Jesmyn Ward Quotes
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Faulkner is a really important figure in southern literature. I wrestle with him and his legacy every time I sit down and write a piece of fiction.
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I can't stop thinking about the devaluation of black life, and I find it seeping into everything I write.
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I am grateful to the activists and women who created the Black Lives Matter movement because I feel like they let me know I wasn't crazy.
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People ask me about staying here. I think they assume that I wouldn't want to come back to a place like Mississippi, which is so backward and which frustrates me a lot. The responsibility that I feel to tell these stories about the people and the place that I'm from is what pulls me back.
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People ask me all the time, 'Why did I move home?' As well as I can articulate it, that's why. I moved home because I love the community that I come from.
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When I was writing my first novel, 'Where the Line Bleeds,' which had young black men as its main characters, I was very invested in telling the story and also very worried about the effects the story would have.
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Because everyone grows up together in my small hometown, everyone knows everyone else. And there are such large extended families that a lot of people are related to each other.
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I celebrate my blackness. I love the artistic vibrancy of the culture I was born to.
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History and socio-economic inequality and all those things had, like, borne down upon my family and my community and really sort of narrowed our choices.
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I was raised in Mississippi, in a family and a community that identified as black, and I have the stories and the experiences to go with it. One of my great-great grandfathers was killed by a gang of white Prohibition patrollers.
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Biblical myth is as integral to the spirit of the South as the heat and humidity.
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As an artist, I feel a certain responsibility to write about difficult subject matter.
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My brother died when he was 19, so a part of me indulges and thinks that some part of him that made him uniquely him is out there, on another plane. So inventing the fictional afterlife in 'Sing, Unburied, Sing' was a way of making that wish real.
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Sometimes, you get tired of fighting. I think you just sort of come to this realization that yes, that you will get tired, but that doesn't mean that you can give up the fight.
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We salvage the bones of our lives every day, through small tragedies and big tragedies.
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The first writer that I think of immediately that I studied with at Michigan is Peter Ho Davies. He was really important to me, tackling that first novel. Just writing it.
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My family has been poor and working-class for generations. And we live - I live in this really small community in Southern Mississippi where you don't evacuate, and you have never evacuated because there are too many people in your family to evacuate.
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When I was a teenager, I was the only black girl at a small, private Episcopal school, where my tuition was paid by the family my mother worked for. It was hard being the only one, and I faced a fair amount of racist and classist bullying there.
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It infuriates me that the work of white American writers can be universal and lay claim to classic texts, while black and female authors are ghetto-ized as 'other.'
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My father owned pit bulls when I was young. He sometimes fought them. My brother and a lot of the men in my community owned pit bulls as well: sometimes they fought them for honor, never for money.
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I love my community. I love always being able to come back and have a home.
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It's very hard to deal with true subject matter, especially when you're writing about such weighty issues.
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If I can get a page out in a day, I am celebrating.
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I recently read a collection of stories called 'Boondock Kollage,' by Regina Bradley. The stories follow multiple characters through the South, through the past and present. I loved reading that book: the first time I read the opening story, I was breathless and incoherent.