FEATURED WRITER OF THE MONTH

We just had to contact Cheryl Wagner after reading her new book, Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around: A Memoir of Floods, Fires, Parades, and Plywood, because she single-handedly reinvented the genre (if there is one) of the survivor's tale. More to the point, she has created a work of literary nonfiction that goes so far beyond its subject matter—Katrina and her apocalyptic aftermath in New Orleans—that we hesitate to even mention it for fear of limiting the book's audience. If you read this book, which we recommend you do immediately, you will see that Ms. Wagner is tough (not necessarily by choice) and funny and wise and, well, winsome. You want to cheer her on with a clap on the back and adopt her like a stray mutt. Talk about perspective:

"So when the hammer breaks in your hand and you drive to the hardware store to replace it but the hardware store flooded and never reopened and you finally find a place that is open and you have to get a thirty-dollar hammer or no hammer at all and you suck that up and grab the last one and head to the checkout and the telephone is still out so they only take cash and you go to the ATM and it's smashed and then you finally somehow, someway get cash and go back and get that golden hammer but also a nail in your tire, don't get mad. Just take the deepest breath of your life and figure out how to get that tire fixed."

She may be young, but she's already earned some impressive creds, including regular appearances on public radio's "This American Life" and publication in Harper's and other fine magazines. A Louisiana native, she lives in New Orleans. Here's what she says about her city: "That New Orleans gets in people's blood is one of those clichés that also happens to be true."

—THE EDITORS

THE OXFORD AMERICAN: Given the countless books and articles that have been released since Katrina (many of which are excellent), why should we read your book about New Orleans?  

CHERYL WAGNER: This book deals with my little family’s three-year effort to stand ourselves back up after being broadsided by the flood. It tells a universal story about learning resilience with some weird particulars. People say it’s a quick, compulsive read. Both a teenager and someone with ADHD I know have complimented me on my ability to make them finish reading it. My mom (and occasional editor) just walked into the room and said, “Tell them an elderly lady did not want it to end.”

THE OA: The book traces the agonizing process of rebuilding your flooded house (without much assistance) over the course of three years. Were you keeping notes and at what point did you realize you would write the book? 

CW: I was in denial for a long time. This book was not on my radar. I thought I was going to slap my life back together quickly and finish my novel revisions for my agent. It's either sad or hilarious in retrospect. I did not know rebuilding would take so long and I did not know the world, my novel’s relevance, and I would not feel the same to me after it was all over.

I had done "This American Life," journalism, and literary magazine work in the past, so I wrote some pieces about post-Katrina stuff for "This American Life" and Times of Acadiana and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio. Except for what I wrote for these pieces, I was not keeping notes. When I finally started to put it down, the episodes that made it into the book were burnt into my brain. Some crazy, venting e-mails I sent to friends also proved helpful. I did subsequent interviews where necessary. This book is both a witness book and a realist painting from a fabulist time. I formally committed to doing this book for Kensington’s Citadel imprint in the fall of 2007.   

THE OA: What were you (and Jake) like before the storm and how are you different now? 

CW: The answer to this question gets more mysterious as time passes. It seemed clearer a year ago. For a time we were split into the people we had been before, and these new post-apocalyptic folks.

THE OA: You mention that you’ve lived in New Orleans since you were seventeen years old. What draws folks to New Orleans, and what makes it unique? 

CW: In the book, I use facts about my life and family history to attempt to cut through the NOLA hype machine. My hope is that the reader will understand my friends and neighbors instead of projecting a bunch of New Orleans mythology onto us. The New Orleans I have lived in is not the same New Orleans my mother lived in when she went to school with the nuns at Charity in the ’50s, but in ways it is.  

THE OA: How hard is it to stay in New Orleans, to rebuild a house and garden and neighborhood, while dealing with the potential threat of another disaster? 

CW: Hence the title.  

THE OA: One of the surprises (and charms) of this book for me is how you manage to describe the third-world conditions of the aftermath, which were largely caused by bureaucratic governmental ineptitude, while keeping a sense of humor. You don’t really talk about humor getting you through the ruinous period, but I wonder if you were able to see the humor in things as they occurred—or was it a more retrospective kind of humor?

