Introducing a fantastical, fictional, original, myth-making project conceived and written by Louisiana writer and historian
Clark Taylor.

The backstory…

Some years ago I decided that Mardi Gras deserved its own “Santa Claus.” Easter has the Bunny (whatever that means), July 4th has Uncle Sam, Thanksgiving has, uh, pilgrims and what not, heck there is even a Tooth Fairy.

But as a Louisiana native — born in New Orleans — I wondered why Mardi Gras didn’t have a singular myth. A singular character to represent all that Mardi Gras means. The holiday is overflowing with myth and lore, image and song. It began long ago as a Saturnalia or Dionysian celebration that morphed over time into a religious season which we all know now as Carnival time. Fat Tuesday. The Feast before the Fast.

Laissez les bons temps rouler!

At first I thought I would come up with a fun poem patterned after A Visit From St Nicholas (Clement Clarke Moore, 1824). That was it. I have had a small amount of success as a children’s author and I thought this would be a nice thing to do, a devotional for my New Orleans.

However, after half a dozen years of study and research and labor, I only recently wrote that book. The resulting poem is included in this website. I am currently looking for an illustrator.

Up until now, and in an ongoing effort, I have been engaged with a long (and getting longer) epic poem, The Legend of Ti Sainte: The Spirit of Mardi Gras, published and tended to here, on this web site.

The poem, now running some hundreds of stanzas — employs eleven-line stanzas with an AA-BB-CC-DD-EEE rhyme scheme. I do not know why I began or continued to write in this odd form, but it became itself, is the only explanation. I noticed that the limitations of the form caused me to slow down and dig deeper into the story, which combines both fictional and actual people and events. I have spent many hours on the Internet Archive. I have been learning French to help with reading about the colony.

I am not a poet (and I know it) but I am a historian of sorts and have been fascinated by the little known and talked about French colony that birthed the Mardi Gras celebrations we know today. There are some statues here and there with the names of Iberville and Bienville written in stone, but what do people know of them anymore except as a place to meet friends or lost children? And what can visitors know of 1699 and Antoine Sauvole and the Choctaw tribes who thrived in the area for centuries untold? How should people care about the King Louis XIV or his brother Louis XV, a regent named Ponchartrain or La Salle or De Tonti? The history of the French colony in America is rich and older than the English colonies. The impact of the French culture, the enslaved African Creoles brought from Haiti (then known as San Domingue), and the number of tribes in the area, the Pascagoula, the Bayougoula, the Houmas and Natchez and a variety of smaller tribes, many of whom are lost to history is incalculable. Their legacies remain in the DNA of New Orleans and its central celebration of Mardi Gras.

This poem and the larger project of myth-making is intended as an inclusive project, inviting artists of all types to join in and expand on the myth of Ti Sainte (“Little Saint”). Though I have spent years researching and writing, exploring both myth and reality, there is so much more to understand about this place and its rich history. I welcome any and all who want to participate.

This work continues, even to this moment. I will be putting up the poem on this site as I continue to research and write. This is a labor of love and appreciation for my hometown of New Orleans. 

                   – Clark Taylor Nov. 2026

NOTE: The creation and writing of this work is 100% AI free. While I have been using AI recently to help figure out how to roll out the project, every single word, note, research fact or description springs from my own mind or was read in discovered online or library research work. At one point I had used an image-generating app to create accompanying images but eventually rejected them and replaced the images with actual art. The location and attribution to what is almost entirely public domain artwork is uneven and needs fixing. But using the actual art, while sometimes factually or date-wise inexact, doing so deepened the project work to new levels of devotion. In fact, while the AI engine has lately (only engaged in the fall of 2026) had some critical things to say about the story, writing style, word choices, etc., I will not be taking any of that into account and plan to leave this work as purely human as possible. That is, very flawed and rough-edged: human. I still have many stanzas to go in the second part of the poem and, as I finish the larger story, I know there will be many subsequent holes to fill throughout. Most of this I do for myself. AI as a creator is redundant and I write for myself and other humans, not for the machine.