Editor’s Note

With this issue we return to our usual practice of publishing two separate volumes of Xavier Review per year, while recent exigencies had made one double issue a more accessible goal.

We are pleased to be able to present chapters from three upcoming books by three veteran New Orleans writers. We have non-fiction work by James Nolan and Randy Fertel, and while their author biographies at the end of the issue summarize brilliant careers, I wanted to express our editorial excitement at being able to present excerpts from books that will create waves locally and beyond. Similarly, the excerpt from Jonathan Kline’s new ‘novel in tiny stories’ challenges preconceptions about the nature and reach of the contemporary novel; his book is guaranteed to produce heat as well as light.

In addition, as usual, we offer poems by exceptional poets, as well as personal and review essays, every page worth a long look.

Our cover photos and photo-essay in this issue are by local (by way of Arkansas) underground photographer, Charles Franklin.

When I began writing editor’s notes at the beginning of my time as this journal’s editor, I had intended to use the forum to comment not only on contents of the current journal but also on wider literary and social issues. At this point in time, however, words—at least words by me trying to make sense of our world—are difficult to produce. I only want to say to future generations: once you have put guns back in their proper place, and worked out ways to honor the lives and ambitions of everyone from every community, congratulations on improving the world we are handing you, and apologies for the distressed state in which we left things.

Xavier Review 42.1, Spring 2022

Editor’s Note — iv

James Nolan

Between Dying and Not Dying, I Chose the Guitar Guitar: The Pandemic Years in New Orleans (excerpt) — 7

Floyd Collins

Teresa: Nights on the Delta — 37

Charles Franklin

City Park: A Portfolio of Photographs — 40

Randy Fertel

Cultural Tensions in American Popular Culture — 54

Malaika Favorite

A Review of Delta Tears, poems by Philip C. Kolin — 73

Juyanne James from Personal Essays on Fear — 79

Tim Skeen

Two Poems — 85

A. P. Walton

Two Poems — 87

Jonathan Bracker Morning Events — 90

Jonathan Travelstead

Cloud Fable — 91

Jonathan Kline from Standing at the Gate — 94

Contributor Notes — 104

James Nolan

Between Dying and Not Dying, I Chose the Guitar Guitar: The Pandemic Years in New Orleans (excerpt)

Prologue: A Rough Draft of History

ike Socrates, Boccaccio, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Pepys, Edgar Allan Poe, Albert Camus, Thomas Mann, William Burroughs, Tony Kushner, and other writers who have approached the subject of plagues, I’m an artist, not a scientist or politician. When dealing with a story of pestilence, either as an immediate threat or a metaphor for menace, I turn toward my imagination to shape it rather than to laboratories or public health policies. Those in power will write the definitive narrative of the coronavirus pandemic. And as a writer adrift during these saturnine years of 2020, 2021, and 2022, now staring out of my window at an alley in the Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans, I must emphasize the obvious: I’m not powerful. Nor am I in any position to speculate whether history, that final version of eventful times told by writers bestowed with authority, will match my personal story.

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But I feel this is one worth telling.

Even as a Southern fiction writer, poet, and memoirist, one with a grotesque and satiric edge to his esthetic, I could never have made up the events of the past two years, beginning on the first day of lockdown in 2020, when my thriving life was abruptly cancelled. I could never have foreseen the confusing and often contradictory public health policies, the divisive politics of the epidemic, or the smoldering civil war about vaccines and facemasks. Nor could I have invented the ghostly Luling Mansion where I was living during much of this time, adjacent to the cemetery where four generations of my Creole family lie buried near Bayou St. John.

Or could I have imagined how, at that very moment, the crew of an Amazon vampire movie shoot would arrive to paint the second-story walls of that phantasmal palazzo in the plague color palette—purple and scarlet—then disappear under strict health mandates, only to return months later to construct a Potemkin graveyard of the undead across the street, even as the coronavirus was ravaging the world. I could never have foreseen my eviction, mid-pandemic, during which I was forced to translate my household into a pyramid of boxes to move into this townhouse apartment on—of all places—Bourbon Street. Nor could I have dreamed up the loneliest New Year’s Eve ever, or the Mardi Gras that wasn’t. Or my desperate search for a vaccine to keep this older man with a heart condition from dying.

I wish that I could have concocted such a plot for a thrilling new novel of the horror, dystopian, or speculative genres, but I didn’t.

Because I was the protagonist, the plot was real enough, and it was happening to me.

The infectious disease epidemiologist Philip Alcabes writes that as a professor, “For years, I have occasionally offered a college course on epidemic narratives. Earlier versions of the course featured accounts of outbreaks by journalists, memoirists, novelists, playwrights, and screenwriters—that is, epidemics as shaped by one sensibility.”

This is such a book.

As you’ll discover in these pages, I’m a veteran of disruptive times, both of the medical and political varieties. “What’s past is prologue,” as Shakespeare cautions us in The Tempest. This is the third epidemic I’ve survived: first polio as a boy in the fifties, then AIDS as a bisexual living in San Francisco and Barcelona during the eighties and nineties, and now the coronavirus, well into my seventies. In each of these eras, I’ve been a member of the target demographic of the pandemic. As of January 6 of this year, this is the second attempted coup d’état I’ve witnessed, and one of three socially restrictive regimes I’ve lived under, of both the totalitarian right and left: fascist Spain, a state of siege in Colombia, and just after the Maoist Cultural Revolution in China.

So nothing should surprise me, either on the medical or political fronts. But these past two years have challenged my faith in human nature, in American democracy, and in the reliability of science to cure all of our ills, much less to sort out the truth. This week a friend wrote to me referring to the pandemic in the past tense: what it meant to her. This was even as the Omicron variant from South Africa was spiking a fifth surge in the United States, where the death toll already has topped nine hundred thousand, the most recorded mortalities of any country in the world. And many European, Asian, Latin American, and African countries were opening up their lockdowns only to slam them shut again in unpredictable patterns that make my head spin.

Although, now vaccinated, I’ve finally taken off my mask, but I’m still listening to the guitar of my imagination. I write these words in the past tense of memoir as well as in the present tense of journalism, what former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham called “the first rough draft of history.” For the moment, during this unsettling time between pre- and post-pandemic life, history seems to be broken, and the powerful have yet to rush in to fill the gap with their official interpretations of what has happened, why, and how it could have been avoided. Contrarian and exasperated as these observations often might seem, I hope that you’ll find my own narrative engaging, entertaining, and somehow meaningful to your own. This disruptive era happened to all of us, each in our own particular way, and the challenge now is to connect our stories, making sense of our suddenly altered lives.

The rest, as they say, is history. February