This is the literature of Louisiana. It has a beating heart and a spring in its step, eyes that watch the world and a real voice that reverberates in the word “home.”

New Orleans, Lake Charles, New Iberia and a hundred other towns and parishes are my home. They hold my history, wait for my return, remember the stories of voodoo and fine cuisine, the Gulf of Mexico and a road that brings us back again and again.

I am frequently asked to name the writers that have most influenced me. It’s a question that the reader hopes will illuminate the common ground between us. But the firmament that connects readers and writers is older than the literate world; it goes all the way back to those stories that your relatives and family friends told when you were a child who saw writing as funny-looking chicken scratches on paper better suited for finger painting, when storytelling still had a voice and timbre, love and warning, a warm touch and lots of laughter.

Everyday life in Louisiana is rife with wonderful storytellers, some of whom have read very little, if at all. Guys hanging out on street corners; old aunties who are the repositories of all the stories of the ancestors — they are all writers of a sort and part of a powerful oral tradition. Homer and some heroic poets were illiterate. Certain forms of poetry came into being because the repetition made the verses easy to remember without having to write them down. This is the germ of literary appreciation: when children are regaled with tales of wonder — how Uncle George survived when he fell down a well in eastern Tennessee; or the strange foods Aunt Loretta encountered in Peru and Paris.

Later, they begin reading on their own — “Treasure Island” and “Little Women,” “Winnie-the-Pooh” (my personal favorite) and “Peter Pan.” Reading becomes internalized, and its power, for some, is so great that the experience rivals and echoes the upheavals of the biology and instincts of adolescence. Some young men and women find all the secrets and dangers that their bodies whisper about between the covers of books. The wrenching passion of love, the fear and heroism of war, and how lonely these hungers and dreads are in children’s often isolated and alienated experience of life.

One by one, these books form a chorus of trusted voices that accompany readers into adulthood. When others succumb to the cacophony of modern life, readers can rely on personalized internal guides that cause them to pause and wonder and question — often at just the right moments. Their reading becomes a virtual map, an internal GPS system that guides them away from the prefabricated and canned production line that so many are shunted toward.

I’m not saying that you have to be a reader to save your soul in the modern world. I’m saying it helps. Artists, musicians, naturally empathetic children and people born to the beat of a different drum often embark on more original lives than the Company Store wants for us. They’re naturally more resistant to the forces of big business and big government.