About

Just me . . .

Writer/Poet/Mother/Instructor of English at UL-Lafayette. Author of Root. Sprout. Blossom: Life Bag of a Flower-Child (CreateSpace 2012), a quirky Southern novel about growing up female in the 1960s and Notes from Refuge (Plain View Press, 2008) poetic narratives of my experience as a Katrina refugee and other poems exploring deeply personal issues of disaster thru a feminist eye.  Root. Sprout Blossom is my first published novel; Notes from Refuge is my first published book of poetry, but I’ve had work published in The Southwestern Review, The Deep South Writer’s Chapbook, Dance to Death, Words-Myth, Moondance, Knock, and The Smoking Poet. Currently working on another quirky novel featuring some of the characters I met in Jackson Square in New Orleans (pre-katrina) in the summer of 2005, as well as a second book of poetry, tentatively titled Blue Rain. I hope some of you will follow along on my journey. Blue Rain will be a little less dark than NFR, I believe . . . I’m finally out of that deep hole of disaster despair.

I recently starting doing PR/Personal Management for my dear friend, and world renowed vocalist/multi-instrumentalist, Kelly Keeling. Kelly and I, as MindRadio Productions, have produced several shows, including “Home for Christmas” a concert to benefit Faith House of Acadiana, and “A Day in the Life” a Beatles Tribute Concert that drew huge crowds of people outdoors for a celebration of life, as well as several other shows that highlight the vocal mastery of Kelly Keeling, formerly of Trans-Siberian Orchestra. Working with Kelly brought me back to life after Katrina pulled me to the brink of despair. Music has been a HUGE part of my life for as long as I can remember, so treading back into musical waters has been incredibly fun….Life is good again these days.

~L.

Notes from Refuge

Robin “Birdie” Lormand, a flower-child from birth/old hippie chick till death, is determined to clear out the heavy root barnacles from her life bag when she reluctantly travels home for her errant father’s funeral in St. Armand, Louisiana after running away to New Orleans 30 years ago.  Armed with a chisel, a hammer, a chef, a priest, and advice from a Voodoo shrink, Robin irreverently and comically faces her angry half-siblings, her dead father, her jilted first lover, as well as her current lover, Sam St. Germain, who follows her home against her wishes and learns the truth about Robin’s secret and bizarre past. All of this happens in one tragically funny weekend that shatters the small, safe hothouse where Birdie, the young flower-child, has been waiting for the past 30 years to root, sprout, and blossom.

© All materials published in this blog are copyright property of Lana M. Wiggins.