IN THE TIME OF JOY AND WONDER

Paul Schexnayder, New Iberia, Louisiana’s artist of note, has created illustrations for several of my books; the most notable being The Kajun Kween, a young adult book that carries Paul’s illustration on the cover and his drawings in the interior. Paul has illustrated many children and young adult books for other regional authors in Acadiana, and last month he came into his own as a children’s book author with The Time of Joy and Wonder. It’s a tale of a King Royal, a Trojan horse, and a blue monkey in a boat. He says that the painting of these characters hung on his wall for some time before he began to wonder about their origins and mission in life.

Readers will find it difficult to believe that Paul is color blind because the characters and landscape in The Time of Joy and Wonder are rendered in vivid blue, pink, orange, and green acrylics on masonite. The illustrations alone will delight young and old, carrying out Paul’s message of joy and wonder in his typically whimsical style. I understand that his “Girth series,” many subjects of which are kings with small heads and billowing robes, was initiated in 2016, and the king in The Time of Joy and Wonder continues this series as a royal person who has become an “exceptional explorer of the day.” The king, Trojan horse, and blue monkey embark on an exploration to find “anything stupendous and magnificent” and discover serendipity — a battered boat that causes them to wonder if it qualifies as a “joy and wonder.” Inside the boat they discover a treasure they decide not to claim and return to their kingdom with only a story that becomes as valuable as the find itself. 

The joy and wonder of Paul’s tale is that, without being didactic, he creates a story ending with an old-fashioned element: a moral. I won’t reveal all of the carefully-crafted tale, but I purchased a copy for my daughter to give to my three youngest great-grandchildren, and I know they will love this colorful narrative.

Paul's art is also displayed at A&E Gallery in New Iberia where he sponsors art classes, poetry readings, author signings, and, in his generous, inclusive way, features the art and crafts of talented area artists. He has been the artist for many state festivals, and his work has gained recognition throughout the U.S., often invoking the question: “Do you own a Schexnayder?” Every Christmas, my gift list includes pieces bearing his imaginative brush strokes. 

I know that Paul has had the desire to publish a children’s book for several years, and I congratulate him on this wonderful expression of his talent and beliefs. Bravo, Paul, and bountiful sales from all your admirers in Teche country! We are blessed to have an artist who believes we still live in a “time of joy and wonder” and wants to convey this message to young readers today.

Available at Books Along the Teche, New Iberia, Louisiana, A&E Gallery, University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, and amazon.com.

MIST

Louisiana Mist

This morning I woke up and looked out the window at a landscape veiled in mist, a familiar scene during the fall and winter here on The Mountain at Sewanee, Tennessee. It seems that I move between mists and mists. In the summer and fall, I live at Sewanee, a place where, as one of my poems reveals, “the mist stores itself/ between the dark tree trunks/obscures the valley, /the air dense and wordless.” In the winter I live in New Iberia, Louisiana where similar mists prevail. They were once captured in the paintings of Alexander Drysdale of New Orleans, Louisiana (1870-1934) who thinned his oils with kerosene to produce the shadowy landscapes that made him famous. In later years, photographer Debbie Fleming Caffery of south Louisiana was attracted to what she called “shades of mystery and shadow” and gained national recognition for the photography of sugar cane fields shrouded in Louisiana mists.

Writers and artists have always been intrigued by mist, the condensation of water vapor that dims and obscures landscapes, often hiding such brilliance as the flaming leaves now turning orange, yellow and red on The Mountain here. Tolstoy, Faulkner, Yeats, Dickens, to name a few writers, wrote about mists hiding the changes taking place in nature or obscuring human figures so that they weren't recognizable at a few yards. The famous novelist Stephen King wrote a novella entitled The Mist, a story about people experiencing terror in a small town in Maine when it was engulfed by mist, and otherworld creatures appeared.

Here on The Mountain, we get socked in by mists and delay going down to the valley for provisions of any kind until it burns off. Those socked-in days become ones involving indoor pursuits. I know that when I return to Louisiana, there’ll also be mornings when mist will hang over the slow-moving, brown waters of the bayou, and I’ll feel a certain malaise and sense of isolation provoked by the gray landscape.

The only places I've lived where mists didn't hover over the landscape are Ahwaz, Iran and Electra, Texas. In Iran, the sky seemed to always be like a blank sheet of blue copy paper – cloudless, mist-less, and filled with merciless desert heat. However, a calendar with a painting of a misty sky hung beside my old tin desk in the front room of my home in Melli Rah and made me nostalgic for the landscapes I’m now complaining about!

