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.
Jesmyn Ward
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.
I celebrate my blackness. I love the artistic vibrancy of the culture I was born to.
Writing 'Men We Reaped' broke me in different ways at different spots in the drafting process. The first draft was hard because I was just getting it out. In some ways, that draft failed. I was really just telling the story, not making assessments - this happened, then this. Just putting those facts down on paper was really painful.
'The UnAmericans' is a compassionate and brilliantly rendered debut - and for a book set largely in the past, these stories feel essential to understanding the contemporary world in which we live.
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.
That larger story in 'Salvage the Bones' is just about survival, and I think that, in the end, there are things about this novel and about these characters' experiences that make their stories universal stories.
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.
On one hand, I can say, you know, I had many family members - I had many people in my extended family who left right after Katrina, who relocated to different cities, right? Houston, Atlanta. Right? Most of them have come back.
People are not afraid to be activists, to be vocal. And I think back to my years in college, and that wasn't the case.
A lot of times, real life is more surreal than writing.
It's impossible for most black Americans to construct full family trees. Official census records, used by so many genealogy enthusiasts to piece together their families' pasts, don't include our non-European ancestors.
If I could chat with anyone, it would be Claire Messud, because I think she could tell me how to get better as a writer as I age.
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.
I think, when I write, one of the things that I'm really attempting to do is I'm attempting to humanize my characters.
Without the library, I would have been lost.
I'm always curious about other writers' routines.
Even though I read voraciously as a child, I never saw myself in books. Without narratives to expand my ideas of who I could be, I accepted the stories others told me about myself, stories which diminished and belittled me and people like me. I want to write against that.
I think that being a parent has expanded my writing, expanded my understanding of my characters, and has added a depth and richness to my work. Having kids deepened my idea of parenting and all the anxieties that come along with it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
By the time I wrote my memoir, 'Men We Reaped,' I had been running from writing it for a long time. When the events in the book were happening, I knew I'd probably write about them one day. I didn't want to. I'd studied fiction, and I was committed to establishing myself as a fiction writer first.
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.
If I can get a page out in a day, I am celebrating.
I wanted to write about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the South.
I didn't start really focusing on writing until I was 24.
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?'
Faulkner's characters, too, were uneducated. They were deprived, but they were allowed to have very rich inner lives. I want to advocate for that, for inner lives that are much more complicated and more poetic than we think.
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.
I need the lightness of children's lit.
One of the ways my first novel failed was that I was too in love with my characters.
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.
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.
While I admire writers who are able to write with a vitality based on order and action, I work in a different vein. I often feel that if I can get the language just right, the language hypnotizes the reader.
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.
As a parent, you want to protect your children, but the fact of racism in this country, of inequality, that is still a lesson my children are going to have to learn. I can't protect my kids from that.
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.
My mother worked for a white family that lived in one of the mansions on the beach. The husband in the family was a lawyer; he worked for a firm in New Orleans.
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.
My time in New York really clarified things for me. I thought, 'What could I do with my life that would give it meaning?' And writing was that for me.
I feel like in the reading I did when I was growing up, and also in the way that people talk and tell stories here in the South, they use a lot of figurative language. The stories that I heard when I was growing up, and the stories that I read, taught me to use the kind of language that I do. It's hard for me to work against that when I am writing.
I would encounter W. E. B. Du Bois and the term double consciousness. When I read it, I thought about sitting in my mother's employer's family room, watching my mother clean while I waited for her to finish so we could go home.
I think people make certain assumptions about what they're interested in reading or what others would be interested in reading, and when they think of poor black people in the South, they don't think people are interested in reading about those people.
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.
I do think that people will claim a certain fatigue about talking about race. But I think that even though they do, it's still necessary - completely necessary.
In American culture at large, but especially in African American culture, it's a sign of weakness to ask for help.
