Many of the stories in Pia Z. Ehrhardt’s debut short story collection, Famous Fathers, are inseparably linked to New Orleans and were written prior to Hurricane Katrina. In this way they are unintentionally elegiac. Reading them offers a glimpse of a landscape that has changed dramatically in the three years since Katrina wrecked Ehrhardt’s city, her home. Ehrhardt says that in the aftermath of the flooding there was a choice to be made: to leave the city behind and start over, or to return. She said, “It would have been like a really terrible break up to leave. It’s a romance. The city doesn’t always treat us well, but I don’t think anybody wants a divorce.”
These stories often involve the complicated relationships of characters who are either divorced or adulterers. Ehrhardt explores the complexity of these relationships through nuance: gestures, setting, all contribute to a subtle approach that allows for an emotional honesty that a lesser writer may have missed.
Sampling the first sentence from any story in the collection will give you a good idea where it is headed. In “Running the Room” a daughter is complicit in her mother’s affair. “Someone’s Flowered Dress” involves a marriage that lasts for one month out of every year. In these stories Ehrhardt moves quickly, laying out the situation, often a tangled scenario, so the characters become the focus.
The new face of New Orleans has changed a novel that Ehrhardt is currently working on. There may be no better writer than Ehrhardt to write fiction based in the landscape of New Orleans during its various stages of destruction and rebuilding. The photos interspersed throughout this interview were taken a year after Katrina. While a picture can show a glimpse of what happened, it will take a writer like Ehrhardt to describe the emotional toll, to fill in the gaps. The devastation to the city itself is apparent with an open eye. The relationships that were strained by the storm, the families torn apart, will take a much gentler touch.
How long have you lived in New Orleans?
I moved here in 1981, with my first husband, so it’s been 27 years. The marriage didn’t last, but here I am.
Is it true that you can look out on City Park from your writing room?
Yes, I’m looking at it right now. The park’s really come back. People arrived from all around the country and volunteered their help to save the park, to pick up fallen branches and pull debris out of the bayous. There are ducks and white and black swans, gray heron and egrets. A couple of months ago the park had a bass fishing rodeo in one of the lakes.
Would these stories be different if you lived in another city; would you be a different kind of writer?
I think they might. This is a forgiving place and I think it gives me the freedom to get my characters out on limbs. I grew up in the Northeast, in Rome and Canada, so I’m not a born Southerner, but I feel taken in by this city. The people here are genuine and accepting of quirky, sometimes self-defeating behaviors, which my characters exhibit. The landscape’s lush, plants growing on top of plants, and even driving to the grocery New Orleans insists that you look at it with fresh eyes and not ignore it, not take it for granted.
You evacuated to Houston following Hurricane Katrina?
We did. My son and I went to Houston for four months so he could go to school, while my husband lived in Baton Rouge with his son and daughter-in-law and their newborn. My son’s high school had ten feet of water, so 400 of the boys from Jesuit in New Orleans were taken in by Strake Jesuit in Houston. They went to school from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. A perfect schedule for a teenage boy.
Was it tempting to write about the experience? “How it Floods” was the only story about a hurricane? ( Note: It wasn’t about Katrina).
“How it Floods” was written back in 2000, and the book was put to bed right after Katrina, so it’s not about The Hurricane, but it’s prescient. We’d had evacuations in the city before. I remember getting in my car one night and crossing the Causeway at 3 a.m. and being a part of that exodus, but we were all back in the next morning, which is what we thought was going to happen with Katrina. I did some essay writing after the storm, but I got really jammed up. Blocked. I’m just now starting to set stories post–Katrina, in this new landscape, but it’s still hard. There are tens of thousands of houses that are empty, hundreds of hundreds of blocks that are empty, especially in New Orleans because most of the flooding happened in Orleans Parish. I didn’t know how to get my arms around such a catastrophe, so I wrote short, scattered pieces and I’m collaging them into a novel. I want to write about tensions that Katrina brought about: moms who took the kids away to towns with schools while the dads stayed back at home to work, how families and pets piled in with relatives, how the elderly were forced to live in FEMA trailers.
