Pia z ehrhardt biography

Ehrhardt is an.
PIA Z. EHRHARDT'S stories and essays have appeared in McSweeney's, Mississippi Review, Oxford American, and Narrative Magazine, and have been anthologized.
She's a brilliant writer, a trusted friend, a generous person, a devoted, big-hearted mother.

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The Owls of Solomon Place

Last May a great horned owl fell into our backyard while I unloaded grocery bags from my car. I froze and kept a distance. We’d been watching the family; this looked like the female. She and her mate had made a nest in the live oak behind our house, or, rather, they’d been squatting in a nest built by black crows who daily mobbed them with swoops and scolds. Babies—we counted two—had hatched. At night, one parent guarded the clutch while the other hunted in the 1,300-acre park across the street. A red clay finial on the roof of our house served as a lookout perch, or the crooked telephone pole. The owl sighted prey, its thick head on a swivel. My husband and I drank gin and took in the show from our porch, and the Solomon Place neighbors walked down the street with their drinks and gathered on the corner, all of us waiting for the bulky bird to take off.

And now I hoped that she’d only flown into a window and knocked herself out. A neighbor passed by on his way to jog and I asked if he’d check to see if sh

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Interview: Guest Editor Pia Z. Ehrhardt

On the city of New Orleans and storytelling

Flash Frontier: Kia Ora, Pia. Tell us about your relationship to New Orleans. How long have you lived there, where do you live and how does it compare to other places you’ve resided?

Pia Z. Ehrhardt: I moved to New Orleans in 1980. Growing up, I lived in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Italy, and Canada. I never felt I belonged to any of these wonderful places, but after thirty plus years in New Orleans, raising our son here and surviving Katrina, it’s become my heart and my home.

FF: Place is often paramount to good storytelling: setting the mood, knowing the intricacies of its history, understanding the subtleties of the culture. How does your experience with New Orleans figure into your own storytelling, either directly or indirectly?

PZE: We used to live across the lake from New Orleans in a bedroom community called Mandeville, and I found myself setting my short stories in New Orleans as a way to will myself over there. We moved to the city in 2002. For the last five years I’ve been writi

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How I Write

Pia Z. Ehrhardt’s stories occur in and around New Orleans, a place of hardship and decay but also hope. Her women are trying to find love, or something like it, and flail in their attempts. Ehrhardt, born in Philadelphia to musical parents, credits the melodrama of her boisterous Italian family for motivating her to write about what she saw and heard, since she had few other chances to “get a word in edgewise.” This is evident in the lilting, though imperative, cadences in her story collection, Famous Fathers. Ehrhardt was drawn early to Southern writers: “I liked how the landscape was a character, a living, breathing player in the work.” She studied with Frederick Barthelme and Mary Robison, whose fiction she describes as concise, meticulous and openhearted. Her work has appeared in many print and online publications, including Mississippi Review and Narrative, and can also be heard on NPR and WQED. She is at work on her first novel, Speeding in the Driveway. She lives with her husband and son in New Orleans, a community she loves and is commi