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. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Throughout my career, when I have been rejected, there was sometimes subtext, and it was this: People will not read your work because these are not universal stories. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
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. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
I wrote the first draft of my first novel at Michigan, and then I wrote the first draft of ‘Salvage the Bones’ at Stanford. So I workshopped the entire thing. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
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 Read Quote
My mom worked as a housekeeper, and I saw her relationship with her employers – how on the one hand she spent more time with these women than with a lot of her friends, and how in certain ways they were friends. But then they weren’t. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
That’s why I write fiction, because I want to write these stories that people will read and find universal. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
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. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
When I look back on my reading habits when I was really young, I was really drawn to stories about strong girls who in some ways are outsiders. Jesmyn Ward Read Quote
