Coming soon

Le cœur a faim is a blog about fighting for sustenance, dignity, and joy when all seem scarce. It is about how people survive when we are trapped and realize that no one is coming to rescue us. It is about how we try, with varying degrees of success, to save ourselves and one another, across time, language, place, and DNA.

The title is a partial line from a Canadian French version of the famous "Bread and Roses" poem by writer James Oppenheim. In English, this fragment loosely translates to "the heart hungers."

Le cœur a faim tout comme le corps ;
donnez-nous pain, mais aussi des roses

Hearts starve as well as bodies;
give us bread, but give us roses.

The poem, translated to French by Syndicat des travailleurs et travailleuses des postes / Canadian Union of Postal Workers, was itself inspired by a slogan popularized by U.S. women's suffragist and social worker Helen Todd. Todd gave her perspective on the phrase and its origins in The American Magazine's September 1911 edition:

Not at once; but woman is the mothering element in the world and her vote will go toward helping forward the time when life's Bread, which is home, shelter and security, and the Roses of life, music, education, nature and books, shall be the heritage of every child that is born in the country, in the government of which she has a voice.

The author

My name is Erin Hébert, and I am a journalist and 9th-generation Cajun-Creole from southwestern Louisiana, one of the most culturally distinct corners of the United States.

I spent my formative years in rural Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, and much of the time since then running away from the place and people that helped to make me who I am. Generations of othered south Louisianans have felt the same, with some of us finding ways to make our own journeys home, satiating our hungry hearts through our shared culture and history. I consider this space part of my own long pilgrimage — a way to explore what it means to be uprooted from home in the modern age and how to survive the chaos of that displacement.

I am also a survivor of both childhood and adult complex trauma — much of it, I now understand, downstream from the lived reality of my ancestors and the forces that shaped the eras they lived through. Ultimately, I believe in truth-telling as a mechanism for healing and change — for both individuals and communities.

In 2016, I moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where I still live with my three cats and many unread books. In my spare time, I enjoy live music and comedy, dancing, museums, long walks in Allegheny Cemetery, scratch cooking, and good prose. I own two guitars and play neither, but I'm trying to change that.

This blog's name is en français to reflect my family's primary linguistic origins: Cajun French as spoken in the Louisiana's rural southwestern parishes, and before that, French across the colonial period in what is now Nova Scotia, Canada, and villages in southwestern and northern France.

Other work

I am currently a founding member of a worker-led community news cooperative in Pittsburgh, a freelance editor and writer, and a local union officer for the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh.

I have a degree in journalism from Louisiana State University, and I have worked for newspapers including The Advocate in Baton Rouge, The New York Times, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. In my decade at the Post-Gazette, I contributed to Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the worst antisemitic attack in U.S. history and spent three years on strike with my union colleagues. For some years in between, I studied social work and trauma theory in graduate school.

You can read more about my journalism and organizing work at erinhebert.com.

Contact me

You can follow me on Bluesky, Instagram, and the site formerly known as Twitter. You can also email me at erin [@] lecoeurafaim [dot] com.

Parles-tu français ?

Pas encore bien. Mais comme on dit, lâche pas la patate !