Jesmyn Ward Quotes
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I think that the first book that made me think that I could try to be a writer - or that made me aware that a young black woman from the South could write about the South - was Alice Walker's 'The Color Purple,' which I read for the first time when I was in junior high.
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I lived in San Francisco and did the Stegner fellowship for two years, and it was amazing. From fall 2008 to spring 2010, I was there.
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If I'm honest about the people that I love, then I need my characters to live through the same things that the people I love and care about are living with and struggling with.
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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.
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My family and I survived Hurricane Katrina in 2005; we left my grandmother's flooding house, were refused shelter by a white family, and took refuge in trucks in an open field during a Category Five hurricane. I saw an entire town demolished, people fighting over water, breaking open caskets searching for something that could help them survive.
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I try to treat writing as part of my daily routine: I write for at least two hours, five days per week. I tend to write at home, in a room I've set aside for the task. I don't work well in cafes or busy, loud spaces, although I wish I could. It would mean greater flexibility for me.
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After I finished my first draft of 'Salvage the Bones,' I felt that I wasn't political enough. I had to be more honest about the realities of the community I was writing about.
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Part of me is stuck in my childhood in the Eighties. I actually watch 'The Neverending Story,' 'Labyrinth,' and 'Legend' over and over again. Also, 'Willow' and 'The Goonies.'
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People give the South a bad rap. It's often stereotyped as backwards and close-minded and dogmatic, and all of those things have been true. But I think that the South is changing, slowly but surely.
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In American culture at large, but especially in African American culture, it's a sign of weakness to ask for help.
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I'm still a bit of a reading glutton, I think, because I browse, read a bit of the back copy, flip through the book, read a bit of the text, and if it still seems fascinating, I read it. That's why my bedside table is so cluttered: I want to imbibe it all.
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One of the ways my first novel failed was that I was too in love with my characters.
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With all the main characters that I write, it's always very important to me that they have good and bad aspects of their personality. It's important to me that they're complicated and that they're human.
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I could stifle my voice, or strip it. I know that I could, because we can do anything we put our minds to. I know that I could, but it feels very unnatural for me to strip my prose like that, in part because place is so important to me.
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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.
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I think that often in the United States we're very blind to the ways that history lives in the present.
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My people are still poor. They're still working class. All of the characters that I write about are inspired by the community that I'm from.
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There is power in naming racism for what it is, in shining a bright light on it, brighter than any torch or flashlight. A thing as simple as naming it allows us to root it out of the darkness and hushed conversation where it likes to breed like roaches. It makes us acknowledge it. Confront it.
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There are moments from childhood that attract heat in our memories, some for their sublime brilliance, some for their malignancy. The first time that I was treated differently because of my race is one such memory.
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The ugly heart of the South still beats with this idea that one group of people is worth less.
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In my family and in my community, I see people struggling with drug addiction, with poverty and the effects of generational poverty; I see people struggling with lack of access to healthcare.
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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.
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I was pleasantly surprised with 'Salvage.' I went to Australia and New Zealand for the novel and met a lot of people who had experienced the earthquakes in Christchurch. They responded very strongly to the book because they had been through these natural disasters and were trying to figure out how to rebuild.
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The women here are the ones that hold the families together. So if my mom were to be unhappy with me, in a way, it would be like I would have lost my entire family.