What To Do When You Don’t Know What To Do: A Conversation with Julie Liddell Whitehead https://ift.tt/xsniaCA
Mississippi native Julie Liddell Whitehead, author of Hurricane Baby: Stories, was a freelance journalist with boots on the ground during Hurricane Katrina and its devastating aftermath in 2005. With her wry humor, gifts of observation, and ability to render fleeting moments of human absurdity with resounding consequences, Whitehead has crafted a collection of connecting stories that captures a cataclysmic moment in Southern history. She has essentially captured the first draft of not only history, but also what eventually becomes lore and legend.
Whitehead is pleased to discuss her book’s genesis with a fellow alum from the Mississippi University for Women’s MFA program, along with her personal experience of Katrina in advance of the twentieth anniversary of the disaster this August.
Whitehead lives and writes from Mississippi. An award-winning freelance writer, she covered disasters from 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina throughout her career. She writes on mental health, mental health education, and mental health advocacy. She has a bachelor’s degree in communication, with a journalism emphasis, and a master’s degree in English, both from Mississippi State University. In August 2021, she completed her MFA from Mississippi University for Women.
Would you consider Hurricane Baby to have elements of the Southern Gothic genre, particularly as a recurrent theme throughout the stories is destruction within a family unit?
When studying [under poet and playwright] T. K. Lee at the Mississippi University for Women, he told me: “There’s a word for what you write,” and I said, “Well, tell me what it is because I don’t know.” And he said, “It’s called Southern Gothic.” And I said, “Really? I don’t like Southern Gothic works, they bother me.” And I think my main problem is that it has so often been the purview of male writers. I realized that I wrote like this because as a kid, growing up, I sat in the kitchen and I listened to my grandmother or I sat on the porch and listened to my aunts and uncles. They didn’t censor what they told us, we heard all of it, we just didn’t know what they were talking about. All that stayed in my head, and that’s what I draw from, since I learned very young that life is not shiny — it’s rough. Maybe Southern Gothic is not the best term for what I do, maybe realistic Southern gothic, because my characters are people you meet at Walmart.
How did your work as a freelance journalist contribute to your stories?
I don’t feel like a non-journalist could have written Hurricane Baby. I say that because — even though it’s fiction — I worked very hard to tell the truth and get it right. People say, “What does that mean for fiction?” Well, that means that you’re paying attention to the details, you are not putting people in the wrong places, or the wrong accents or the wrong dialect in the wrong places. These are mistakes that some readers blow past but I don’t, so I have a very high standard for myself — every word had to do its job, every word had to earn its keep, or it wasn’t going to stay. That’s something that I think journalism bred into me.
Did you interview anyone in the wake of Hurricane Katrina whose stories of survival seemed stranger than fiction?
I have lived in Mississippi my whole life. The first hurricane I remember was Frederic in 1979. A tornado came through where I grew up in Choctaw County in 1992. It upended my cousin’s house. The tornado picked up the tops of trees and tore the house up. My cousin went to the hospital with a broken leg and he was asked for his driver’s license and insurance card. [That hospital incident and her cousin’s response] made it into Hurricane Baby. That’s the closest thing in the book that comes to factual information in it. Not that there weren’t other stories that flavored the book.
I think the weirdest Hurricane Katrina story I heard came up out of New Orleans. [Before the hurricane] someone took a big jug of water to a priest and had it blessed; it was now holy water. He poured it around his house and around his business, and [after the hurricane] there wasn’t a scratch on either one. Nobody looted it or touched it, nothing happened. And I think that’s the weirdest thing I heard out of the entire list of stories that I heard after Hurricane Katrina. You sit there and you think, “That sounds so made up,” but if you put it in a book, someone would say, “That couldn’t happen,” but it did.
In the story “What’s Mine is Mine” a character says they no longer want to live somewhere they have to evacuate once a year. As a Mississippi native have you ever felt that way, particularly after a devastating hurricane like Katrina?
No, and I’ll tell you why. Rain falls on the just and the unjust, that’s what my Bible says. You look around and see that California has wildfires and earthquakes, the Midwest has tornadoes just as bad as we do, Louisiana has alligators and hurricanes, you get up to New England and you get snow, and in Florida it doesn’t do anything but rain. You can’t get away from the weather, it’s going to do what it’s going to do whether you like it or not. Where are you gonna go?
Did you begin writing any of these stories immediately following Hurricane Katrina?
I started writing this two or three days after Hurricane Katrina, and I’m glad I did that because it got the flavor of the desperation and the danger that we were in. I took my first draft to an agent, and I didn’t know any better — I didn’t know anything about publishing. There was an agent local to the area who represented Southern authors. And he liked the book and he tried to sell it in New York, and they weren’t having it, basically because it was too soon. One lady said, “I am not emotionally prepared to edit a Katrina story.”
Around the fifth anniversary of the storm I took what I had, which at the time was a novel, and turned it into a play. It was solely about the characters Wendy and Judd and Ray, and their situation. The play won an award, and when I graduated from the Mississippi University for Women in 2021, I was at loose ends. I thought, “I am going to do my level best to get it right and get it published. I’m going to do everything that’s in my control to make this happen.” Now there are so many things that are not in your control when you’re trying to publish a book, but I can write the best book that I’m able to and I can send it out, and keep sending it out… I worked as hard on Hurricane Baby as I have on anything in my career.
Did any authors—Southern or not, journalists or not—inspire this story collection?
I studied very carefully how Tennessee Williams put something on stage. I had read lots of his work and he’s decidedly Southern Gothic, so our topics kind of fell along the same lines. I looked at [his plays] and how they were staged and at what he was trying to bring out in people. And I thought, “That’s what I want to try to do.” And so I worked very hard on the dialogue, but I can’t think of anything that I’ve read that’s like Hurricane Baby.
When you mentioned Williams I thought of how many of his plays explore the underbelly of relationships: grudges, trauma, people holding in their volcanic emotions for the sake of appearances and family unity. Several of your characters are very obviously repressing emotions they know will be ugly and break things when released, and Katrina becomes the catalyst for several memorable eruptions in your stories.
What are some of the themes of your collection?
“What do you do when it’s nothing but you?” We all have these scenarios in our heads: “If so-and-so happens, we’ll do this or do that,” but nobody is prepared for what happens when a tornado takes the roof off of your house. Nobody is prepared for what happens when the water won’t stop rising. If you’ve been through a hurricane before, you know to keep an ax with you — you have to think fast, it might be life or death at some point. That’s what this book is about: What do you do when you don’t know what to do? Sometimes you make bad or impulsive decisions that may help or that may hurt.
You also explore how tenuous interpersonal relationships can be after a major disaster, perhaps most memorably in your title story.
What is next for you, more stories or a novel?
Right now I’m working on a piece and I don’t know what to call it, which is the same thing I said about Hurricane Baby. It’s book length right now, and it’s about a family with secrets. It’s set after Hurricane Camille… I don’t know why I can’t get away from hurricanes.
Thank you for your time, Julie. Now I know not to take the first rejection by a New York editor to heart — and to keep an axe nearby! I look forward to reading your next Southern Gothic tale as only you can spin it.
Hurricane Baby: Stories is Whitehead’s first book, and you can follow her at @jdlwhitehead.
FICTION Hurricane Baby: Stories
By Julie Liddell Whitehead
Madville Publishing LLC
Published August 20, 2024
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