In a recent interview with the Times-Picayune, writer and New Orleans resident Tom Piazza said, “What are you going to stand and fight for, if not New Orleans?”

Piazza’s newest book, Why New Orleans Matters, is a vital piece of that fight. The book, written in a period of five weeks following Katrina, is, according to one lab-toting reviewer, “a bittersweet paean to what is, arguably, the most joyous metropolis in North America … Those of you being swayed by the ‘it doesn’t make sense to rebuild New Orleans’ argument should read this and think again.”

Tom will be touring from Mississippi to New York City in the next few weeks — get the schedule here (along with the assurance that Piazza’s a great reader, “i.e., you won’t be wondering what’s happening on ‘How I Met Your Mother’ during the performance”). You can read an excerpt from the book here.

Today Tom discusses his nonfiction influences over at Maud Newton. Here he tells Tingle Alley what it’s like to crank out a book at a time of high emotion and dislocation:

Writing Why New Orleans Matters was like skiing a very steep grade without much warning: it was intense, it was over almost before I knew it, it was exhilarating, and I’m glad it’s finished. Five weeks is a short time for writing a book, even a short book, which this is. Part of me seemed to be in ultra-high focus, and part of me was in a trance.

Some friends asked if it was cathartic and I guess in some kind of way it was, but it was corrosive, too, like sitting in an acid bath for five weeks. In the book I tried to summon the things at the heart of why New Orleans is so important to the people who really love it, what is at stake if it gets lost, why it is worth fighting for the city’s future. But each memory and image of the streets and jazz funerals and all the people in the neighborhoods and the Mardi Gras Indians and restaurants came with pain over their likely, or at least possible, loss.

I had spent August in Virginia working on a new novel, and I never made it back to retrieve anything before the hurricane hit. Instead I drove to Malden, Missouri to join my partner, Mary, who evacuated there on August 27th, to the cotton country where she grew up. Southeast Missouri looks something like the Mississippi Delta, but without the poetry. I’ve visited there many times with Mary, and everyone is friendly, but it isn’t really my kind of place – I’m a New Yorker (for 14 years before I went to Iowa for the Writers’ Workshop in the early 1990s) and a New Orleanian by choice (for the past 11 years). In some way the strangeness of the surroundings in which I wrote the book helped the writing. I worked on it partly in an unused upstairs office in a cotton gin, taking breaks in the evening to watch CNN. As I wrote in the book, the feeling of dislocation was, and is, so profound – and we were, and are, in a place with many comforts and resources. The degree of pain and dissociation involved for people from deep in the Ninth Ward, say, who relocated to Utah and have no idea when they’ll be back is almost unimaginable.

The book also got written in a small farmhouse a few miles south of town, and, for a week and a half in October, in hotels and guest rooms in Connecticut and Vermont and upstate New York and Florida. Friends arranged readings for me during October because I had lost all my fall income in New Orleans (Loyola University, where I was to teach a couple of classes, did not honor its contracts with part-timers), so I wrote the back end of the book on the road.

Of course I feel proud of whatever craft or ability allowed me to do this so quickly, especially in the middle of such weird and heavy and contradictory emotional weather; on some level pure reflex took over. I almost didn’t have time to think. A writing process that might otherwise have taken eight or nine months took five weeks. The publication process took a proportionately short time, too. My “galleys” were PDF files my editor e-mailed to me. Copyediting took four days total, and proofreading about two or three. I read the PDF galleys via e-mail at night in hotel rooms after driving all day and my editor at HarperCollins, Cal Morgan, would submit the changes the next morning.

People always ask whether we are going back to live. My apartment is in a part of town that didn’t flood, and that is the big dividing line these days in New Orleans: whether you flooded or not. Part of my roof blew off and the rain that got in collapsed the ceiling in a couple of rooms. It is a big mess but, as I wrote in the book, a fixable mess. Mary’s house flooded, and so did her office, where she provided legal help for the city’s most disadvantaged people, most of whom are scattered across the country now like the gold dust at the end of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. I tried to write in the book what it was like going into her house for the first time. Anyway it will be February, at least, before we will be able to live in New Orleans again full time. For many other people it will be a lot longer. But the short answer is yes. I love it too much. I hope that love comes through in the book and maybe in a small way at least it can help shape the dialogue over the city’s future. Then I’d feel as if I’d done something good.