By Bo Emerson

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Can you make it more about New Orleans?"

That publisher's suggestion to a writer vindicates the despair many residents of the Mississippi Gulf Coast feel about official accounts of Katrina, the storm that crippled the region -- well beyond New Orleans -- five years ago.

"In my garden club, out of 45 people, 37 lost everything they ever owned," said Gulfport, Miss.,  resident Lucy Phenix, 77.

"From Bay Saint Louis to Pascagoula, the whole region was absolutely devastated," Phenix said, "and of course because people are more familiar with New Orleans, that's what they talk about. It's very discouraging to people who are not in New Orleans."

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey, a professor of creative writing at Emory University and also a native of Gulfport, sees the invisibility of the Mississippi coast as part of a virtual erasing that began even before Katrina blew in on Aug. 29, 2005.

Her new book, "Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast," is an attempt to stand up for her home state, an effort to preserve the memories of the land in the face of mighty destructive forces, including forces that masquerade as rebuilding.

As low-income housing is bulldozed and casinos rush in to fill the void, the land that she knew continued to disappear even faster, she writes. Trethewey quotes a fellow Gulfport resident who said,  "The devastation of the storm will not surpass the devastation brought on by the recovery."

For her own sake, and for her hometown, she wanted to put up a literary marker. "My intent is to create some kind of monument, not a static monument but a living monument."

Trethewey spoke recently about her book, which began as a series of lectures at the University of Virginia. An amalgam of memoir, reportage and poetry, the book takes a sudden turn halfway through when Trethewey describes the storm's collateral damage in the life of her brother, Joe Grinnette, who was arrested on a drug charge in 2007 at the same time that she was winning a Pulitzer.

The folly of trying to fix the evaporating history of her town is revealed in a quote from Flannery O'Connor, emblazoned just inside the title page:

"Where you came from is gone. Where you thought you were going to never was there. And where you are is no good unless you can get away from it."

Trethewey's father was a white college professor from Canada. Her mother was a black Gulfport native who was murdered by Trethewey's stepfather.

She feels a certain existential absence when she goes back to visit. Her family's house is gone. Her grandmother's house is uninhabitable. "I don’t have anywhere to stay," she said. "When I go home I stay in a hotel."

The book, she said, was modeled after "Segregation," poet Robert Penn Warren's series of informal conversations with Southerners after the Brown v. the Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision changed racial politics in the South. ‘"It was a pilgrimage for him to rethink his own feelings about the region, to take stock," she said. "He was figuring out something about himself as much as he was figuring out something about the region."

She does the same thing throughout the book, as she interviews residents of the battered region. In a poignant scene, Trethewey returns to Gulfport in 2008 to bury her grandmother, Leretta Dixon Turnbough, whom she called Nana. Evacuated during the storm, Nana asked repeatedly to go back home but didn't return until she made the trip in a casket. The service was held at the church across the road from Nana's house. She'd been a lifelong member at that church, and had sewn curtains for the baptismal font.

But the church, like Nana's home, was damaged, and the family gathered in the low-ceilinged fellowship hall at the rear of the building instead of in the soaring but uninhabitable sanctuary. Her brother visited his grandmother's casket in shackles and handcuffs, escorted by police officers before being returned to prison.

"I could see three years later, in 2008, that [Katrina] wasn't over," Trethewey said. "The church still hadn’t gotten back all its members. People were going to [other] churches not in need of renovation. The ceiling tiles were all stained. This was where we had to say goodbye to my grandmother. It made me feel guilty because she had been begging to go back there and I had been putting her off. She wasn’t in a position to travel. I thought one day we’ll get her to go, we'll find a handicapped accessible van, find handicapped accessible bathrooms along the way. But she didn't make it back until her funeral."

The dominant sensation she describes is feeling adrift. "I refer to myself as a motherless child. Losing my mother felt like that, but I still had my grandmother. Losing her, I kind of lost the place that was my place. It makes me realize the extent to which I had built my life elsewhere. It's probably a cliché to say this, but probably most writers feel most at home in what they make in words."

Event preview

Natasha Trethewey, who holds the Phillis Wheatley Distinguised Chair in Poetry At Emory University, will speak about her book “Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast,” 12 noon Aug. 28 at the Spruill Gallery, 4681 Ashford Dunwoody Road in Dunwoody. Free. 770-394-4019. www.spruillarts.org

She will also appear at the AJC Decatur Book Festival. 1:15 p.m., Sept. 5. Free. Carreker Hall stage, Decatur First Baptist Church, 308 Clairemont Ave., Decatur. 404-471-5769, www.decaturbookfestival.com

See video of Trethewey reading her poem "Liturgy" here.

See video of Trethewey discussing "Beyond Katrina."