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Tales from New Orleans
| Posted on July 12, 2010 |
In an airy, white-walled classroom in the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (Nocca), Anne Gisleson, its director of creative writing, is leafing through an anthology produced by her high-school class. It was a scramble getting it together, she tells me cheerfully.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which hit Louisiana on August 29 2005, Gisleson’s students – many of whose homes had been destroyed – were relocated to other schools across the country. Meanwhile, the old cotton factories and train depots that house Nocca were taken over by Task Force Raven, a division of the National Guard, who used it as army barracks. For a year, Gisleson says, an officer slept under her desk.