Essay writing? I noticed on your blog that you say you keep Orphans by Charles D’ Ambrosio close.
I love his relationship with the city, how he explores the streets and treats Seattle like a complex character. I’m interested in writing about my relationship with New Orleans, because we’re staying here, but it’s requiring a lot of trust and faith in government and the people who make cities work. A city got destroyed by broken levees and it’s going to take the next ten years to build it again.
You really have to see New Orleans firsthand to believe what happened, how profound the damage is. My son played on a club soccer team and only three of the kids on it didn’t lose their homes. But they were boys and they didn’t cry. They did get a record number of red cards for fighting. None of us knew how to absorb what happened. The water came in so fast and then it stayed, and everyone just kind of soldiered through. Everyone looked out for their families and families took in families and people reached out, people let people reach out and it’s just mind-boggling. I feel, even three years later, like all the sadness and all the grief from the storm is being stored in the back of my brain right now, and it isn’t yet ready to let it go.
Sorry to bring up such bad memories.
I don’t mind. I don’t want people to forget about the city. This is a really beautiful place down here.
Were you tempted to stay away?
Yes. We were. You think you have a clean slate, because you’ve lost your city, you’ve lost your grocery stores and your kids’ schools and your churches and all of that. I mean in your head the moon’s a balloon and you think you could live anywhere. Where do you want to go? Do you want to go to San Francisco; do you want to go to New York? But we wanted to come back here. I mean this really is the relationship that people have with this town. It would have been like a really terrible break up to leave. It’s a romance. The city doesn’t always treat us well, but I don’t think anybody wants to divorce.
We came home four months later. Moved right back into our house. We had to get our roof fixed but we didn’t have flooding because we’re on a narrow ridge. There was nothing open in the neighborhood, but little by little my part of town is rebounding. Anything that opens up is a cause for celebration -- the pizza place, the ice cream parlor, the video store. We don’t take anything for granted anymore. You get to see and appreciate how cities work, by seeing one deconstructed. You understand what makes a fragile and diverse city like New Orleans so valuable and inimitable, so tough.
It’s interesting you mention divorce. A lot of these stories were about adultery or divorce.
I was trying to look at those subjects from different angles, to understand the impact that affairs and divorce have on different characters. I try not to judge behaviors in my work. It’s easy to think: Mistress = bad. Father in affair = bad. It’s more interesting to me to walk in the shoes of a character who’s having one, and why? Is it about sex or is it about bridging to a parent who’s having one? Is it about ending or enlivening a relationship?
“Someone’s Flowered Dress” comes to mind and “Running the Room”. Do you come up with the situation first or do you have the characters in mind?
Well in “Someone’s Flowered Dress” the notion of a 30-day husband seemed like a really interesting idea. What would that feel like? How do you move around in that? How do you follow the rules? How do you feel those other 11-months? “Running the Room” I wrote when I was in graduate school. The New Orleans setting is important to that story because the errant couple does a lot of driving around and they’re noticing the prettiness of the city, the freshness and possibility of a free night out. I had the idea of a mom asking her daughter to be complicit in a love affair. How that would feel to the daughter, how that would feel to the mother, making her kid her accomplice, and how that would feel to the daughter’s husband. To answer your question, with those two stories, the situation first. The what-ifness.
Two of the stories seemed a different tone. “Intermediate Goals” and “Stop”. Are there periods that you’ve gone through, that you can identify with from reading your writing?
Yes, that’d be true. The stories feel like an archaeology of different tensions and worries and wants and preoccupations that I’ve experienced over the past ten or fifteen years. Not places I could return to, but stops I’m glad I made.
