Katrina Narratives: What Creative Writers Can Teach Us about Oral History

Creative writing graduate students—living in post-Katrina Louisiana and struggling for a means to aid their devastated community—ask their peers about the stories they are telling concerning the hurricanes, how their peers construct their individual hurricane narratives, and how the creative process/discipline bears on the material we call history. The authors frame the discussion around Ronald Grele and Alessandro Portelli's writings on narrative. They argue that the oral history informant and the professional storyteller are linked by certain common pursuits and practices and thereby create common byproducts as well and that these connections offer useful insights into the study of oral history. In this essay, they work to bring the two disciplines together and to explore possible overlaps so that we might benefit from a place of new understanding not yet imagined.