Zitat des Tages von Jesmyn Ward:
I dabbled in writing, wrote really bad poetry in high school. I also took a few writing classes when I was an undergrad at Stanford. I was so intimidated.
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.
'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.
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.
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.
Before Hurricane Katrina, I always felt like I could come back home. And home was a real place, and also it had this mythical weight for me. Because of the way that Hurricane Katrina ripped everything away, it cast that idea in doubt.
I hope people who read my books feel empathy for us and really see us as complicated people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think that often in the United States we're very blind to the ways that history lives in the present.
A lot of times, real life is more surreal than writing.
I didn't start really focusing on writing until I was 24.
Great trouble breeds great art, I think.
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.
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 read everything. When I say everything, I read everything: children's literature, Y.A., science fiction, fantasy, romance - I read it all. Each genre fulfills a different need I have. Each book teaches me something.
There was nothing postracial about my experience, and there still isn't.
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.
We're all about pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, et cetera - I think that's a harmful mythology, that the choices that we make and the things that we do in our lives are not connected to anything else. So I'd like to help to debunk that.
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.
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.
In American culture at large, but especially in African American culture, it's a sign of weakness to ask for help.
One of the ways my first novel failed was that I was too in love with my characters.
I couldn't run from that desire to tell stories, that desire to tell stories about us, and about the people I loved.
Confidence definitely did not get me here! More of, like, desperation.
Katrina silenced me for two years. I wrote a 12-page essay on my experience in Katrina, and that's it. I didn't write anything for, like, two, two and a half years after Katrina hit because it was so traumatic.
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.
I need the lightness of children's lit.
I love creating that community and writing about that place, because I think, in some ways, Bois Sauvage is like the DeLisle of my past; it's like the DeLisle of the '80s that I can never return to. So in some ways, when I write about Bois Sauvage, I'm writing about a home that I've lost.
I was a freshman at Stanford University the first time someone called me a 'bama.' One of my new friends from D.C. said it, laughing, and even though I didn't know what it meant, exactly, I got that it was some kind of insult. I must have smirked or shrugged, which made him laugh harder, and then he called me 'country,' too.
There was something so empowering about having President Obama in office because I know that for many of us, that's something that we never thought that we'd see in our lifetime.
My mother helped to integrate the local elementary school in the nineteen-sixties.
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.
I've found that in fiction - and this is just the kind of writer I am - I can't really work from an outline. I have a vague idea of the characters at the beginning of the book, and then I have a vague idea of whatever the end of the book will be, but I can't approach creative nonfiction like that.
