What happens when a city doesn't simply remember its dead, but continues to live alongside them?
In New Orleans, cemeteries are woven into the cityscape, generations of families carry stories of the unexplained, and traditions of prayer, Voodoo and ancestor veneration keep the boundary between the living and the dead remarkably close.
After our previous conversation exploring the extraordinary life and afterlife of the Baroness de Pontalba, Dr Rory O'Neill Schmitt @roryschmitt8162 and Dr Rosary O'Neill return to take us deeper into the city surrounding her — and into their book The Haunted Guide to New Orleans.
In a city where, as Rory puts it, the cityscape can become a “deathscape”, perhaps the past is never quite as distant as we imagine.
This week we return to New Orleans — a city of ghosts, ancestors, memory and mystery, where the living and the dead sometimes seem to occupy the very same streets.
My Special Guests are Dr Rory O’Neill Schmitt and Dr. Rosary O'Neill:
Dr Rory O’Neill Schmitt is the author of six books exploring history, culture, art, and the enduring mysteries of place. Much of her work is rooted in New Orleans, where the past is never entirely past: its houses, streets, legends, and larger-than-life figures continue to inspire stories of hauntings and restless memory.
Dr Rosary O’Neill, PHD, is a senior Fulbright drama specialist and winner of nine Fulbright awards, including five to study Edgar Degas in Paris. She has published nineteen plays with Concord Publishers (Samuel French Publishers), including Degas in New Orleans and Marilyn/God, and has published six play/screenplay anthologies, three novels and seven books. She co-authored screenplays with Dr Rory Schmitt about Kate Chopin, Edgar Degas and the Baroness of Pontalba in New Orleans, and these are currently being optioned as films.
Dr O’Neill is a professor emerita at Loyola University, New Orleans, and a member of the Playwrights Division of the Actors’ Studio in New York City.
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