Opening day and master classes

So far, so good; the organizers are walking around looking sanguine, whether that's really how they feel or not. This is the scrum at the checkin table. Somewhere in there is executive director Paul Willis, associate director Karissa Kary, v.p. Doug Brantley, LouAnn Morehouse, and program assistant Marika Christian. Marika was a longtime Festival attendee who just up and moved to New Orleans one day, and the city opened up its magic box for her; she found an attic apartment above the city's most notable TW scholar, Dr. Kenneth Holditch, got a job with the Fest, and is now working on her first novel under the tutelage of local writer Julie Smith...all of which is the sort of thing that happens in New Orleans with alarming regularity if you just strip off your defenses and dive right in.

Here's the table from the Garden District Book Shop, which came through Katrina just fine and is actually bucking the brick-and-mortar bookstore trend by, well, not going out of business and actually making a little bit of scratch. It's in a great area; the Garden District is, if anything, cleaner than it was before the storm, Commander's Palace is (thank God) open again, and all that's missing is the streetcar running up St. Charles Avenue. Taking the "St. Charles bus" just doesn't have that romance to it.


And here's the Festival president, Pat Brady, with her inamorato/main squeeze Michael Ledet. Pat is also the author of Martha Washington: An American Life, which has gotten the sort of reviews that writers could (and have) killed for. Michael, who owns 2 Martini Press with the Gumbo Shop's Richard Stewart, was about to present a master class on self-publishing with Richard and Allain Andry, the author of the children's book Louie the Buoy.

Is anything going wrong? Well, they ran out of free coffee (which is, fortunately, not in short supply in the Quarter), and the out-of-towners are mopping sweat from their brows and looking slightly poleaxed. Wusses! It's only March.