I just finished reading The Donkey Show by Michael Patrick Welch. I met Patrick one day on the couch of his girlfriend’s neighbor’s house, where in a galaxy of artful minds and conversations he only stood out as the new guy. We didn’t get a chance to become friends. He was just settling in while I was moving on. After reading The Donkey Show I wish I had had that chance.
The narrative is charged with the schizophrenic energies of New Orleans; poverty, wealth, wealth in poverty, poverty in wealth. Every time something good happens you’re waiting for the other shoe to fall. Every time tragedy strikes look around the corner for the city to resurrect joy from pain. The book tells you, and reminds me, what its like to arrive in New Orleans a foreigner, minority, cautiously excluded, and cautiously welcomed. Patrick teaches at a public school in New Orleans and of all the pregnant tales, tells the reader the lessons he learned from his students, and by inference ones he didn’t. He serves fancy meals at a fancy restaurant while his first Mardi Gras rolls by right in front of him, and lets us in on the wait staff rantings with its defacto race, sex, and gender politics. He falls in love and finds his way, for now. Sadly he doesn’t tell us if he ever made it back to Costa Rica, but at the end of the book he gives you his email address so you can just drop him a note and ask.
While despairing to impart the simplest of instructions Patrick tells his writing students to “review the content.” I did my best. The last time I saw Patrick he was sitting on his bike with his girlfriend on his lap waiting for the next parade to roll down Canal Street. The Donkey Show tells some of Patrick’s story, but there’s a lot more, and I’d love to hear it.

Find Michael Patrick Welch at these other links:
Equator Books, Author Profile.
Gambit Weekly Author Archives.
commonplace, the author's blog.
An early piece of The Donkey Show at The Edward Society.
and the essay Animal Hospital at BIGnews - A Publication of Mainchance.

First person to ask gets it. I have released it via BookCrossing.