Author James Nolan represented New Orleans: 'a bit odd' and 'mesmerized by darkness and joy'

“I’m good at running away,” the New Orleans writer and teacher James Nolan once wrote me in an email.

Always moving, always writing, that was Nolan, who died earlier this year, on Aug. 22, at the age of 78. For those who only knew his work on the page, he was not only a prolific multihyphenate of an author — a published poet, novelist, essayist, memoirist and translator — but thoroughly represented New Orleans: a bit odd, equally mesmerized by darkness and joy, unafraid to let life get in the way of work.

Though his back-flap biography would later describe him as a “fifth-generation New Orleans native,” as a bisexual and bookish young man, he couldn’t wait to escape.

“The city struck me as brutally backward,” he wrote in his first book of memoirs, “nowhere I wanted to call home.”

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