Interviews

A conversation with Ken Wells

Q: Unlike other books on Katrina that focus on the destruction of property, your book really is about cultural destruction, isn’t it?

A: My book is about the struggle for survival of Louisiana’s distinct—and irreplaceable—bayou culture and the wetlands ecosystem that has nourished that culture for more than two and a half centuries. This is a place that had sat, pretty much until the post–World War II oil boom, isolated and relatively unchanged for two hundred years.

Q: Tell me a little about the place where the story is set—St. Bernard Parish.

A: In its pristine state, it was a low-country paradise that sprawled with game-rich marshes and primeval cypress forests, and bays and bayous teeming with fish, shrimp, crabs, and oysters. Even today, though its wetlands have been battered by development and industrialization, it supports (or did until Katrina struck) a robust seafood industry and a colony of indigenous, self-taught boatbuilders practicing a level of craftsmanship found in few other places in America.

Q: What about the main character in the book, Ricky Robin?

A: Ricky barely squeaked out of high school, yet as a high school senior he sketched out plans for his 56-foot steel shrimp boat, the Lil’ Rick, on the pavement of a school parking lot with a piece of chalk. With no drafting or engineering training, he welded the boat together by himself in the backyard of his parents’ home, designing and making all the mechanical systems as well (all before he turned twenty years old). By that time, though, he was already a master boat handler and a preternaturally good fisherman who had learned, in his parlance, “to think like a shrimp.”

Q: It is hard to think about a book on Katrina as uplifting, but yours is.

A: I’m writing about a decidedly blue-collar, ruggedly independent people whose decisions to face down Katrina lay in deep cultural anchors. It’s a story of people who—when they realize no one is coming to save them—rise up to save themselves and their neighbors in the face of raw peril and a disaster of unimaginable proportions. Finally, it’s a story about a resilience rooted in an exquisitely deep notion of home, and the tug of home, family, and culture in a place terribly upended.