CW: All the nut-job moments were funny at the time. Humor is probably my primary coping mechanism. Of course, the horrible stuff was just plain horrible. But yeah, I have the gift/curse of seeing exactly how stupid I look at all times. If I’m rocking the classic rock as someone’s carpenter assistant while I’m sanding something, or having to break out Google Translator to talk to some guy from Honduras, how can I not notice [the humor in] that? My neighbors, friends, and I would alternate complaining and laughing about the weirdness that went down every day. Jake and I also engaged in constant reality-checking—like, “Did that just happen?”   

THE OA: Has anything good happened in New Orleans as a result of Katrina?

CW: I'm reluctant to scour around for silver linings to make everyone feel better. Good can come from bad, sure. But nothing that happened in the past four years in New Orleans after the flood was worth it in the least, no matter how you slice it.  

THE OA: Was there any one moment (or event) when you hit rock bottom and wanted to give up? How did you keep going?  

CW: Many. I saw a lot of women after the storm doing awe-inspiring, crazy things. I saw women in their fifties, sixties, and seventies doing backbreaking labor in insane heat. I knew this happened in the world. My own mother and grandmother worked in the fields on a Hungarian Settlement farm in Louisiana, but still I had not seen with my own eyes the backbreaking labor that women were capable of. That inspired me to keep going some days when I did not feel like it (and that was many, many days). I would see some old woman busting ass and think, That lady has forty years on you! Keep going. You can do this. Without being totally conscious of this, I think I also practiced visualizing transformation until transformation became reality. And plants and planting and art and music and the kindness of neighbors and Jake helped me.  

THE OA: Your mom and Jack (your boyfriend’s stepdad) are especially inspiring figures to me. Who are your role models and why?  

CW: Some of my role models are listed at the beginning of the book in the dedication section. I have a lot of different role models for different things. Both iconoclasts and matriarchs who manage to do very progressive things while still doing what they’re supposed to do. I don’t always do what I’m supposed to do, so I admire those who do and also don’t compromise along the way.  

Of course, Jack is also inspiring to me. He’s wise and fun to be around. He’s an entomologist who reads widely—an Oliver Sacks-type guy. He's always good for dragging you into the woods to look at a bug or a bird or a mushroom and then quoting some obscure bit of British lit in reference to it.  

THE OA: Was there any material that was too personal or too painful that you deleted from the final draft?  

CW: Without a doubt, there’s stuff that didn’t even make it into the final draft. So yeah. It was pre-deleted—as in self-censored—I’m sure. Yet when you literally put all your underwear and personal photos out on the street and scavengers come pick through it, your notions about the private and public sphere change. 

I also really, deeply struggled in the depiction of my relationship with my friend Helen Hill. I felt I could not tell our story without telling hers, and I felt an obligation to tell her story because of my strong feelings about government culpability for post-disaster lawlessness. I also just wanted to capture her voice forever in a book. So I sought the blessing of her husband and her mother. Still, I did not tell the full story I wanted to tell because I wrote this book quickly, and at the time it was too painful for me.   

THE OA: I learned from your book that New Orleans, within its own city limits, pretty quickly became divided between “the flooded” and “the unflooded.” The title of your book plays with your struggle to not resent folks who weren’t flooded. Could you explain? 

CW: Flooded people would get mad when they had to drive Uptown for supplies and hear someone who didn’t flood there raving that her manicurist was out of town. I would try in my mind to take the high road. I did not want to become bitter. People’s sense of control over their own destiny was shredded when the whole city’s future came into question. Everyone’s loss was big to them, even if it was the arguably chi-chi loss of their favorite sushi restaurant. I had to actively work not to fall prey to resentment when encountering certain people. I’d complain about it to other flooded people, and then let it go.

My losses were minor compared to many I saw on a daily basis. Everything I went through, someone else went through it worse. As hard as it was on us, and I play with the idea of us being the “lucky ones” in the book a lot, it’s true. We were and are the lucky ones.

One day, another flooded lady saw me in standing in line with a clean skirt on Uptown and got really despondent because she thought I was unflooded and getting to prance around in my little skirt with my identity unstripped. I was taking a break from working on my house, and it was my one of my first days in a clean skirt, so I knew that she would likely be in a clean skirt again soon. But I felt bad for wearing it. This and countless other episodes and conversations with unflooded friends helped me empathize with how unflooded people felt.  

THE OA: Is there more to this ongoing story that we can expect in a later book or are you looking elsewhere for material? Is New Orleans going to be (if you can think this far ahead) your permanent “beat”? 

