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. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
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. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
In the South, there is more overt racism. It’s more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it’s not as if by moving I’m going to be able to escape institutionalized racism. It’s not as though my life won’t be twisted and impacted by racism anymore. It will. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
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. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
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. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
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. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
I grew up in a lot of different homes when I was younger: my parents rented trailers and small, boxy houses set high on cement block pillars. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
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. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
Young people have a right to optimism, and rightly so; human beings have grown and developed and accomplished wonderful feats in the world. But what mires me in pessimism is the fact that so much of life is pain and sorrow and willful ignorance and violence, and pushing back against that tide takes so much effort, so much steady fight. It’s tiring. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
I think that often in the United States we’re very blind to the ways that history lives in the present. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote