Articles

Surviving disasters

By Michael Bracken

Published: March 31, 2006

After Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flood destroyed much of the main floor of novelist John Biguenet's two-story New Orleans home in August 2005, Biguenet entered his most productive writing period ever.

Even though Hurricane Wilma nearly gutted her Fort Lauderdale, Fla., condominium in October 2005, novelist Elaine Viets finished writing one novel and read page proofs of another.

In 1995, when Hurricane Marilyn destroyed the 39-foot yacht on which then-unpublished novelist Tobias S. Buckell lived in the U.S. Virgin Islands, he lost nearly all of his writing and was forced to start over, making his first sale only a few years later.

Words didn't fail these writers. If anything, they found new and better words because, even in the face of disaster, writers write. Nothing drives the point home more effectively than the experiences of these three authors, all of whom survived hurricanes that destroyed their home offices but didn't destroy their will to write or their writing careers.

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