CW: People keep asking me that. I'm sure I will write about New Orleans again some, because I always seem to. But I think it’s because I live here and then something interests me. Most writers’ subject matter comes from inside and gets churned in with their environment. I have at least one other book-length work of creative nonfiction in me that happens to take place in Louisiana. But it is, I would hope, like this book, a universal story.  

THE OA: You mention “a disastered novel”—do you still write fiction, or is nonfiction your passion now? 

CW: I have two unpublished novels. I have another novel or two in my head. But some days I feel like I may have lost faith in fiction in some ways. Not sure yet. Maybe I just don’t want to starve. I'm going to finalize my next project soon.

THE OA: Are there any books or articles or films or artworks or restaurants, etc., that have emerged since Katrina that we should all experience? 

CW: The Character Previously Known as Jake used to be in a band and work on documentaries. Since Katrina ate his band, he mostly DPs a lot of doc and commercial work. He and Jennifer John Block just finished All Over But to Cry, a doc about the “Cajun tidal wave” in Cameron Parish in Southwest Louisiana in 1957 during Hurricane Audrey. The cinematography is just beautiful, and the oral histories and recreations really conjure past and present Louisiana rural life. To me, it’s about how hurricanes get woven into the cultural fabric of a place over time.  

Other stuff I like: Dedra Johnson's novel Sandrine’s Letter to Tomorrow. The Roots of Music middle-school marching band. Miss Pussycat’s Trixie and the Treetrunks puppet soap opera. People are also excited about David Simon-Eric Overmyer’s new New-Orleans-post-Katrina drama for HBO. I think they should call me to write an episode for them because I have been forced to gaze into the deep, dark NOLA psyche for years now. And I work cheap.  

THE OA: Is everything back to “normal” in New Orleans? 

CW: The answer to that will probably continue to be “yes and no” for the next five years. Neighborhoods used to be Flooded and Unflooded. Now it's Mostly Recovered, Kinda Recovered, and Oh No.   

THE OA: If you could change anything about New Orleans right now, what would it be? 

CW: I always wonder what New Orleans would be like if families and individuals were utterly non-violent for a generation or two. Like utopianly non-violent.

THE OA TEN: Questions we ask of every interviewee. Wee!

1. What superstitions do you have? 

CW: Ones from my Catholic girlhood, of course. Purgatory, sins of omission, stuff like that. 

2. What would you like to change about yourself? 

CW: The usual. This week it’s probably being more proactive in some areas and less reactive in others. Knowing when to spend my energy where at the correct time seems reasonable. I would also like to be a better girlfriend and a better daughter and a better dog owner. 

3. What are you still trying to accomplish in your professional career? 

CW: To not keep wasting time.  

4. What is your hidden talent? 

CW: I can design and build fences. I can take out splinters. I know what to do if someone has a seizure. I have a lot of random musical knowledge. I can sleep to the Bad Brains. I can make Hungarian crepes and also a Hungarian cabbage dish and I have either good soil or a green thumb. But mostly I just sit around reading. 

5. What subject causes you to rant? 

CW: Easy. The Road Home Program and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—full-on, old-school, crazy ranting. Zero to a hundred mph in ten seconds flat. It’s a bore. The health care system in the United States can also get me going.  

6. What is the biggest mistake you ever made in your professional life? 

CW: Making things harder on myself by not walking through various doors that were open to me at the time. Repeatedly. Because of being young and headstrong, or myopic, maybe. 

7. What is one thing that you used to dislike but that you now like? 

CW: Some types of death metal, some types of country music, some types of uber-Southern men.  

8. What profoundly underrated book, album, or movie would you like to champion for us? 

CW: I don’t know if these are underrated, but they’re likely under-known. The graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby by Howard Cruse. I also like the album Magnolia by the Wooden Birds (ex-American Analog Set Andrew Kenny's new band). It’s really good. 

9. What is your favorite line from a song? 

CW: Too many to count. A few lines from “Cigarettes, Wedding Bands” by Band of Horses pop into my head occasionally. “Violence it ripped through the old dogwood fence, see the hope, see it unravel.” From the same song: “The dead folks in the clouds, for crying out loud!” I also like “Bang! Bang!” by The Knux. “Where they mommas at, where they mommas at? Nobody knows, nobody cares.” They're from New Orleans.  

10. What was your favorite childhood toy? 

CW: I have no clue. I used to have one of those plastic lemons you hook around your foot and you swing it in a circle and hop over and over like you’re possessed.