New Orleans - the Crescent City, The Big Easy, the home of Laissez les bonnes temps rouler is coming back with a vibrant, jazz-filled French Quarter and way too much luscious and fattening food. It is also the home of the yearly literary festival, Words and Music, put on by the Faulkner Society. Rosemary James and Joseph DeSalvo, Jr. are owners of the house on Pirate's Alley where William Faulkner wrote his first novel, Soldier's Pay. They live upstairs in true New Orleans historical surroundings and operate a bookstore downstairs where they have put together a writer's conference extraordinaire for the last 20 years.
The theme of this year's event was War and Collateral Damage and included Tim O'Brien, a Viet Nam War vet and author of The Things They Carried. Rebecca Wells, author of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and a decades long anti-war protester, read a piece from her brilliantly written Little Altars, titled E-Z Boy War, that follows the emotional turmoil of a Louisiana farmer who serves on his local draft board during that same disasterous conflict. Both speakers brought tears to my eyes and a standing ovation from a packed audience. They also confirmed my personal belief that including a significant description of the Franco-Prussian War, the Siege of Paris and the subsequent Commune de Paris in my own novel, A Luscious Illumination is vital in conveying just how far reaching the collateral damage of war can be and how much those events changed history and my characters' lives. It also pointed out that we can read reports in the newspapers, watch actual footage on TV, but nothing brings home to our own souls the real horror of war like the arts. From Francisco Goya's Disasters of War to The Hurt Locker, it is the vision of the creative mind that uses fiction to tell the truth.
