A Texan Shares His Love for New Orleans in an Emotion-Driven Novella

Matt Rosas ended up in New Orleans by chance. He took a job with the retailer Dillard’s, not knowing where the company would send him. “They said, ‘If you accept the job, we’re going to move you somewhere. You don’t know where it’s going to be. You have to sign and say yes.’ I said, ‘OK.’ ” Dillard’s sent the Texas native to Louisiana, where he spent six years. “I loved it, until I was ready to come home,” he says. 

Rosas’ time in New Orleans provided the setting for his new book, Praying Not To Fall. The novella tells the story of Jo Santos, who loves his party-driven lifestyle and his Type A fiancee, Hope—two things that are often in conflict. Kirkus Reviews calls it “a compact, boisterous tale that succeeds in describing the struggle to regain control in life.” 

“I poured a lot of myself into this book,” says Rosas. “I think people will be surprised at some of the raw emotion and raw feelings.” Jo’s nights out are described in detail at some points, while at other times Rosas focuses on the more abstract atmosphere, the experiences that keep drawing Jo back to the New Orleans nightlife. “Part of the experience I try to describe was the complete unknown of when you walk into the French Quarter and you don’t know what direction you’re going to get pulled in on a given night,” he says.

Rosas also wants readers to appreciate the bars and restaurants that appear throughout the book, which he remembers vividly from his time in New Orleans. Like Rosas, the characters get hamburgers from Port of Call. “I wouldn’t go there often, but the times I would go, it always seemed to be a launching pad for nights of debauchery and madness, in a fun way,” he says. They also visit Napoleon House, which Rosas recommends for “a Sunday afternoon, or when you’re not wanting to go out and party the rest of the night.”

Some of the bars featured in the book no longer exist, but Rosas can still call them to mind. Jo visits Shim-Sham, which Rosas said is “small, and looks like an ugly little bar in the front, and then you go to the back, through a door, and there’s actually a big house venue area” where both he and his characters enjoyed live music. He hopes that readers will understand that in his New Orleans, “any night can turn into something really, really wonderful, which is why I enjoyed it there for so long.”

The book is full of quiet moments as well, like an afternoon visit to Jo’s grandmother:

She serves us fideo, with rice and beans. On the side she adds a bowl of cucumber and some leftover lasagna from a few Sundays ago. Then she brings the best part to the table, a warm plate of flour tortillas. We devour everything. We help her clean up then, sit with her in her living room. Grandma holds both of our hands in hers. She tells Hope stories of when I was in kindergarten. Hope tells her that she will get to walk down the aisle for our wedding in December. Grandma tears up. She is thrilled about our marriage. She loves Hope as much as I do.

Life in New Orleans was not just about the nightlife for Rosas, who was sometimes lonely living away from his family. “When you’re by yourself, there’s good times and bad times to having that solitude,” he says. When he needed help managing his loneliness, he turned to The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. “At those times, I would pick up the book and find one of my favorite poems, one of my favorite short stories. It would give me some comfort to be able to read that type of literature, those types of words.” He had bought the collection as a decorative object, thinking it would look good on his bookshelves, and was surprised when it turned out to be one of the works that shaped his own thinking and writing, along with The Brothers Karamazov and The Alchemist.

After Rosas returned to Texas, he moved from retail into school counseling, his current career. The academic year gives him a block of time each summer to focus on writing. “I get one month off,” he says, so each July, “I would take a week to decompress, and the next two to three weeks, I would be able to write and focus on those feelings and get into that place.” 

He began writing fiction after his move back to Texas “just because there were so many feelings,” he says. Praying Not To Fall is his second book. The first was The Legend of Mariquita and Other Short Stories, which Rosas describes as “definitely more G- or PG-rated,” in contrast to the many partying scenes in Praying. Regardless of his intended audience, Rosas’ goal is always to affect his readers emotionally. “I really want them to laugh and cry along with the characters,” he says.

Outside of his intensive summer writing sessions, Rosas is focused on writing flash fiction, a short and intense format. “I took a course and found it really interesting, trying to put a single moment or a single feeling into a paragraph,” he says. “When I have some free time, when I have a feeling or a thought, I’ll try to put that into a quick flash fiction.” He has found that he loves the short form for its ability to make people laugh, proudly calling a recent piece “total silliness. The character in this flash fiction is the best escalator rider in the world, and he describes some of the methods of escalator riding.” He enjoys readers’ reactions to his humor writing, especially their surprise at it. “I had no idea that was a part of you,” friends have said after reading his work, and Rosas considers that a victory.

Sarah Rettger is a writer and bookseller in Massachusetts.