Jesmyn Ward
Jesmyn Ward
Jesmyn Ward is an American novelist and an associate professor of English at Tulane University. She won the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction and a 2012 Alex Award with her second novel Salvage the Bones, a story about familial love and community covering the 10 days preceding Hurricane Katrina, the day of the cyclone, and the day after. Prior to her appointment at Tulane, Ward was an assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama. From...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
CountryUnited States of America
writing people fiction
That's why I write fiction, because I want to write these stories that people will read and find universal.
brother writing together
When I decided to write about my brother and friends, I was attempting to answer the question why. Why did they all die like that? Why so many of them? Why so close together? Why were they all so young? Why, especially, in the kinds of places where we are from? Why would they all die back to back to back to back? I feel like I was writing my way towards an answer in the memoir.
moving writing character
I want each character to be as unique as possible. I want them to reflect something of who they are in the way that they move and in how their bodies work. That was foremost in my head when I was writing Salvage: I wanted every gesture, every little movement, to really carry meaning and communicate meaning to the reader. I was very conscious of that when I was writing.
writing unique people
When I was writing the memoir, every page was a battle with myself because I knew I had to tell the truth. That's what the memoir form demands. I also had to figure out how much of the truth do I tell, how do I make the truth as balanced as I possibly can? How do I make these people as complicated and as human and as unique and as multifaceted as I possibly can? For me, that was the way I attempted to counteract some of that criticism.
writing class people
I feel like the kind of people I write about are the kind of people I grew up with, the families that I know in my community. Most everyone is working-class, and there are some intact families, but a lot of families aren't.
book writing home
I've also never written about home in this way before. I guess a lot of it is subconscious and I am intuitively making these decisions when I'm writing. I wanted to communicate in the book that on one hand, being at home - both in our homes and in DeLisle - gives us a sense of belonging and family and safety, but at the same time, being in those places makes us less safe.
school mean writing
I wrote poetry in middle school and high school and even through college. It was bad. I just don't think I'm very good at writing poetry. I mean, the distillation, I think, is hard for me, but I love poetry.
telling
When I read 'Absalom, Absalom!,' I remember being really excited about it and telling all my friends they had to read it, especially my writer friends.
drawn girls habits stories ways
When I look back on my reading habits when I was really young, I was really drawn to stories about strong girls who in some ways are outsiders.
characters understand
Hip-hop, which is my generation's blues, is important to the characters that I write about. They use hip-hop to understand the world through language.
things-i-love said clear
While I've said that there are plenty of things I dislike about the South, I can be clear that there are things I love about the South.
reading trying fiction
I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.
michigan firsts bones
I wrote the first draft of my first novel at Michigan, and then I wrote the first draft of 'Salvage the Bones' at Stanford. So I workshopped the entire thing.
mom hands way
My mom worked as a housekeeper, and I saw her relationship with her employers - how on the one hand she spent more time with these women than with a lot of her friends, and how in certain ways they were friends. But then they weren't.