Connections reading recounts story of hurricane survivors
Freshman will begin their college experience in the fall through Connections, a program designed to assimilate incoming students to life at USU, by hearing from Chris Rose, a New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter who has written extensively about Hurricane Katrina.
He will visit USU Aug. 27 to speak about Dave Eggers’ novel “Zeitoun” at 9:30 a.m. in the Kent Concert Hall. The novel chronicles the emotional exodus of Hurricane Katrina survivors Kathy and Abdulrahman Zeitoun. Abdulrahman began to explore the city in New Orleans in a secondhand canoe following the calamity, distributing what supplies he had and ferrying neighbors to higher ground.
Tuesday, Rose was contracted to be the welcome-to-school-week’s speaker by Noelle Call, director of Retention and Student Success, after USU officials’ original plan to welcome either Hurricane Katrina survivor Kathy Zeitoun or author David Eggers had to be changed. Rose said he will seek to inspire the newest Aggies by shedding light on the novel’s significance.
Rose was a 2006 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Distinguished Commentary of the catastrophe and was a part of the Times-Picayune team that won the 2006 Public Service Pulitzer for the newspaper’s Katrina coverage. He said an additional objective of his visit is to recount the catastrophic events which changed the lives of hundreds of thousands.
“I carry a message of resilience, of community, of pride of place, and of extreme optimism in the face of lost hope,” said Rose, who also wrote a book of collected Katrina columns called ‘1 Dead in Attic,’ a compilation of life in New Orleans following the hurricane.
“What New Orleans did to rebuild itself in the near absence of hope, what New Orleans and the hundreds of thousands of volunteers who have come to to help rebuild is a tremendous story of the triumph of the human spirit,” he said.
Such spirit is captured in a novel that hones in on the Zeitoun’s plight, Rose said.
“In one personal story, we see exactly a perfect example of what I’m talking about,” Rose said of “Zeitoun.” “It exists totally in a book about someone who was selfless and helping. That’s indicative of the New Orleans spirit. Now, of course, things go wrong – terribly, terribly wrong – for this man. And it elevates his story into something epic and nightmarish.”
Rose said he has no concern about being able to connect an event to students who would have been many years from high school when it occurred.
“It’s simple really, right?” he said. “All the students love great movies, they love great books, great music, great songs. For that matter and the reason they are attracted to movies, books and songs is because they tell great and universal stories. That’s what ‘Zeitoun’ is. It’s an incredible, unforgettable, story. Simple as that.”
Call said she is confident that Rose’s expression of his own similar observations will strike a chord with his audience.
“I’m really impressed with how he has approached Katrina personally,” she said. “He is very much a humanist. He does well at illustrating the struggles of the people of New Orleans and how they got to that point. I thought he would be a good match since we couldn’t get (Eggers) or the characters in the book to come.”
It’s an invitation Rose said he was glad to accept.
“I can only assume they would choose me because my work must be the the second-best book about Katrina and they probably can’t afford Dave Eggers anyway,” Rose said. “He’s a big deal, and I’m a little – no I’m a medium deal. I mean, I have a Pulitzer prize and he doesn’t, but I only have one New York Times bestseller and he has a whole bunch of them– like a bookshelf full.”
“Covering New Orleans at the time let me show the dark side of the storm,” he said. “However, the professional atmosphere and coverage to my work are things I will cherish forever. I don’t know if it’s worth the awards, though. I would trade those accolades and awards back to making that it all never happened. But, it did, and with that said, there’s no denying that natural disaster is a great career move for somebody in my line of work.”
Lisa Hancock is a SOAR director who helped plan Connections through the initial selection of “Zeitoun” in late March.
“You know, I think the speaker and the experience usually works out,” Hancock said. “It’s good for students to read and discuss and have these sorts of experiences before the semester begins.”
Rose said the role of the catastrophe in both his life and career “shadowed his life” and he explored the wreckage of New Orleans in-depth as a journalist.
Rose said, “After Katrina, after about two years of a very intense, embedded journalism in the wasteland of physical and emotional wasteland that was New Orleans, after the federal levy failure, after all that was through, when I came up for air, I realize I did suffer and mirror the suffering of tens if not hundreds of thousands of people who lived in and around New Orleans. My story is not uncommon.”
This is a story that Rose said he certainly believes in.
“I like enlightening the masses, blowing young minds,” he said. “All of us together, we’ll laugh, we’ll cry. I promise.”
– rhett.wilkinson@aggiemail.usu.edu