every year on a range of interesting topics.

She added, "We produce armloads of material here, and I would like to see people interested in what our professors are choosing to write in those books."

Originally published in The Student Printz on October 20, 2005