Literary Mardi Gras

Tuesday is the great feast of my people, and I have corrected galleys due at noon Ash Wednesday. Ha! It is to laugh! It is to guffaw. Has anyone ever set a deadline on the day after Christmas? Certainly not, and certainly I won’t be home with my nose in a book on Fat Tuesday. Naturally, I’m gonna have to blog about what goes on out there, but how to make it literary?

Let’s start with the time I caught a panel at a literary festival in New Orleans in which the panelists  somehow got on Carnival. To a woman, they agreed they’d never write about Mardi Gras, because it was far too clichéd for their exalted selves. That made me squirm a bit, due to the fact that the very first book I ever wrote set in New Orleans was about Mardi Gras. I mean REALLY about Mardi Gras; not just about an event (murder, of course) that occurred at Mardi Gras. But about how the culture’s imbued with it. Who writes about that? In fiction, that is. (Well, the Treme people, actually, but this was at least a dozen years before the show was conceived.)

Try as I might, I could only think of one other story I’d ever read set at Mardi Gras—a piece of erotica about two masked people who didn’t know each other and…etc, etc. and ho-hum. Now that WAS a cliché. Even if no one but the author has ever actually written it. Because everyone’s thought it.

Since NEW ORLEANS MOURNING (my opuscule), Greg Herren (www.scottynola.livejournal.com) has gifted us with the highly amusing MARDI GRAS MAMBO, but a Google search shows there’s still little else on the subject except children’s books and non-fiction. Oh, yeah, except for that time I did it again, in another book, but that was the African-American Mardi Gras, which is wildly different from the white one.

So I guess those guys were wrong, except in theory. Just FYI. To get it on the record.

But I digress. My point is this: Even if there were a thousand Mardi Gras books a year, they’d only be clichéd if the authors stooped to cliché. Just as love stories are only clichéd if the author’s lazy. Because there are a million ways to write about love, some of them fresh and new. And everybody’s tried it. Who thinks love is clichéd?   Tomorrow: Running the Streets on Fat Tuesday