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The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish, the sophomore effort from writer Elise Blackwell set in southern Louisiana in the weeks preceding the great flood of 1927, was finished and sitting on an editor’s desk when Hurricane Katrina hit. Alarmed by the parallels between what she had just written and what she saw on TV from her home in South Carolina, Blackwell felt she had to revise the novel to be read in a post-Katrina world, a thought that still unnerves her.

“I found the parallels chilling,” she says. “Here are two events, both terrible disasters affecting the same region and both plagued with decisions made by human beings.”

The book hits stores this month, and Blackwell, who grew up in Baton Rouge, will speak at the Baton Rouge Gallery at 4 p.m. May 6 as part of her book tour, thanks to Danny Plaisance of Cottonwood Books.

The daughter of botanists, Blackwell decided early on that the “family business” was not for her, turning her attentions to writing and as young as five years old began churning out stories for her grandfather, who paid a dollar a story. But when Blackwell became too prolific for his wallet, he offered advice instead. “Keep writing, but not just for the money,” he told her.

Later in his life he also took to the pen, chronicling his years growing up in rural Louisiana, his years in the war and general thoughts on life, not with the intention of publication, but rather so his grandchildren could know him better. Every Christmas each grandchild received a white copy shop box with his latest chapter in it. It took Blackwell several years to finally pick up the memoir and even longer to decide what to do with it.

“I wanted to tell the story of his life, but I wasn’t sure how,” she says. “One day it just came to me. Set against this historical backdrop makes it all the more powerful and compelling.”

In her haunting and timely novel, 90-year-old Louis Proby, a character loosely based on her grandfather, awaits the arrival of Hurricane Katrina in his New Orleans apartment, a revision Blackwell made to the original draft to tie the story to the current state of events. Proby’s thoughts turn, not to his safety, but to his memory of the 1927 flooding of the city by the Mississippi River. A young Proby tells how his hopes and desires for a different future washed away in the floodwaters decades ago.

Blackwell, who moved from Baton Rouge in 1986 to pursue an MFA at the University of California-Irvine, admits it was hard for her to write about Louisiana. In fact, her first novel, Hunger, which received wide praise and was a Los Angeles Times Best Book in 2003, couldn’t have been set farther from the bayou state, taking place in war-ravaged Leningrad in 1941.