Backstory: Hurricane Stories, Laura Himel

Laura Himel was one of four students nationwide to receive a gold award and $10,000 scholarship for her General Writing Portfolio in 2006. She was also born and raised in New Orleans. As a senior in high school on the Gulf Coast, Laura found herself in the eye of two hurricanes: Katrina and the college application process. Katrina at first seemed like the lesser of the two.

Laura and the rest of the Himel family evacuated at the last minute to Jackson, Mississippi. They took very little with them, having evacuated before—“Each time you take less. Before Katrina, you’d always come back to find your life intact.” Laura echoed the words of so many New Orleanians: “We didn’t know.” No one anticipated the severity of the storm.

But once the storm hit, its severity was impossible to ignore. Laura spent the first semester of her senior year—the semester students apply to college—at a new school in Austin, Texas. She wrote “The (Second) Watery Demise of Virginia Woolf” (featured in the online gallery) only a month or so after Katrina hit. It was during this period—October and November of 2005—that Laura found herself writing more, and not only because of a creative surge in response to the hurricane crisis. An abridged version of the essay ended up becoming Laura’s personal statement for all of her college applications. “I hadn’t intended for that to happen,” Laura confided, “but that’s what was on my mind at the time.”

Laura returned to New Orleans right before Christmas to find her house in shambles. There had been four feet of floodwater—less than houses nearby, but still utterly damaging. They lost most everything, and ended up gutting and selling the house for very little profit. But Laura is positive: “If you take something horrible that happened and produce work about it, it’s not just an act of therapy, it’s an act of hope for the community.” It’s proof of production from destruction. “And of course,” Laura added quickly, “it does help the artist to cope.”

Laura hopes that others will find solace in her work as she found solace in the work of Virginia Woolf and so many others. As Laura herself reminds us, “If nothing else, this still remains: the ability to extract life from a shelf—to be able to hold it in one’s hand, a solid monument.”

Laura Himel, Age 18, Covington, Louisiana