I’m writing from New Orleans.

“Not a day goes by where I don’t witness something visually striking.” That’s what Neal “MO” Walsh told me at Verret’s Lounge, the diviest of dive bars in the Big Easy. Neal is a Louisiana native and the director of the creative writing workshop at the University of New Orleans. When it comes to NOLA, Neal knows what’s up.

The city is visually striking, just like the people in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency Hotel, the families in striped yellow baseball jerseys, the words “Savanah Bananas” stitched across their chests.

Unknown street in New Orleans

A sign on the second floor reads: “Shadows and Seductions, this way. . .” and away I went, down a carpeted hall that led to an erotic fiction convention. As tempting as that scene was, I had my own writing conference to attend. So I dialed up an Uber and headed for Tulane.

On the way, a priest ran out in front of our car, chasing after a bus. A woman on the radio, a DJ for Q93, asked her listeners to call in and confess their greatest fears. A man’s voice filled the Uber’s cab, saying, “I’m scared to death of losing my two front teeth,” and then we were there.

Hundred-year-old live oaks, their branches covered in resurrection fern, lined the lesser-known New Orleans side streets that surround the Tulane campus. It was beautiful. Just beautiful.

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Like my lunch in the authors’ lounge with John T. Edge, Beth Ann Fennelly, and Wright Thompson. We discussed the future of farming in the Mississippi Delta. Beth Ann told a story about a man who nodded toward his father sitting on the far end of a bar in Nowhere, Montana, and said, “That’s my old man. He ain’t much.”

He ain’t much . . .

So beautiful, so tragic, like the rest of the city, all those branch-tunneled side roads and the mattress propped on the corner of Freret Street and Broadway, a mattress, leaned up against a light pole, a graffiti tag, a swirl of black spray paint, streaking the soiled fabric.

The ice cream truck took the cake, though.

It was the cherry on top of the whole trip, the perfect metaphor for lesser-known New Orleans. It wasn’t even a truck; it was a van with stickers hawking Drumsticks, Chipwich Cookies, and Bomb Pops. The loudspeaker drilled into the hood blared, “Oh Come Let Us Adore Him,” as it trundled over cracks in the pavement and down a street with a name I can't recall.

In the airport, zydeco music drifts through the concourses. Beads dangle from the ceiling, purple and yellow and green. As I make my way to Terminal C, preparing to fly to Houston, then Little Rock, I keep searching for something, anything, that reminds me of the “visually striking” city I’m leaving behind.

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