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It's very hard to deal with true subject matter, especially when you're writing about such weighty issues.
Jesmyn Ward -
'As I Lay Dying,' I reread that often. That's the first work of Faulkner's that I read that so amazed me and that I responded to emotionally and viscerally. I admired it so much, and I think that's why I keep rereading it.
Jesmyn Ward
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One of the most important things that I want for my kids is I want them to live. You know, I want them to live to see 21 and beyond.
Jesmyn Ward -
One of the things that is so striking to me about the South, especially living here now as an adult, is that I see a lot more mixed-race couples than I saw when I was growing up in the 1980s and the 1990s. I feel like living across the color lines has become something that's more expected.
Jesmyn Ward -
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.
Jesmyn Ward -
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.
Jesmyn Ward -
On one hand, I am very pessimistic, but on the other hand, if I didn't believe that speaking up would do something, I wouldn't have spoken.
Jesmyn Ward -
I'm always thinking about time. That's one of themes I return to in my work, the way the past bears on the present, the way that time is not linear, and how that expresses itself in people's everyday lives.
Jesmyn Ward
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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.
Jesmyn Ward -
I thought about all those people whose suffering had been erased, and I thought, 'Why can't they speak? Why can't I undo some of that erasure?'
Jesmyn Ward -
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.
Jesmyn Ward -
I hope that I never have to work in a place that sells large quantities of jeans ever again. Jeans are rough! It used to kill my hands. I know that sounds prissy - I'm not prissy at all. But it did; it killed my hands. It was awful.
Jesmyn Ward -
We salvage the bones of our lives every day, through small tragedies and big tragedies.
Jesmyn Ward -
I celebrate my blackness. I love the artistic vibrancy of the culture I was born to.
Jesmyn Ward
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I always think about Faulkner, and I would argue that there can be a difference between the way that characters express themselves internally and externally.
Jesmyn Ward -
At one time, when I was eight years old, my mother and father, my brother and my sisters - we had to move back in with my grandmother, and there were 13 of us living in one house.
Jesmyn Ward -
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.'
Jesmyn Ward -
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.
Jesmyn Ward -
Biblical myth is as integral to the spirit of the South as the heat and humidity.
Jesmyn Ward -
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.
Jesmyn Ward
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I love my community. I love always being able to come back and have a home.
Jesmyn Ward -
I'm from a small town on the bottom edge of Mississippi, very near New Orleans and the Louisiana border. My family has lived there for generations.
Jesmyn Ward -
In the past, I travelled with 'The Hero and the Crown' by Robin McKinley: I suffer from a fear of flying, and I felt a bit safer knowing I carried the book and characters with me.
Jesmyn Ward -
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.
Jesmyn Ward