Mists have actually inspired my Muse to write poetry and full-length mysteries containing numerous mentions of “mist” which I used to portray the atmosphere of south Louisiana and Mississippi; e.g., (from Chant of Death), “Insects whirred monotonously and Malachi thought how like the monk’s chants their incessant steady singing was, only the insects never seemed to sleep…As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could see vague swirls of mist hanging over the lake…” Or from Goat Man Murder: “When Donald Majors returned to Pecan Grove as the sun pierced the morning mist, he discovered his sister Penelope already at breakfast…the long kitchen that faced a back gallery harbored a cheerful spirit not found elsewhere in the mansion…” (The latter mystery is presently being transposed into a script for a play by Rose Anne Raphael of New Iberia). Then there’s a scene from The Kajun Kween, my young adult book set in south Louisiana, in which Petite Marie Melancon goes into the swamp and encounters a loup garou (werewolf): “Out of the wispy mist ahead, something glowing yellow-white leaped up and floated toward the pirogue…”

There are many more allusions to mist in my writings, as well as in the works of more famous writers, and on such a misty day, I could probably spend the entire morning searching for such allusions. However, it’s 10 a.m; the bright fall leaves on the trees in my backyard are beginning to poke through the oppressive gray blanket, and I have packing to do to prepare for mists to come in bayou country.

Painting by my brother Paul Marquart

P.S. Coming Soon! A review of Dr. Victoria I. Sullivan’s and Susan Elliott’s newest book, Why Water Plants Don’t Drown, published by Pinyon Publishing, an excellent marsh plants guide with beautiful drawings and illustrations. 

HURRICANES AGAIN

Illustration by Paul Schexnayder for
The Kajun Kween

Hurricane Isaac is casting his wet shadow on my home state of Louisiana where I live part of the year when I’m not residing on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee. Like many Louisiana residents, I remember Katrina and her destructive effects on people and property in the bayou country. For six weeks following that killer storm, I directed a clothing operation at Solomon House, an outreach mission of the Episcopal Church of Epiphany in New Iberia, and ministered to those who escaped the deluge in New Orleans, seeking higher ground in Acadiana.

Although New Iberia has not felt Isaac so far, I cringe when I think of the violent whirlwinds that have disturbed Acadiana in the past. New Iberians live near the Gulf of Mexico, a relatively shallow body of water with no chilling ocean currents running through it, and this shallow depth allows water to heat up to 85 degrees in the summer, so that the warm water can spawn a hurricane at approximately 80 degrees. As the heat from condensation causes the air in a hurricane to rise rapidly, the hurricane becomes a big wheel containing turbulent winds. And devastation occurs.

As far back as 1722, a hurricane demolished the new settlement of New Orleans, and one of the most memorable hurricanes was the storm on August 10, 1856 that struck Isle Dernier or Last Island. This hurricane caused high storm tides, killing hundreds of people reveling at a dance in a hotel called “The Trade Winds” and destroying every building on the island, as well as most of its vegetation. The devastation inspired the famous novel, Chita, by Lafcadio Hearn. Today, Last Island is an uninhabited beach containing little vegetation.

Hurricanes appear in three of my Young Adult fiction books and provide active settings that derive from my experiences of major hurricanes that struck New Iberia–Hilda, Betsy, and the worst, Andrew, when I sat huddled in my home while the wind vibrated the walls of my house like a giant accordion.

One of the lighter treatments of a hurricane occurs in my YA book, The Kajun Kween, in which the heroine, Petite Marie Melancon, ties herself to a tree to experience the Big Wind so that she can provide a story for a comic strip publisher. (However, this narrative is not intended as a jest to minimize the severity of hurricanes –in fact, it emphasizes the foolishness of Petite Marie.) Before Petite goes outside to experience this childish adventure (unbeknownst to her parents), a discussion of hurricanes takes place at the supper table, and Petite shows off her knowledge of hurricanes to her Papa: “Wizards in Finland used to sell wind to seamen. The wind was inside of three knots,” she says. “If someone untied the first knot, a small wind came up. If he untied the second knot, half a gale blew, and if he untied the third knot, a hurricane blew in. I read that seamen in the Shetland Islands still buy knotted handkerchiefs from old women to control the storms…”

Papa Melancon bests Petite’s story with one of his own. He claims that at one time when hurricanes blew in, Sumatrans ran from their houses armed with swords and lances to cut up the winds. Petite’s papa explains that the word “huracan,” which means “God of All Evil,” is derived from Indian tribes in the Caribbean, the Tainos, who thought that on many occasions Huracan got angry with them and tried to blow them away. You’ll have to read what happens to Petite Marie Melancon during her hurricane adventure in The Kajun Kween, but I don’t advise anyone to test the intensity of the Big Wind, as Petite attempted to do.

Meanwhile, we assume the position of “hunkering down” in sympathy with our Louisiana friends and family and pray that Isaac will take his winds to some other body of water or deserted island, settling his terrible rotary disturbances there.

The illustration at the beginning of this blog is a clip from a drawing by Paul Schexnayder, New Iberia artist, and appears in The KajunKween.