Joshua Clark never left New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, choosing instead to band together with fellow holdouts in the French Quarter, pooling resources and volunteering energy in an effort to save the city they loved.

Clark will be signing his memoir about this traumatic ordeal, Heart Like Water — Surviving Katrina and Life in its Disaster Zone, Thursday, Aug 9, 3-5 p.m., at Page & Palette, 32 S. Section St. in Fairhope.

When Katrina hit, Clark, a key correspondent for National Public Radio during the storm, immediately began to record hundreds of hours of conversations with its victims, not only in the city but throughout the Gulf Coast: the devastated poor and rich alike; rescue workers from around the country; reporters; local characters who could exist nowhere else but New Orleans; politicians; and the woman Clark loved, in a relationship ravaged by the storm.

Their voices resound throughout this memoir of a unique and little-known moment of anarchy and chaos, of heartbreaking kindness and incomprehensible anguish, of mercy and madness as only America could deliver it.

Publisher’s Weekly observes that in Heart Like Water, “The scenes of physical devastation are matched by an uncompromising look at the emotional traumas that unfold in the storm’s aftermath — yet through it all, Clark never fully abandons his sense of the absurd.”

Clark is the founder of Light of New Orleans Publishing and has edited such books as French Quarter Fiction, the best-selling Southern Fried Divorce and most recently Louisiana: In Words, an anthology of 120 Louisiana writers depicting a day in the life of their state.

He contributes essays, fiction and photographs to dozens of publications, from the Los Angeles Times to the Chicago Tribune. He runs the Katrina Arts Relief and Emergency Support fund (KARES), which supports New Orleans-area writers affected by the storm. A portion of the royalties from Heart Like Water will benefit this fund.

For more information, contact Page & Palette at (251) 928-5295, or visit online at www.pageandpalette.com.