Flashlight #17: After the Flood
Finding words after a long break; finding new ground after deep, shifting waters.
Hello friends,
I kept thinking I’d find a good way to write about Hurricane Helene and everything else that has been shifting these last months. But somehow the magic articulation elves haven’t visited, and I run a freaking accountability workshop, so: time to just write it.
I live in Asheville, NC. My last newsletter came shortly before Hurricane Helene jumped from the coast up to these mountains and devastated our city. I’m ok, so is my family, so is my house. But so many people and places aren’t. And of course, in the months since this happened in Asheville, the disasters around the country - and world - keep stacking. So it’s not unique. It’s not new. But it still feels important to record.
Because for me, alongside the storm (underneath it?) there’s been another storm - I’ve been in the long process of separating from my husband. There isn’t much I am going to say about it here, now. But both events are enormous and unsteadying, and also both are the kinds of things that make you figure out how to reroot, where to find new footing. (Notice I’m not even mentioning the enormous, unsteadying, frightening political reality we live in. Ok, I’m mentioning it. Also, that.)
But I am popping my head up from new dirt over here to say, hi. I’m ok. And here’s a little bit more about it.
***
September, 2024
We’re like sardines, all of us packed together at the fire station in the wake of the flood. We’d sniffed out our windows to where people were gathering, saw people shuffling up that way. The fire station, two blocks up from my house, has its big doors open and firefighters scatter through the crowd, calming people down.
It’s t-shirt weather, sunny, and strange to be so quickly nice one day after Hurricane Helene has just jumped from the Florida coast up hundreds of miles to land here in Asheville, bringing massive floods and catastrophic winds. But we don’t really know that yet. What we know is that after three days of relentless rain, the power is out and the water is out and cell service is gone and the internet is out, but aside from minor basement flooding and a few downed trees nearby, my little pocket of West Asheville seems ok.
My daughter, two-and-a-half, holds tight to my neck as we weave through the crowd. We are looking for information. Nobody has any. But I see a firefighter passing out fliers and begin heading that way when a woman bumps into me, turns to apologize, and sees the kid in my arms. Oh, she says. Everyone thinks their kid is cute, but mine is cute cute, like Cindy Lou Hoo from the Grinch, that kind of cute. That’s what people usually comment on, that’s what I’m expecting. Oh, she says, looking at the two of us, bless your heart. She shakes her head, sadly. Oh honey, good luck.
I had been fine, holding it together because that is what it means to be a parent. That’s what you get good at. You hold it together until someone looks at you with your kid, like, how will you do this?, and you have to think, oh god. I don’t know.
You hold it together until you read over the shoulder of someone lucky enough to snag one of the informational flyers:
Question: Is there any way to get out of Asheville?
Answer: No, there is no way in or out of Asheville. All roads are closed.
It is Saturday. There is no power and there is no internet and there is no cell service and there is no water. The taps stopped running the day before. The food we have, with a rapidly warming fridge, will only last so long. I’m holding it together until I’m not. There is no way in or out of Asheville.
How fast I turn away then, finally taking stock of what is really happening and how, standing alone as a singular body in the world you are vulnerable, of course, but standing with your own body and also holding a little body, one that relies on you only and entirely to survive, there is no holding it together. And the only choice is to hold it together.
My daughter wriggles out of my arms, peels a dog poop bag from the roll and begins collecting mulch. She fills it with sticks and rocks. And then, finding a few tiny flowers growing on a bush, begins delivering the small blooms to people sitting nearby.
When J says that we have to leave as soon as a road is open, I agree. Of course we do.
At home, we have a few jugs of water to get us through the immediate days. We begin cooking feasts with friends and neighbors, making use of the rapidly thawing food in our freezers. And, because there’s no other way to find out what has happened, we drive ourselves to the river. But when we are still blocks away, there, suddenly, is the river. I can see rooftops peeking out of the water. Cars, wood, debris. We turn around, take another route to a tall bridge, and gather there with dozens of others, looking down at what used to be the River Arts district. The water is above everything. A semi-truck’s container floats by.
A few days later, we get word that one single road has opened up. “We gotta get out of here,” J says, back at home. “Yes,” I say, again, because it seems like the only answer. He begins packing our camper van as fast as he can. “But I don’t think we should go,” I tell J.
