- Whitehead draws on her journalistic skills to pack each story with detail and authenticity.
In the early morning hours of August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina slammed the Mississippi Gulf Coast with devastating consequences. At landfall, the storm had a Category 3 rating on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale. Sustained winds of up to 140 miles per hour stretched across 400 miles, affecting the coastal states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.
While the storm did an estimated $100 billion in damage – the costliest in American history – its aftermath was catastrophic. Rebuilding infrastructure and buildings was an unimaginable undertaking. Rebuilding the lives that were affected has been even more difficult.
Now 19 years later, people still remember the storm. Each have their own Katrina stories.
Books on Katrina
Several books have been written about the storm, including America’s Great Storm: Leading through Hurricane Katrina by former Governor Haley Barbour with Jere Nash. Barbour had only been Mississippi’s governor for twenty months when he assumed responsibility for guiding the state through recovery and rebuilding after Katrina. A personal memoir about his role in that recovery, the book also shares the many lessons he learned about leadership during a time of massive crisis.
NancyKay Wessman’s work of creative nonfiction, Katrina, Mississippi: Voices from Ground Zero, is written through a public health lens. Wessman was the long time communications director for the Mississippi Department of Health and handled every storm in the state for 25 years. Her book showcases local heroes and their work from the epicenter of preparedness, response, rescue, recovery, and rebuilding. Individual stories from first responders and critically important volunteers are woven together to shine a light on the public health impact of both the natural disaster and the unnatural consequences that emerged through human efforts.
Whitehead’s book explores scars left by tragedy
Now, a new Katrina-based novel has been published by Madville Press. Brandon author Julie Liddell Whitehead’s Hurricane Baby: Stories was inspired by her own musings.
“In the immediate aftermath of the storm, I was wondering about people who weren’t exactly hurricane victims (house was fine, no lives lost) but still experienced trauma from Hurricane Katrina. I started thinking about how a situation like that can scar you for life–and how those psychological scars might affect a body through the years.”
All the stories in the book are fictional.
“I culled bits and pieces of half-forgotten dialogue and memory and stories from past disasters I had experienced or read about–Hurricane Frederic, the 1992 tornadoes in both central and north Mississippi, the Inverness tornado, Hurricane Camille, etc.”
Whitehead’s background
A lifelong resident of the state, Julie grew up in North Mississippi, in the community of Fentress, between Weir and Ackerman on Highway 12 in north Mississippi. She has been writing since she was a child.
“I decided I wanted to be a news reporter when I was eight years old after I read a book about newspapers–a history of the press in America, how to write a news story, and how newspapers were put together. From then on, I resolved I would be a journalist.”
She became hooked on journalism when a couple of her pieces ran in the Ackerman High School newspaper.
“In college, I wrote for The Reflector at Mississippi State University and went on to get a BA in communications and an MA in English. I started working as a freelance writer in 2000 and threw myself into it.”
With two stints at teaching at Hinds Community College and Mississippi College, Julie graduated with an MFA in creative nonfiction from Mississippi University for Women in August 2021.
She began the book within a couple of days after Katrina, but when it didn’t sell immediately, Julie shelved it. After she finished her MFA at the W, she revisited the manuscript, taking it apart and rewrote it as a short story collection.
About the book
In Hurricane Baby: Stories, ordinary lives, some quiet and some quite loud, are explored. Lives like Wendy Magnum of Hattiesburg who suffers remorse after having an intimate encounter with Judd McKay, a friend her husband, Ray, trusted with his family during Hurricane Katrina. Tommy Hebert turns to alcohol to handle what he saw in search-and-rescue in Metairie, Louisiana. Mike Seabrook’s relationships with his God and his wife, Dinah, are tested after he loses a patient in his emergency room in Slidell, Louisiana. Lori King goes into premature labor as a result of the storm, and her husband, James, discovers that his best friend died trying to protect the Kings’ home in Kenner, Louisiana from looters.
Julie draws on her journalistic skills to pack each story with detail and authenticity.
“She transforms the term hurricane from a noun to a pulsing country and citizenry of its own,” says author Ellen Ann Fentress about the book.
Author Steve Yates describes the book as a “jarring reality, plain-spoken truths, soulful yearnings, outright fear, courage and its traumatic aftermath…tales that must not be binged but marveled at, one by one.”
Meet the author
Julie will be participating in the Mississippi Book Festival on Saturday, September 14. She will be on the Mad about Madville Press panel in State Capitol Room 204 from 1:30 to 2:30 pm. She will be joined by Yates, who will discuss his new book, The Lakes of Southern Hollow, and R.J. Lee, who will discuss his book, The Majestic Leo Marble. All three authors feature portraits of characters who find themselves in the face of real-life disasters to speak to the life lived in-between the headlines and the human ability to adapt in the face of adversity. The panel will be moderated by Dr. Darden North, author of Party Favors.
After the panel, the authors will move to the Signing Tent on the Capitol lawn.
Julie will be promoting her book over the next few months, including a reading at the Ackerman Library on September 5 at 6:00 pm, the Louisiana Book Festival in Baton Rouge on November 2, and an appearance at the Author Shoppe in Hattiesburg for a reading/signing.
More to come
Hurricane Baby: Stories isn’t a one-and-done for Julie, who says she has a set of linked novellas she is working on.
“The three novellas explore what happens when a teenager in the mid-1980’s discovers she was adopted and goes looking for answers from her birth parents–and doesn’t like what she finds out.”
