Welcome to When the Wind Turned: A Katrina Family Story, a new serialized work from Heavy Crown Press. This is an exclusive weekly series (Wednesdays), available to paid subscribers, following one Louisiana family whose lives split apart—and then unexpectedly re-form—in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
This story is fiction, but the emotional landscape is rooted in lived experience: displacement, loved ones scattered across states, the ache of rebuilding, the quiet grief of what’s lost, the fierce hope in what’s found. Our goal is to create not only a narrative, but a space for profound conversations about trauma, recovery, climate change, environmental injustice, and what it means to be a refugee within your own country.
I hope you’ll read along, reflect, and join the dialogue as each chapter unfolds.
— Ashley Rovira
P.S. As of the week of March 11, the story has thirteen chapters, with Chapter Fourteen going live on March 11. The story will soon be on hiatus. Paid subscribers will still be able to access existing chapters, but the preview availability for free subscribers will change.
Chapter One
Before the Breach
FRANCINE LEMOINE — AUGUST 30, 2005
The waterline is not what she remembers first.
It’s the silence.
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