“But we have no power or water,” he says.
“Yes,” I say. “But we have neighbors, and they need us.”
“We have a kid,” he says. “We can’t have no water with a kid.”
Of course he is right. We have to go.
*
We swerve to avoid fallen trees on the one open road to get us out of town. We drive and drive, snaking south and then east, west and then north, and at the end of a long, long day, we arrive in Tennessee. That’s where J’s family lives. We give our daughter a bath. We drink cup after cup of water. Look, for the first time, at images of the wreckage.
*
I last two days there. And then I come back to Asheville, alone.
My camper van is filled all the way up with drinking water, shelf-stable food, diapers, wipes, pet food, hygiene products, anything on any list I could find that people might need. Friends, members of my literary community, family, strangers start sending money to me for supplies, thousands of dollars. I buy everything I can, exactly what people are asking for. I drive supplies deep into parts of the county with nothing left. I deliver them to the doorsteps of mothers I connect with on facebook who need size 2 diapers, similac formula, toddler snacks. I deliver latex gloves, ziplock bags, cat food. And water, for everyone. I cook food, I knock on doorsteps to search for the missing, I comfort a man whose son-in-law was washed away in the river.
From sun-up to long after sun-down, I drive everywhere my car can make it, everywhere trees have been cleared enough for one car to shimmy through, delivering water and food and baby products and so much more to women I connect with on an Asheville Mama’s Facebook page, and nothing has energized me more.
To be in the middle of it. With all the other people in the middle of it.
That’s how I held it together. And then lost it. And then got it together again. That’s the story I’ll tell my daughter about it, one day.
*
It would be two months before we got clean drinking water again. Two months before my daughter’s daycare opened back up.
*
Now, six months after the storm, this all feels so far away. So many other, bigger things have happened, are happening, in the world, in the country, in my own life.
But in Asheville, as within me, we’re still rebuilding. We’re finding new solid ground. We’re feeling gratitude for the way things once were, appreciating them, and understanding that they’ll never be the same again.
Hopeful that whatever comes next will be even better.
****
Publications
In one of those bizarre moments of synchronicity, I’d turned in an essay, “After the Disaster,” about finding my way through the aftermath of a devastating tornado, to an editor a day before Hurricane Helene hit. This is one of those pieces I worked on for years, never quite getting it right, never quite figuring out the meaning I was trying to make. The editor let me make a few additions to include the new disaster I was suddenly inside, and I’m proud of how it turned out. Read it here.
Jonathan Vatner, of Poets & Writers, interviewed me and other Western North Carolina writers about the literary community’s response to Hurricane Helene. “Healing from Helene,” Poets & Writers, March/April 2025
The PBS/NPR station for Southwest Florida featured a conversation between Gulf Coast Life Book Club host Cary Barbor and me, discussing THE RED GROVE
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May 18, 1:00-4:00PM; Online via Zoom
In this generative, one-day intensive, we'll move step by step through building the draft of a short essay—from idea generation through early drafting, with prompts along the way to help with structure, image, point of view, theme, and form. The end goal is that each participant leave the workshop with a short first draft. Writers need not come in with ideas for their essay already in mind, though ideas are welcome. The workshop will be writing-focused, so participants should come prepared to dive deeply into their own material. This workshop is appropriate for any experience level, and any stage of a project-in-process. Though we'll primarily focus on the personal essay, narrative nonfiction writers, memoirists, short story writers, and others are also welcome.
Accountability Workshop:
Join the Accountability Workshops led by Annie Hartnett (author of novels Rabbit Cake and Unlikely Animals) and Tessa Fontaine (author of the memoir The Electric Woman and the novel The Red Grove).
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Good Moms on Paper Podcast: Join me, Annie Hartnett, and Ellen O'Connell Whittet as we interview other writers about writing, parenting, and creative accountability. Three past seasons for your auditory enjoyment.
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Ok, that’s it!
Are you doing ok? I hope you are.
xo
Tessa
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The part about going all in with supplies made me shiver. Connection and kindness s much stronger than divisions and cruelty. 💗
Another chapter in the sword swallower, electric lightbulb, sturdyness that life tosses your way. Adelante, avant!