In a previous interview you said, “I try to listen to what the characters say and to what they leave out. I try to explore what they leave out through sensory details.” One of the things that I enjoyed about your writing was the subtlety. Some writers seem to punch the reader in the face with what they’re saying. How do you balance those two extremes and make sure that the reader still gets it?
In terms of being subtle, I figure the reader’s probably three steps ahead of me, so I don’t have to over explain. Gestures do a lot of the work, and external details like weather and sounds and smells. They add layers. I do find when I’m uncomfortable about something, I tend to move through it really quickly or just kind of sidestep it. So after I’ve got the draft done, I go back and poke at the areas that I skimmed over. That’s inevitably where the trouble is. Then I go in there and try to make things worse, really screw things up, bring in another character, yet another problem before I throw ropes.
What’s important to you in discovering a character?
Their dirt. Their desires and shames and dreams. When the daughter goes to see her father and his mistress who’s singing his opera, it isn’t melodrama. The daughter doesn’t yell, “Bastard!” She notices the nuances of the father with his lover, of how comfortable and natural and unfurtive they look together. I tried to describe what she’s feeling as her own affair is ending by honoring the richness of her father’s relationship, which is an inversion of her own. It wasn’t standing up and saying ‘How could you do this to mom.’ It’s more like, ‘What they have is so private and I’m filled by their affair, but not by my own.’
As a reader, that was not the direction I thought it was going to go in. You don’t expect a daughter to be an accomplice in her father’s affair. I liked that it went that way.
I think I’d written a draft that was a lot more melodramatic. I had the mother there at the opera, I had the sister there, the sister’s husband, and they were all sitting and watching and I had to deal with all of these different reactions. I wanted to give the mother dignity in the story, too, because once she hears the tape of them speaking in Italian it’s over. Anything more would be kind of maudlin and self-indulgent for the writer, and humiliating for the mother. What might’ve dragged on longer in real life got stopped when it needed to in the story.
“A Man” was a great story and also tragic. It seems different in tone from all the rest of the stories.
I read about a woman who had both of her arms cut off and was left for dead in a desert. I don’t normally take my stories from the news, but I did with that story. I wanted to understand how it felt to lose a limb and fall in love with the man who saves you, whom you can’t have. The ending came suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere: the presumptuousness of forgiving someone who wasn’t asking for your forgiveness.
You’ve contributed to several magazines and you’re a contributing editor to Narrative. Has that helped the writing?
Back when I was in graduate school, I read for Mississippi Review and when you read 300 submissions, you understand pretty quickly what’s working and what’s not and when stories own you and where they fall apart. The undeniable stories are just that. Opening paragraphs are critical. Every sentence pushing the story keeps me reading. You have to keep the editor reading! Even a worried one like me who’s afraid of giving up on something too soon. There are stories that are 70 percent there, and you want to get behind the writer and push them over the finish line, but that’s not the editor’s job. I’ve learned a lot from reading submissions: get to the point quickly, then, remember the point.
You had gone to graduate school, right?
I got about 15 hours in and then stopped because I had a middle school kid and I wanted to be home with him rather than driving late at night on the highway between New Orleans and Hattiesburg worried about running over shredded tires. I loved graduate school. I love the workshop environment. I just did a guest workshop with high school students at the New Orleans Center For Creative Arts, and it’s fun to be on the listening/guiding end of having a short story discussed.
What’s the novel you’re working on about?
The novel I was writing before Katrina had to be reset into this new landscape because I didn’t want to romanticize New Orleans, but that turned the plot pretty much on its head. I thought it was going to be about a daughter trying to figure out her parents, but I’m not so interested in that territory anymore. Lately, I’m interested in writing about teenagers, about mistakes and near misses, alcohol and drugs and fresh sex, how kids dealt with the grief of losing everything to Katrina, about parents who have these promising, risk-taking creatures you can enjoy as adults, sure, but who you still have to shepherd home via text messages so they make curfew, get off the streets, and you can sleep. Some of it I’ll be making up.
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Q & A