How Hurricane Katrina and Fred Rogers inspired Vernon Poche & the Ghosts of New Orleans

Next year marks exactly two decades since Hurricane Katrina became one of the country’s greatest natural disasters. Over that time, Paul Siefken believes the tragedy has become lost to younger generations.

“That means that there are high school graduates now for whom that’s history. And yet, for people in New Orleans, they talk about it like it was yesterday,” Siefken tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “I felt that, among my family that still lives in New Orleans, being among the people who feel like [the hurricane] was yesterday, it was important to sort of immerse the reader in what that might have been like.”

Siefken hopes to reach middle schoolers born after Hurricane Katrina with his debut novel, Vernon Poche & the Ghosts of New Orleans, now available from Treehouse Publishing Group. Siefken will appear at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill on Tue., Oct. 22 to discuss the newly released book in conversation with Tim Smith.

In the aftermath of Katrina, Vernon Poche and his friend Alisha go on a series of adventures, meeting the ghosts of New Orleans legends like “Vodoo queen” Marie Laveau, bandleader King Oliver, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, and pirate Jean Lafitte. They are guided by Tonti, a small, wiry dog who knows everyone and seems to have lived for a few hundred years. When Vernon’s father threatens to leave New Orleans forever, Vernon searches desperately for a reason to stay.

Siefken, who grew up in New Orleans, used the book to illuminate landmarks like Bourbon Street and Jackson Square. Some sections also cover lesser-known sites, including Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, the Ursuline Convent, and Bayou St. John, a Spanish fort.

Siefken, the president and CEO of Fred Rogers Productions, and a 30-year veteran of children’s television, wanted to focus on the discovery process.

“When a child learns something from what they watched, they might share it with a parent or with a friend, and that parent or that friend says, ‘Where did you learn that from?’ And they very proudly say, ‘I learned that from watching that show,’” Siefkin says. “And so, I’d love for people to be able to share this information they picked up in this book, and to be able to proudly put it out there.”

Siefken says he is inclined to work on projects that keep a young reader’s best interests at heart, much like Rogers.

“I think what Fred Rogers encouraged children to understand about themselves in every episode of his show was that despite all of the things you’re seeing, there’s nobody in the world like you,” Siefken says. “What are you, as Mahalia Jackson says in the book, ‘going to add your voice to the choir?’ And it’s your voice. And so, I worked really hard to make sure that the kids [in the book] had agency in the story, that it was up to them if they wanted to continue their journey.”

Throughout the book, Vernon and Alisha face obstacles that require perseverance. Their ability to overcome roadblocks is another lesson that Rogers taught.

“That resilience is one of the key skills that we try to model in the content we try to make at Fred Rogers [Productions],” Siefken says. “Children being able to overcome some of the stresses in their lives, whether they be economic or emotional, if they have the tools of being resilient and persevering, they’re more likely to have more well-being.”

This article appears in Oct 16-22, 2024.