The project yours truly is working on was mentioned in the above article, published by the Mobile Register on October 23.

Kids reacting through art and writing

I've been working on this Katrina Recovery Project through the University of South Alabama's College of Education. Mostly, it's lectures and teaching materials from the Education Psychology faculty to aid teachers in helping their students deal with the aftermath of the storm--but I think it may very well grow into something more.

We're looking at creating a database of children's work--narratives, art, whatever--in response to what they've witnessed and gone through. The line of thinking is that children of certain age groups do not have the verbal capacity to really express themselves through words, necessarily. In those cases, art therapy could be very useful in helping them heal. For older children, if they can't speak about what happened, perhaps writing--stories or poetry--would help them. We're looking to not only catalog experiences, per se, but also how children see those experiences and express them. With a disaster on such a massive scale, such a database would be useful in gaining insight across not only several age groups but also those groups connected by race, family income level, disabilities, etc.--the latter come especially into play with how the media represented the disaster. Some children may have internalized what was said, thus creating another level of damage on top of what they'd already been through.

Some have already begun working in this area:

Eastern Shore Art Center put on a show of kids' works http://www.easternshoreartcenter.com/blue_faces_of_katrina.htm

ArtTherapy.org offers a printable handout with suggestions
http://www.arttherapy.org/newarttx_trauma.pdf


Unfortunately, as of yet, there's been surprisingly few postings of actual kids' works to the web. Perhaps it's too early--perhaps this project I'm involved with can blaze a trail--but I think its a worthy endeavor to preserve what these children have created.

Consider this a restart

I know this blog has been sorely lacking and I'll try to make up for it shortly. Last semester, with all the commuting back and forth to Hattiesburg, I finally had to drop off production because life was simply getting too chaotic.

But here we are--post summer, post Katrina and with each new storm that births itself in the Gulf, we collectively hold our breath until its well inland, wherever it may make landfall. I imagine we'll be doing the same thing next year, and the next, and the next--until Katrina's memory becomes faded--not forgotten--but like some distant section of a photo album stuck on the shelf for too long.

The Coast will come back--New Orleans will come back. After the strength of the anger, fear, and anguish all begin to subside, the human drive to build again--to create something from chaos--will begin again--and we will all come back.

In the meantime, there are the arts to sustain, encourage, inspire and provide creative nourishment for that part of us that yearns to get out of the splinters and pulp that the waves and winds left behind--if only for a short amount of time. The art scenes of New Orleans, Bay St. Louis, Gulfport, Biloxi, Ocean Springs and Pascagoula may be on hiatus for a while, but Mobile and Pensacola are still keeping the art scene alight, for those who wish to make the jaunt over and take a respite from the recovery effort.